“Good” is a relative term, and in a year as relatively devoid of great movies as 2010 has been, I think Inception is going to be as good as it gets as far as cerebral thrillers go. It’s not terrible. The cinematography is great, the costuming, hair and makeup is flawless, and for the first time since The Matrix I saw some reality-bending fight scenes that didn’t look like cheesy rip-offs of The Matrix. (You know, like the fight scenes in Matrix 2 and 3)

Beyond a pretty appearance and good line delivery, the story is an empty shell. The premise is that shared dreaming can be used to steal a person’s thoughts or plant ideas in their subconscious (called “inception”), and naughty crooks like Leonardo DiCaprio and that kid from Third Rock from the Sun can sneak into their targets’ brains. The plot consists of a Japanese businessman hiring an innocent man on the lam to commit psychological piracy with his elite team of baddies inside the brain of a billionaire heir with generic daddy issues. Corporate espionage is a pretty boring motive for a life-threatening endeavor, but pretty much all of the characters just do what is needed without much motive at all. Ellen Page’s character is particularly blank. For no reason other than being invited to join the team, she instantly goes from respectable university student to international criminal to Leonardo DiCaprio’s nanny, all without thought or struggle. We then follow the team through many lovely and dangerous dreamscapes as they pull off planting the seed of an idea that will destroy Japanese Businessman’s enemy’s empire. Or whatever. Seriously, there has got to be an easier way to be competitive in a global economy.

The team of psychological pirates accomplish their goal by falling asleep inside their dreams, delving down into three layers of dreaming until — EPIC PLOT TWIST — they’ve got to go down one more level and that’s way too far. Because unlike The Matrix where dying means real world death, in this dreamworld you have to die to wake up, and going too far into the dream makes you forget to die. Or whatever. So in addition to keeping track of too many boring characters, I also had to keep track of three or four iterations of boring characters in each level of the dreamworld. But like making a copy of a copy of a copy, each time they descended the characters sounded more and more like finger puppets on a toddler’s hand. I almost laughed out loud at the movie’s climax when Nolan’s subconscious crept into the script and had the main character apologize to a character in his subconscious for having created her so flat and lifeless.

But all this is just the vehicle for the larger point that filmmaker Christopher Nolan is trying to make. Nolan seems to have missed that human beings have articulately and elegantly addressed this topic for thousands of years, the most classic iteration coming from La Vida es Sueño by Calderón de la Barca. The awesome special effects and vacant personalities in the film were really meant to do the following:

1. Skim read a junior college-level psychology book.
2. Take a horse. Name it “Question Reality.”
3. Beat the horse to death.
4. Continue beating Question Reality long after the horse is dead.
5. Keep going. Yes, I know you’ve been going for two hours. Keep beating the dead horse.
6. When Question Reality has been beaten into little tiny bits, sweep them into a pile and jump on them for another half hour.

My boyfriend hated it. I now know for certain how well I understand him, because even though we were sitting silent in a darkened movie theater, I could feel the irritation radiating out from his skin as each passing moment went by. For my own part, I tried to enjoy the clever direction of scenes filmed in a gravity-free dreamscape and tried to figure out what shade of lip gloss Ellen Page was wearing because iwannit. I was also grateful because although there was naïve bullshit about existentialism, at least there wasn’t patronizing bullshit about causality like there was in the Matrix sequels. It’s pretty. It’s an interesting premise. But Nolan got too caught up in playing Freud to remember to create interesting characters with meaningful actions. It might be the best thriller of 2010, but when most of the films coming out this year are crap, that doesn’t mean much. Inception isn’t as good as his previous work breathing life back into the Batman franchise.

Sigh.

Have I mentioned that I can’t wait for The Expendables to come out?