Last night I saw “Inception,” six months after the buzz, but nonetheless excited to lose myself in an elegantly designed movie. But the experience wasn’t visually compelling at all.  The architect in the movie, Ariadne, is a young, hippie-ish woman, which is cool.  But the synthetic worlds that she constructs for her team of dream-invading global super-spies fall flat.  Roads that bend at 90 degrees vertically?  Mirrored Parisian courtyard blocks?  Endlessly looping staircases?  These are adolescent, Escher-like effects.

The one unique design in the film is the Ice Fortress that serves as a backdrop for a captive’s dream.  Its setting reminds me of the snow planet where we find Luke at the beginning of “The Empire Strikes Back."  But the building itself is a dazzling, over-the-top, brutalist concoction that was modeled after the Geisel Library at the University of California San Diego.  That building, by architect William Pereira, was funded by and perhaps also inspired by the work of Theodor Geisel, the writer known as Dr. Seuss.  In turning to this awesome, ridiculous building for inspiration, the movie-makers did something absolutely right.