Couple of years ago, I grumbled that dreams weren’t getting enough respect in pop culture. That just showed how much I knew about pop culture, roughly 100,000 readers e-mailed in to tell me, with many references to dream sequences in TV shows (The Sopranos, Ally McBeal) and entire movies about dreaming (The Matrix and its sequels, Mulholland Drive, Waking Life, and others). Not wanting to be similarly caught out again, on Monday I essayed one of my occasional doomed attempts to keep up with the Zeitgeist: I went to see this new dream-movie, Inception. Boy, what a waste of time! The thrill of sci-fi is what Isaac Asimov called “those crazy ideas.” What if there were smart creatures on other planets? What if you could travel in time? What if I could hear your thoughts? What if…? The Inception what-if is: What if I could project myself into your dreams, and thereby find out your innermost secrets, or plant ideas in your unconscious mind? The idea’s not a new one. Sci-fi ideas hardly ever are, just as ideas; it’s how you build a plot around them. Telepaths may be a persecuted minority, they may presage a new phase of evolution, or they may just help out national security. Sci-fi writers have been playing around with dream themes and what-is-reality? conundrums for ever, with a big boost in the 1970s from the brain-in-a-vat thought experiments of Daniel Dennett and Doug Hofstadter. Build a plot? The makers of Inception hardly bothered. There’s some stuff about fending off control of world energy markets by a big corporation; and the Leonardo DiCaprio character is supposed to be obsessed with his dead wife. (What is it with these movie guys and their dead wives? Grieve, get over it, life goes on. The men involved are never old or poor — who in movies ever is? — so there is no obstacle to their getting new wives. Come on, guys, the world needs populating.) It’s dull stuff, though, with just enough narrative horse-power to keep the thing staggering along for a couple of hours. The main point of the movie is the special effects. Some of them are pretty neat — a zero-g fight is always fun to watch — but none of it raised a response much above the “uh, that’s kinda cool” level in me, and I think I’m less jaded than average here, as I don’t see many movies. A really imaginative director could do wonders with the speculations currently floating around in neuroscience and “Consciousness Studies” circles. Instead they just use the little they’ve grasped as a peg on which to hang their special-effects alien worlds or dreamscapes. We’ve had CGI for thirty years now. It’s too familiar to carry as much of a movie as Inception wants it to. And a few random gee-whiz special effects do not a dreamscape make. Dreams have a very particular quality to them that just isn’t captured here — strange hints of significance or menace, lapses of logic, a sort of insistent solipsism, silliness. (Of the dream-movies I can recall, I think Waking Life gets closest to the true dream-ambience.) So all we get is some hardly-matters grand-corporate strategizing, DiCaprio doing an unconvincing guilt’n’grief-obsession act, and a lot of special effects that exist mainly as a frame for dully conventional car chases and shoot-’em-ups. Zzzzzz. I’ll allow, though, that there are moments when DiCaprio, even with a dumbo script like this one, holds your attention as an actor should; and Ellen Page definitely has my vote as the number one girl-next-door, sexy-without-being-beautiful actress of our age; though given the fates of some previous title holders, she should tread carefully and invest wisely.