"It was all a dream" has long been the hallmark of bad storytelling, a way to bring something to a conclusion without actually doing the work to wrap it up coherently. Usually when a story ends as a dream, it has the veneer of comprehensibility for most of its length; however, this film uses its very nature as a film about dreams and dreaming as an excuse to make little to no sense for its entire runtime.
People act like idiots, characters seem wooden, the plot meanders about without any focus, and events occur for no reason. Are any of these actually deliberate choices because the line between dream and reality is blurred? It all hits more like bad writing. Nothing really seems dreamlike or surreal, there's just a series of obviously-not-actually-happening scenarios that the characters are subjected to before a monster pops in to say "boo."
Say what you will about the Nightmare on Elm Street films and their varying quality, but almost all of them of them had creative dream scenarios, the characters had clear motives and you knew why things were happening, and there were no pretentious voice-overs reciting poetry.
People act like idiots, characters seem wooden, the plot meanders about without any focus, and events occur for no reason. Are any of these actually deliberate choices because the line between dream and reality is blurred? It all hits more like bad writing. Nothing really seems dreamlike or surreal, there's just a series of obviously-not-actually-happening scenarios that the characters are subjected to before a monster pops in to say "boo."
Say what you will about the Nightmare on Elm Street films and their varying quality, but almost all of them of them had creative dream scenarios, the characters had clear motives and you knew why things were happening, and there were no pretentious voice-overs reciting poetry.