Inception [PG-13]: A rule of thumb for any disintegrating dream fantasy: Reality Exists. A thing is what it is in the awake hours. The freewheeling romp through the subconscious must be backed up with a nod to unfettered reason, like in the works of Lewis Carroll or L. Frank Baum.

It's too bad writer/director Christopher Nolan didn't remember much other than the special effects from the excellent sci-fi film Dark City, where aliens play mind-games on sleeping humans. The effect of entire cityscapes folding in on themselves for his big-budget baloney screen-filler Inception amounts to naught because, like Nolan's Memento, it's presented as a head-trip to hide a tangled mess of subplots and rational dead-ends.

When visual images rather than ideas are the focus, cinema has reverted back to the pre-D.W. Griffith era when trick photography, not structured narrative, was all the rage.

In Inception, a "Mission Impossible" team of brain police led by Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) induces dreaming in subjects before extracting corporate intel. Similar in effect to the brainwashing techniques in The Manchurian Candidate, using embellished dreams within dreams, once Dom and his team are hired to plant intel in a competitor's mind that is intended to bring about a collapse to his financial empire, a new, more brazen architect is needed to structure the maze-like dreams.

Therein lies the essence of its story, which is nothing more than an excuse to stage elaborate effects to wow the crowd. Need stairs? Think 'em up. Wanna wake up? Douse with water. Avatar was the same sort of thing. 3-D is likewise.

This is knucklehead screenwriting one-oh-one! In the aforementioned Dark City, the aliens were challenged by linear thinking in the form of a coastline that loosened their grasp on the human mind. Nolan bases his dream mazes on the rings of Hell accessed by an elevator, so the deeper you descend, the more convoluted and personal things get.

A huge freight train plows through rush hour. Boy Howdy! That's entertainment!

His point might be that reality and illusion merge on some level – but Cronenberg covered the subject with more surefooted reason in both Videodrome and Existenz. Herschell Gordon Lewis' Wizard of Gore did much the same.

"This town is just a sealed tuna sandwich with the wrapper glued..."

Being quite the fan of hallucinatory movies, Roger Corman's The Trip still resonates with its precision edits and innocuous craziness. I just recently got two friends thrown out of their neighborhood bar by recommending they show Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain, a movie cited as "too weird for Tampa"!

"It's by baloney on the rack/ It goes for 40 cents a whack..."

Christopher Nolan could've put diminutive eunuchs on skateboards trampled underfoot by toadstools, but without a sharper story, it amounts to naught.

Separated from his kids, Dom has legal issues hanging over his head. Michael Caine runs Xavier's School for Brainiacs and Ellen Page, his understudy, is so advanced she's hauled outta class to join Dom's dream team because she "thinks outside the box"!!

"...from a matron in La Habra with a blown-out crack..."

If Inception had been a film by Tarkovsky, "outside the box" would mean hypnotic intensity, bleak as bedsheets unruliness. It would hit the jugular, not just shatter mirrors and confront corporate conundrums. This movie nearly drove me insane with banality once the gravity is shut off in a hotel corridor. Wasn't this taken from Star Trek VI? It's one thing to have Klingons floating down the gutter, but burly bio-techs in freefall is Matrix-like and uninspired to say the least.

"...who dies to suck the fringe offa Jimmy Carl Black!"

Prosaic, tedious stretches don't equal profundity. At two hours and 27 minutes, intellectual slumming shuts the doors of perception with a harsh clang. And the label reads: Return to Sender!

So here's Inception insides the box: dreams are invaded and structured so that the target can't tell if he's dreaming or awake, only to awaken in another dream within a dream while intel is extracted or implanted. And to keep from being trapped inside of a dream, participants need a totem, an object to assure them they've escaped.

Isn't that the plotline to almost every Freddy Krueger movie?