Inception ***SPOILER THREAD***

[Lomax]

Okay, you can't really discuss Inception without going over the spoilers. And I'd love to discuss the movie without tiptoe-ing around the details.

I have a few questions for those who have seen the movie...

1. At the end, when the van hits the water, why isn't everybody immediately awakened? Isn't that the point of the "kick"? Instead of waking up, they swim out of the van as if it only fell a few feet.

Edit: Okay I get this. The van woke them up from the hotel, and the hotel elevator woke them up from the military compound. What woke them up from the first layer of the dream?

2. Why do they need drugs to go to sleep in a dream world? Along the same lines, how is it that you can get physically hurt in a dream world? Isn't the point of a dream that you are imagining your own physical state? Why would an imaginary stopwatch in an imaginary world give you the correct time reliably?

3. Was the point of going three levels deep in Fischer's dream to trick him into thinking he was breaking into Browning's mind, or his own? If it was Browning's mind he thought he was breaking into, then how was planting an idea there going to make him think that he came up with the idea about desolving his father's empire? I just don't see the connection. Also, isn't that instantly undone when he wakes up and realizes that Browning's kidnapping and betrayal was also a dream?

4. Why is Cobb's subconscious projections following him around into other people's dreams? Why doesn't that happen with the other guys? Are they trying to say that the entire thing was Cobb's dream?

5. How are they actually getting into other people's dreams? Are they psychics? There doesn't seem to be any special "power" or "rules" involved in doing it, or special machinery. It seems that they are supposed to be in the same room, but that's it.

6. When Cobb finally gets home to LA, how is his father, the professor, there to meet him? Wasn't he teaching in a school outside of the States?

I know there are more questions. These are the ones that immediately come to mind.

[UberBroncoMan]

The funniest part is that his kids never aged from the moment he left them to when he saw them again.

Pretty early into the film I thought the plot was going to be all about Cobb. I thought he was actually the target for inception. Inception to create the belief needed to let go of the wife from his dreams and finally wake up to reality. That perhaps when she killed herself she was actually waking up to reality after all, not just trying to go back to limbo.

Still... for a guy who's been away from his kids for so long, I found it funny that they didn't age a day. Their hair was the same length, etc. It's like he never left. The daughter sounded older on the phone that she looked too.

[OCBronco]

[QUOTE=Lomax;2882109]Okay, you can't really discuss Inception without going over the spoilers. And I'd love to discuss the movie without tiptoe-ing around the details.

I have a few questions for those who have seen the movie...

1. At the end, when the van hits the water, why isn't everybody immediately awakened? Isn't that the point of the "kick"? Instead of waking up, they swim out of the van as if it only fell a few feet.

Edit: Okay I get this. The van woke them up from the hotel, and the hotel elevator woke them up from the military compound. What woke them up from the first layer of the dream?

2. Why do they need drugs to go to sleep in a dream world? Along the same lines, how is it that you can get physically hurt in a dream world? Isn't the point of a dream that you are imagining your own physical state? Why would an imaginary stopwatch in an imaginary world give you the correct time reliably?

As I understood it, the idea is that while you aren't *really* hurt, the pain that you imagine is real. So you feel the pain that is inflicted on you, even though your body isn't really damaged. On the second question, I thought the issue was that the time of the watch was relative to which level of dream reality you are in. So ten seconds at one level buys you exponentially more time in a dream within the dream, and so on. If there is any kind of reliability, it's just relative to that dream state, not the real world.

3. Was the point of going three levels deep in Fischer's dream to trick him into thinking he was breaking into Browning's mind, or his own? If it was Browning's mind he thought he was breaking into, then how was planting an idea there going to make him think that he came up with the idea about desolving his father's empire? I just don't see the connection. Also, isn't that instantly undone when he wakes up and realizes that Browning's kidnapping and betrayal was also a dream?

I thought the point here is that they make Fischer think he is breaking into Browning's mind in order to steal an idea from Browning — when in fact that's the very mechanism which plants the idea in his mind. On the latter point, the problem is that Fischer believes the story told to him, which allows him to interpret things a certain way. There is a potential plot hole here, though, because in the movie we are told that Fischer has been trained to ward off "mind attacks," so wouldn't he have some sort of totem that would enable him to check these things?

[OCBronco]

4. Why is Cobb's subconscious projections following him around into other people's dreams? Why doesn't that happen with the other guys? Are they trying to say that the entire thing was Cobb's dream?

I thought there were two answers here. First, Cobb is more emotionally disturbed than the other guys, so more stuff that he has no control over creeps into his subconscious. Remember also that the security forces in the deeper dreams are all creations of Fischer's subconscious. I think the movie is constructed such that it's possible to interpret the whole thing as Dom's dream.

5. How are they actually getting into other people's dreams? Are they psychics? There doesn't seem to be any special "power" or "rules" involved in doing it, or special machinery. It seems that they are supposed to be in the same room, but that's it.

Well, they do need the dream to be constructed first (in a computer, I guess?), and the machine enables them to share the architecture of that dream. I guess you need to be hooked up to the machine with wires? Whether the wires need to be connected to your brain, or to your soul, the movie doesn't say.


