Originally Posted by Lomax
Right. They feel pain. But Saito was "dying" in the dream. I don't get that. You don't have real organs that can really be punctured or damaged in a dream, anymore than there are real guns or bullets to damage them, so why would he be dying?
You're correct, you don't have real organs that get damaged in the dream. Just the same, it can seem to you as if your organs have been damaged. It's no trouble at all to dream that you have cut your hand off with a chainsaw and feel pain from it. The appearance is not real, but nevertheless you feel pain. I don't see how this is problematic.
As for the stop watch, I understand the point of them having them, I just don't get why the rules of physics and time would work flawlessly in a dream. Were their "dream" watches designed in "dream" Switzerland by top "dream" engineers and mechanics, calibrated to measure every millisecond in their "dream" reality? That's one part of the movie that sort of eats at me. The dreams are so literal, they might as well be reality. And yet, you can flip a city on top of itself. Speaking of which, if Ellen could do this to Leo's dream, why couldn't she do that to Fischer's dream?
Ellen is the architect for the dream, and given the film's logic, she could manipulate all the features of the dream world if she wanted to. However, if she did so, it would alert Fischer to a much deeper problem. You want Fischer to think that the story you've told him is entirely consistent, so you keep the world as convincing as possible so that his subconscious doesn't get more agitated than it already is.
So Fischer is breaking into Browning's "safe" to steal his father's will. Which will suggest to him that he should dissolve his empire. Which he believes Browning is hiding because he wants Fischer to continue in his father's footsteps. Is that about right? I just want to understand what they are trying to say.
Yeah, I think that's the way it's intended.
As for the second point, yeah. That's a good point.
Those were Fischer's dreams though. So he has free reign to insert his subconscious projections. If you could bring your subconscious projections into someone else's dream, why couldn't you bring your own armed unit with you to defend yourself from the dreamer's subconscious?
Well, they do dream up their own guns inside Fischer's dream. Again, maybe this is similar to the reason for why Ellen doesn't suddenly change the architecture of the dream too radically: you want the dreamer to feel as if things are as consistent as possible.
Yeah, they didn't really explain this part too well.
It was good. I just didn't like that the dreams were so literal. It's like they were walking around in The Matrix, not in somebody's psyche.
I'm not sure what the alternative would be. What do you have in mind?
IMO no movie should leave gaping open holes. There need to be two or three concrete possibilities. Like Total Recall. There's a set point in the story where either he went crazy, or he really saved the planet. Leaving the whole thing open to interpretation drops it down a peg or two in my book, because it means Nolan wrote himself into a corner he couldn't write himself out of, so he had to leave it up to the audience to fill in the gaps.
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