Entertainment: Starting as a Succubus, Taking Hollywood by Storm

While Martin and the two girls wandered the streets of Milan, Inception made its global box office debut. North America raked in $39.43 million, with a worldwide total of $122 million. Another explosive cinematic hit.

Of course, Inception wasn't universally adored. As the audience grew, so did the negative reviews.

"This film must've borrowed ideas from Blade Runner and 2001: A Space Odyssey, right? Is it really that good? I don't think so. Its philosophical depth and exploration feel forced, too cautious, and the pacing's way too rushed."

"The dream mechanics in Inception are so rigid, it's practically lifeless. Martin Meyers seems to imagine dreams as overly rational. Real dreams should be like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—full of random, bizarre shifts."

"Let's be real, people. Inception doesn't deserve to be hailed as some great masterpiece. It's just Martin trying to dazzle us with smoke and mirrors. Don't get sucked in! I didn't see any depth in this film, just pretentious nonsense and laughable chaos."

"I'd love to tell you how awful this movie is, but it's so infuriatingly bad that describing its flaws feels impossible."

"Everything Martin Meyers does reeks of obsession and anxiety. Inception isn't his ticket to the pantheon—it's a shiny but clumsy film. His so-called complexity—emotional or intellectual—adds up to nothing but multiplied boredom."

Then, the Inception defenders rallied, their keyboards blazing in response.

"As a summer blockbuster, Inception is an absolute masterpiece. I think the dream layers go beyond the four shown—there's a fifth. Martin ends the film with a stylish open-ended twist, and in the credits, the music hints that the theater we're sitting in might be the fifth dream layer."

What makes Inception so captivating is how it invites interpretation, pulling viewers into its world. For instance, a Princeton math professor analyzed the film from a mathematical perspective: "Inception is a recursive story. In mathematics, recursion breaks a complex problem into simpler, fundamental cases. It's like replicating the original issue on a smaller scale to solve it. A common real-life example is the infinite reflections between two parallel mirrors, where the image gets smaller and smaller. In a sense, this mirrors fractals—where a polygon is divided under a specific principle, and each smaller polygon is subdivided further, repeating endlessly."

A Harvard psychology professor offered another angle: "Sigmund Freud's iceberg theory suggests human consciousness comprises three parts: the conscious, the preconscious, and the subconscious. The conscious is the small part above water, the subconscious the vast mass below, and the preconscious the bridge between them. Martin Meyers' film, through its intricate dream-within-a-dream structure, takes the commercial strategy of altering someone's thoughts, replicating and subdividing it to solve the problem."

Then there was USC professor Lynda Meyers—yes, Martin's own mother—analyzing the film's structure: "Inception builds a spatiotemporal framework through five dream layers. People can use a sedative to fall asleep and enter a dream, and within that dream, they can sleep again to enter the next layer. Dying in a dream wakes you in the layer above, until you return to reality. Time in dreams flows twelve times slower than in reality—so five minutes of real sleep feels like over an hour in the dream. Each deeper layer slows time by another factor of twelve, or up to twenty with a stronger sedative."