10 Great Sci-Fi Movies With Terrible Concepts
2. Inception
Okay, so anyone who has seen legendary blockbuster director Christopher Nolan's 2010 hit Inception will have a hard time imagining what they would have thought of the film's premise if they'd never seen the innovative heist thriller.
But there's a reason Nolan was so tight-lipped about details of the film's story before its release, and it's more than just his general secrecy.
“It was all just a dream” is usually a phrase which destroys any tension and stakes instead of raising them. It's an easy way to say "see? It was all pretend, no harm done", and audiences generally presume that anything which happens in dreams has no real effect on the reality of the movie.
Characters can be eaten alive in a dream and then walk to school minutes later. So how would a heist that takes place entirely in dreams build or maintain any modicum of tension?
Well, by writing in the ingenious twist that characters always run the risk of becoming trapped in the dreams and languishing there. It's a seemingly small detail which grounds this otherwise weightless premise and gives it real, life-or-death stakes, even in a dream within a dream.