Inception: Has Christopher Nolan forgotten how to dream?

Boy, was I misinformed. I'd gotten the impression that Christopher Nolan's "Inception" was about dream states, but what this movie's facilely conceived CGI environments have to do with dreaming, as human beings experience dreams, I don't know. For what it's worth, Warner Bros. describes it as a "science fiction action film." But the movie's concept of dreams as architectural labyrinths -- stable and persistent science-fiction action-movie sets that can be blown up with explosives or shaken with earthquake-like tremors, but that are firmly resistant to shifting or morphing into anything else -- is mystifying to me.

As is the writer-director's conception of dream-time as something linear, scalable and reliably convertible with a calculator. (There's an app for that: Let's see, 5 minutes of real time equals -- what? -- one hour of dream time, equals a week of deeper dream time, equals ten years in limbo... Have you ever experienced seven consecutive days in the course of a single-setting dream?)

Objects and characters maintain their identities without randomly changing or melding, and nothing is ever more than one thing at a time (with the possible exception of a family home with a repetitive skyscraper view that's constructed like a Hannah-Barbera background loop). The emotional components of dreaming (not to mention the universal archetypes) are nowhere to be found. No shame, lust, embarrassment, exhilaration; no flying, nakedness in public, pop quizzes, "actor's nightmares," quicksand floors, teeth falling out... There are lots of guns, and even those aren't anything but... guns. Dream reality behaves predictably and reliably according to the rules of the experts who've figured out to a certainty exactly how The Human Subconscious works. In an "Inception" dream, when something happens, it stays happened and the dream-narrative continues in a straight temporal line from there. Cause-and-effect is still in effect. Sure, there are video-game-like "levels," but all the same organizing principles still apply from one to another. There's a rainy traffic jam world (and the usual Nolan action sequence in which the audience can't tell where anything is in relation to anything else, although the characters in the scene can), a hotel supposedly inspired by M.C. Escher but actually more by "Royal Wedding" (and Kubrick's "2001"), a James Bond "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" snow fortress... Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) even has an elevator to take you from one level to another in his subconsciousness. It's all so neatly organized! In other words, not dreamlike at all. Just disappointingly flat, sterile, cold, rational. If a filmmaker is going to dream, the challenge is to dream big, to show us things in ways we haven't seen before, not to simply regurgitate indifferently executed cliches from action pictures and heist movies: car chases, kidnappings, gunfights, interrogations, elevators, ski chases ("Help!"), burglaries and vaults that simply open up when you reach them. (OK, I don't remember seing that last one before.)

As the philosopher and rhythm guitarist David St. Hubbins famously said, "It's such a fine line between stupid and clever." Nolan is clever, clever, clever. He is not stupid, but you can see stupid from where he is. (It's right over there, where characters in a dream consciously try to kill themselves so they'll wake up.) This was promising premise, and it's too bad the writer-director did so little out of the ordinary with it. Nolan makes crafty little puzzle boxes (and sometimes big ones), but they never quite get beyond merely clever. Like "Sleuth" or "The Usual Suspects," they're not about characters or emotions or ideas or human experience at all; they're just self-contained gadgets, amusing but mechanical.

For more imaginative dream-states (though not necessarily actual dreams) on film, see Buñuel, Kubrick ("Eyes Wide Shut"), Cronenberg (particularly "Videodrome"), Bernard Rose's "Paperhouse," Wes Craven's original "A Nightmare on Elm Street," Alex Proyas's "Dark City," Neil Jordan's "In Dreams," Guillermo Del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth," David Lynch's "Mulholland Dr.," Tarsem Singh's "The Cell" and "The Fall"...

ADDENDUM (07/27/10): In response to a comment below, I attempted to concisely summarize my disappointment with the movie in one sentence: "Inception" is based on the idea that people can occupy others' dreams and monkey around with their thoughts and emotions, but it reduces the complexity (and beauty and terror) of the human subconscious to the dimensions of a routine action movie or video game.