There’re a few different questions people ask each other when first meeting: Where are you from, what kind of music do you listen to and what kind of movies do you like. There’s obviously a pompous answer for each as well as one designed to make the speaker sound as intelligent or well informed as possible. In the realm of film, saying something like “I watch movies that keep me on the edge of my seat,” not only fails to denote what kind of movies you like, but unwittingly makes the speaker sound like a lame advertisement.

Either way, Inception, directed by the omni-obtuse Christopher Nolan, seems to be made for just that sort of person.

Scripted by the director, there’s clearly been a lot of thought and planning put into play here. The depth of even the most basic plot points and the myriad number of characters is pretty impressive. But the idea of a dream within a dream within a dream isn’t really brilliant. It’s redundant and seems as if it might have resulted from a late night pot smoking marathon held in a college dorm room with the word “WHOA” punctuating pretty much every turn.

The cast should have helped to mitigate any perceived problems in the script – which we’ll get to in a minute. But Leonardo DiCaprio doesn’t turn in one of his stronger performances even as he’s clearly aged well within his profession and just as a good looking dude. With Joseph Gordon-Levitt, a good actor, in a supporting role it shouldn’t be too difficult to imagine a better fit for the role – perhaps higher profile, but that’s about it. Unfortunately, if you grew up during the nineties, the entire movie might be spent thinking about the 3^rd Rock from the Sun theme song and Ellen Page starring in Juno as a pregnant teenager.

Picking on Inception’s casting, though, is pointless while there’s enough to take issue with regarding the story itself. Apart from the easily figured Hollywood ending, the forced twists and turns that precede it cease being startling pretty quickly. Certainly, there’re some cool action sequences, but each seems to serve a specific purpose.

Nolan makes movie for the mainstream intelligentsia. In order to make a buck and have his fan base able to deny accusations of snob (or whatever) there’re a buncha explosions. Action’s fine, but when it appears the final level of the dream was included for Star Wars’ references and its accompanying fire balls, Inception comes off like a waste of two and a half hours. At least it didn’t seem that long, but that’s about it.