Having to constantly track how many levels deep you are, how time flows at that level, the rules for what may/may not wake you out of a level, the specific actions going on during the specific levels at those rates of time, how they interact all together, and whether you were right about the level the movie took place at the entire time and what that means for it all, and the information you've learned and leaned on to make the assumptions you have at every point.

It's a very complex, complicated movie built out of very simple premises.

> I have a feeling that Inception is kind of like Interstellar in terms of public perception

Possibly. I wasn't super impressed by Interstellar, but not for the same reasons people around me always seemed to point out. To me it felt like a story that might have wanted to make some interesting philosophical points but decided to hide them almost completely behind staid and rote characters and plot and overly interpersonal emotion driven motivations, given the scope of the project they were supposed to be involved in.

> If I've missed any deep concept within Inception

I don't think so, I think you just misinterpreted what I meant by complicated. It's not conceptually or philosophically complicated, it's mechanically complicated. In the same way that two separate expressions of an algorithm or procedure may be simple or complicated, elegant or a bunch of spaghetti code. Inception is a simple set of concepts expressed as spaghetti code, but done so purposefully with the intent to entertain.

In this sense Inception and Dunkirk are very similar. There's a wonderful choreography to make all these variable-speed timelines hang together in viewer-time.

FWIW, a classic sci-fi movie that leaves me similarly cold is Bladerunner (although I love Philip K. Dick).

Stanislaw Lem's Futurological Congress explores similar ideas with both brilliance and humour (avoid the dire movie based on the novel however).

http://filmreadings.com/2015/12/31/a-skeleton-key-to-incepti...

Shortest explanation? The film combines Christian symbolism (Matthew 7:24), the Platonic theory of the soul (anamnesis), the Fisher King story from the Grail Legends, and the Greek legend of Theseus in the Labyrinth. The four parables intertwine effortlessly: Mal is simultaneously the Minotaur in the labyrinth, the Platonic negative (who falls into the world and forgets the truth she once knew), and the faithless temptress who chooses to build on sand.

The film then does to the audience what it shows the heist team doing to Fischer ("your mind is the scene of the crime"). So it is a meta-heist film that discusses how art communicates with its audience, all the while following the convention of the heist genre in showing us exactly what it is doing and then surprising us when it pulls it off.

I think Mulholland Drive was such an effective foil for power fantasies because it started in a dream state then revealed the depressing and pedestrian triggers for that state. I saw it late in graduate school and the sense of failure permeating Naomi Watts' character in the second half hit very close to home. I don't know if it would have worked if the frame for the movie had not been so mundane (in contrast to something like Inception, which relies so heavily on a black box dream-infiltration device).