In my brief absence from the blogosphere, I seem to have missed the boat somewhat on Inception and meanwhile Mark K-Punk has gone and made almost exactly the point I wanted to make about it (though I think he makes it better than I would have). This is precisely what I was alluding to on Twitter when I said that the film was not as clever as it thought it was. There are basically two philosophical ideas in Inception, one of which is fairly boring, standard sixth form stuff (what if our reality is just a dream? etc.), the other is slightly more interesting (the strange loops stuff Mark talks about), unfortunately, at a certain point the writers clearly decided to 'go with' the former.
The thing is, I spent almost the whole film thinking that its whole structure was itself going to turn out to be a strange loop, like the paradoxical dream architecture talked about in the film - i.e., that the end, which had, necessarily to come after the middle, would turn out to be the beginning, which itself had necessarily to come before the middle. But it didn't do this, nearly but not quite - it just ended on the spinning top, in a vaguely Richard Herring-esque 'Ah! But what if all this is still just a dream? Eh? Eh??!' Well, more fool me, I suppose ...
