Christopher Nolan’s “Inception” is a wildly entertaining summer flick stacked with first-rate stars and an elaborate plot that keeps your mind in perpetual motion. Its energy is never-ending, allowing the 150-minute spectacle to fly by without any long periods of boredom. But aside from the entertainment value, Inception is ultimately shallow, lacking character depth and failing to recreate the fascinating obscurity of dreaming.

The story follows a futuristic dream hijacker, Cobb, played by DiCaprio, whose specialty is to enter someone’s dreams and extract confidential knowledge from their mind. As for his personal life, he is suspected of his own wife’s murder and is unable to return home to see his children. However, when an energy tycoon, played by Ken Watanabe, offers Cobb one last job with the reward of returning to his family, Cobb puts together an all-star team for his biggest job yet. There is only one catch; this time Cobb won’t be extracting information, he will be planting it.

The story seems relatively simple, an “Ocean’s Eleven” sort of movie, with the addition of conceptual puzzles and complex techniques in dream manipulating. All of this takes time. A lot of explaining through dialogue gets us there, but ultimately Nolan spares no time for molding his characters, leaving them flat. They become nothing more than clichés: the chemist, the architect, the wildcard, the right-hand man, and the mastermind.

To go further, the story is just too literal. Nolan attempts to delve into the irrationality of dreams by playing tricks on the eye and bringing atmospheric elements of the real world into the dream world. All of this is intriguing enough, but the character’s dreams have no emotional quality; nothing enigmatic, sexual, anxiety-driven, or whimsical exists. Thus, in all of his intricately designed scenarios, the setting is entirely superficial. In one particular dream sequence, the members of the inception crew battle a unit of military guards on a snowy mountain ridge. It felt like a scene out of a Pierce Bronson James Bond movie.

“Inception” has that glossy production look of a top-notch crew. Unfortunately this type of visual clarity conflicts with the inherent mysteriousness of dreams. Look at the impulsive visuals of Maya Deren’s “Meshes of the Afternoon.” Her film has an intuitive element that brings out the feelings of Déjà vu and the intangible quality of the surreal. More recently, David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive,” captures the discomfort of both spatial and temporal displacement. Something is very off in these films, and that something compels the mind.

I would be lying if I said I did not enjoy seeing the movie and I would recommend it to most people. But Nolan has hyped his film up as a masterpiece, and artists should not be the ones to congratulate their own work. “Inception” is a load fun, but so is Cranium. And you don’t see me calling that a masterpiece.

-Max