The films The Matrix (1999) and Memento (2000) were released less than a year apart, and they share a dark vision of the world -- one with uncertain realities, confused, if not unreliable narrators, protagonists struggling to regain control of their story. And while the comparisons between The Matrix and Christopher Nolan's most recent film Inception seem quite obvious (dark SF thrillers with much-touted special effects, casting, writing and direction), I see a lot of similarities between Inception and Nolan's 2000 breakout film as well.

The Matrix, Memento, and Inception all argue that the human mind is so pliable, so manipulable that we cannot be sure of our reality. Unlike recent films like Gamer and Surrogates (and the upcoming Tron Legacy, perhaps) where virtual realities are second, alternative lives undertaken to escape (and combat) the real world, Nolan's two films and The Matrix challenge our ability to know with any certainty what really is the real world.

The Matrix posits a Baudrillardian world of the technological hyperreal, a world where robots and computers have reached such a level of sentience and sophistication that they can (dare I say) curate a "false" world to placate their human captives.

Although there is some metal-suitcase-stowed device that helps sedate the characters in Inception and allows the team to enter someone's dreaming mind, the film does not emphasize the technological, but rather the psychological. Attacks don't come from computerized projections but rather from the human mind itself.

Although the sequels (actually, all subsequent Wachowski Brothers movies) might've made us forget it, The Matrix offers some philosophical complexities for us to chew on. You know, the whole "There is no spoon" and "the desert of the real" thing. And while I enjoyed Inception, I don't feel that it goes as deep down the rabbit hole as The Matrix does. The dreaming mind in Inception seems to be more about militarism than symbolism, more about the fairly standard action-flick gun battles than about the open-ended fantasy of our uninhibited subconsciousness. Oh sure, there's repressed memory and trauma (aptly named Mal). There are father issues. Child issues. Issues of home.

And while yes, there are labyrinths and layers for the characters to wind their way through, the mazes -- and the movie -- struck me as awfully Escher-like. Once you know the pattern, it's a neat trick, but a predictable one.

The "trick" with Memento, I think, was far more interesting: the undoing of narrative time and reliability. Memento was more innovative than the dream-within-a-dream idea or than Leonardo DiCaprio losing his shit about his dead wife (yet again). DiCaprio seems to have reprised his character from Shutter Island, and I daresay Scorcese managed to elicit a performance with far more emotional depth than has Nolan. Perhaps DiCaprio's character in Inception is trying to keep himself together by not going to those depths, while his character in Shutter Island purposefully unravels by doing so. But most of Nolan's protagonists share this guilty anguish, most of his characters are on a psychological brink.

So for a movie that is set in the place where we supposedly work through our deepest issues, through these very psychological processes -- our dreams -- Inception struck me as a bit too logical and unimaginative.