I loved Inception. I loved Inception so much I saw it twice in three days. I loved Inception so much I pretty much married it. And if I've been told correctly, all marriages first go through the honeymoon phase (I love you unconditionally!), and if the marriage lasts long enough, the post-honeymoon phase (now I can see you are a real human being with real flaws). What follows is not a review so much as it is a re-viewing of Inception, a second take on a film I initially opened my arms and mind to without hesitation. So I write this "re-view" of Inception precisely because, after the second viewing, I painstakingly pushed through the honeymoon and forced myself to take off those childlike glasses we wear upon first discovery of something new and exciting, of a first love.

Imagine the most intricate bank-robbery you've ever witnessed on film. Now, instead of stealing that fat sack of cash from the vault, imagine the thief's goal was to plant a million bucks there instead. This is Inception. Leonardo Dicaprio as the humorless Cobb leads an all-star team of "mind-robbers" into the most secure vault in existence: the human subconscious. Their mission is to plant an idea, their path of least resistance is through shared dreams, and their getaway car is waking up.

For most of us, dreams are the surreal, bizarre zones of our deepest fantasies and fears. They are pure imagination, not reality, and that's exactly what makes them our dreams. But when we enter Nolan's dream world, we soon realize we're not cruising through the fluid head-trip subconscious of a mind like Salvador Dalí, Terry Gilliam, or even Tim Burton (if it sounds like I'm ranking fantastic imagination, I am). The films of Michael Mann (Heat, Collateral) seem to have incepted themselves in Nolan's subconscious, for his main idea of a dream is modern architecture and a cool, gunmetal grey and blue color palette. This visual style worked wonders for The Dark Knight, creating a Gotham City that felt cold and terrifyingly real. The dreamscapes of Inception, while always visually stunning, leave much to be desired.

What Nolan lacks in dream imagination he attempts to make up for in the intricate set of rules the dreamers must follow inside the dream.

But does intricacy make a great film? Sure, intricacy can make a plot line a little more interesting, or exercise our minds in the midst of a good mystery, perhaps. But plot intricacy alone cannot hold a film at the seams. For a short time I was so wrapped up in that labyrinthine dreamscape of Inception that I couldn't see the film for what it really is: a beautiful yet ultimately hollow piece of craftsmanship.

The rules of the dream world that drive the plot forward in Inception are like the complex gears of a finely tuned, wonderfully pointless machine. Nolan makes those gears shine so well that we are drawn into his creation; we want desperately to understand its inner workings. But because this huge machine is powered by nothing emotionally substantial, its complexity is futile.

Inception lacks that pulsing bit of humanity that makes great films great. Cobb, who should be the glue of the film, has a vacuous relationship with both his children and his wife that we never grasp. One may claim this is because the whole film is a dream and his children and his wife are projections, but it still doesn't make me sympathize with Cobb and his emotional issues. In fact, there are no meaningful relationships, characters or emotional developments we care about in Inception. Each member of the team feels like a two-dimensional projection, all there to crack his one wisecrack, do his job and file along.

Worst of all, the very plot point that sets the job in motion could not be more banal: The team has to convince a CEO (the totally underutilized Cillian Murphy) to break up his father's energy corporation so that another energy corporation can dominate the field. It would be more interesting if the team had to go into a five-year-old's subconscious and incept that he should eat his broccoli.

Most critics hail the film only because it exists within that very rare breed of "cerebral action epic." If this movie were directed by Michael Bay, perhaps I would be, too. But I believe Christopher Nolan can do better. If his previous work (Memento, The Prestige, The Dark Knight) is any indication, Nolan has too much emotional intelligence to make a film of hollow mazes, a film whose only excuse for true depth is the obvious, neverending debate it spurs among viewers: "When was it a dream?" or "When was it reality?" Such water has been tread so many times in cinema and elsewhere that it is brown with muck.

My love for Inception lies in Nolan's technical craftsmanship. The one thing he is undeniably great at is creating vast, awe-inspiring set pieces of coordinated action. As was said by A.O. Scott of the New York Times, the premise of Inception can be seen as Nolan's ingenious scheme to orchestrate the otherwise cinematically impossible: multiple action set-pieces involving the same characters all going on at the same time.

It's as if Nolan had taken all the glorious set pieces of his previous film, The Dark Knight, and molded them all together into one swirling, two-hour-long behemoth of an action sequence. The Matrix pulled this nifty trick on two levels-one reason that film was so groundbreaking was because we feared for the characters well-being both inside the Matrix and out.

With four different levels of dreams, Nolan has upped the anti to four levels of simultaneous suspense. It's a lot to take in at once, but when the film hits full swing, it's pure cinematic bliss.

See the film twice. Not so you can understand it more, but so you don't have to. If you've seen the film once and didn't "get" a thing, if you just turned your mind off and basked in the glory of that pulsing beast, you've experienced the best it has to offer. Don't waste another 18 bucks trying to reach cinematic enlightenment-you've already reached it. If you really want to explore the subconscious, watch David Lynch, or read some Carl Jung. For this one, it's best to clear your mind and take the ride. You won't even want to wake up when it's over.