It’s boring! It’s like a long (really long) video game. It’s fairly complicated, like a good game/puzzle, but you’d have to get more involved than any reasonable viewer could to follow all the clever stuff. It has very annoying background music, a lame attempt to make what’s going on on screen more dramatic and weighty than it really is. The visuals have been often described as “awesome,” but they weren’t authentic or rich enough to keep my attention (maybe imitating the flatness of dreams, but who cares?). Important questions are raised about the limits of human creativity and they’re (finally!) answered in a realistic way (as they are in the MATRIX and most movies of this genre). A real girl has more infinitely more perfections and imperfections than the dream image of a real girl, and great architects sometimes make the mistake (like the Ellen Page character) of thinking that natural constraints artificially limit them. But such points are made in speech; they’re not really SHOWN to true through the action etc. of the movie itself. And they’re pretty obvious points even in our virtual times. If the movie gets nerds and slackers to turn off the computer and cut out the drugs and go out and meet real people, then who am I to be against it? And maybe my objections are those of old folks these days. Bob Cheeks was right that there’s no intimation of real transcendence, but the Christians and the Socrates are united in attributing too much significance to the world we perceive to be going on while we’re sleeping. Even the dreams we can really believe in occur while we’re physiologically awake. This is the only movie I’ve seen this year I found to be torture to sit through. I write this evening with the humanitarian objective of saving you from such self-imposed cruelty.
