Is Inception complicated?

(This blog post represents my personal opinion, and should not be interpreted as any official statements from my employer NVIDIA.)

I recently finally watched the movie Inception. This movie is the source of the meme “we need to go deeper”. That meme inspired the authors of the GoogLeNet paper when deciding on a name for their Inception module.

Interestingly, I found the movie harder to understand than the Inception module itself. Then again, I have probably read the GoogLeNet paper a handful of times so I probably need to watch the movie a few more times before it is a fair comparison.

A quick Internet search reveals that I’m not the only one who struggled at least a little bit with following everything in the movie:
“Am I unintelligent if I don’t understand the movie Inception?”
“Inception Remains a Very Complex Film a Decade On”
“Inception Is Officially The Most Confusing Movie Ever, According To Survey”

However, not everybody shares that opinion:
“Inception is not complicated”
“5 Movies More Complicated Than Inception”

I suppose the next step is to re-watch Inception a couple of times and then assess if I’m ready to tackle those five more complicated movies…