6. When Cobb finally gets home to LA, how is his father, the professor, there to meet him? Wasn't he teaching in a school outside of the States?

I think it's possible to read the ending in several different ways. 1) We end the movie in the real world. 2) We end the movie in limbo. 3) The whole movie has been one massive dream within a dream, and we have never glimpsed the real world at all. (remember that the movie begins in the limbo dream world, and we work our way back there over the course of the film).

This is one of the things I loved about the movie: it doesn't make it easy for you to figure everything out, and it's really quite ambiguous. And just like a dream, the movie can be interpreted any number of ways. Personally, I think this is a remarkable achievement, and not a weakness of the film.




I know there are more questions. These are the ones that immediately come to mind.[/QUOTE]

[Lomax]

Originally Posted by UberBroncoMan

The funniest part is that his kids never aged from the moment he left them to when he saw them again.

Pretty early into the film I thought the plot was going to be all about Cobb. I thought he was actually the target for inception. Inception to create the belief needed to let go of the wife from his dreams and finally wake up to reality. That perhaps when she killed herself she was actually waking up to reality after all, not just trying to go back to limbo.

Still... for a guy who's been away from his kids for so long, I found it funny that they didn't age a day. Their hair was the same length, etc. It's like he never left. The daughter sounded older on the phone that she looked too.

I thought some of it might have been his dreams too because his subconscious projections were following him around. As far as I know, your subconscious projections only enter your own dreams. But they only showed up in the hotel, so does that mean they were in Cobb's dream in the hotel and in the compound?

As far as the kids, yeah not only that, but they were wearing the same clothes in the final scene that they were in all of his dreams.

[OCBronco]

Originally Posted by Lomax

I thought some of it might have been his dreams too because his subconscious projections were following him around. As far as I know, your subconscious projections only enter your own dreams. But they only showed up in the hotel, so does that mean they were in Cobb's dream in the hotel and in the compound?

As far as the kids, yeah not only that, but they were wearing the same clothes in the final scene that they were in all of his dreams.

This is one of the reasons why I think it's possible that we are still in a dream by the end of the movie.

[Lomax]

Originally Posted by OCBronco

As I understood it, the idea is that while you aren't *really* hurt, the pain that you imagine is real. So you feel the pain that is inflicted on you, even though your body isn't really damaged. On the second question, I thought the issue was that the time of the watch was relative to which level of dream reality you are in. So ten seconds at one level buys you exponentially more time in a dream within the dream, and so on. If there is any kind of reliability, it's just relative to that dream state, not the real world.

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?

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?

I thought the point here is that they make Fischer think he is breaking into Browning's mind in order to steal an idea from Browning — when in fact that's the very mechanism which plants the idea in his mind. On the latter point, the problem is that Fischer believes the story told to him, which allows him to interpret things a certain way. There is a potential plot hole here, though, because in the movie we are told that Fischer has been trained to ward off "mind attacks," so wouldn't he have some sort of totem that would enable him to check these things?

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.

As for the second point, yeah. That's a good point.

I thought there were two answers here. First, Cobb is more emotionally disturbed than the other guys, so more stuff that he has no control over creeps into his subconscious. Remember also that the security forces in the deeper dreams are all creations of Fischer's subconscious. I think the movie is constructed such that it's possible to interpret the whole thing as Dom's dream.

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 need the dream to be constructed first (in a computer, I guess?), and the machine enables them to share the architecture of that dream. I guess you need to be hooked up to the machine with wires? Whether the wires need to be connected to your brain, or to your soul, the movie doesn't say.

Yeah, they didn't really explain this part too well.

This is one of the things I loved about the movie: it doesn't make it easy for you to figure everything out, and it's really quite ambiguous. And just like a dream, the movie can be interpreted any number of ways. Personally, I think this is a remarkable achievement, and not a weakness of the film.

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.

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.

[SonOfLe-loLang]

I, too, had a lot of questions about who was dreaming and whose subconscious was controlling what. For example, in the last level, the limbo level i suppose it was, why are they in a city that Cobb built with his wife? Or I should say, why would the rich guy and Ken Watanabe we included in that? The only thing that would make sense, to connect all the worlds, was that it was always Cobb's dream.

As far as his kids not aging, i dont think we know how much time has actually passed in the presumed real world. Yes, he spent an eternity in limbo with his wife (till the grew old apparently), but that might be only hours in the real world.

[UberBroncoMan]

Originally Posted by OCBronco

This is one of the reasons why I think it's possible that we are still in a dream by the end of the movie.

Would have said that, but I honestly wasn't 100% sure they were the same clothes. Same position though.

[UberBroncoMan]

Another thing btw. This entire ordeal with getting back to his kids could have just been Cobb creating the entire fantasy to validate a reality that's still a dream.

*SPOILER FOR ANOTHER FILM*

Which just so happens to be exactly what the film Memento was about. The big surprise ending for that movie. Also directed by Christopher Nolan.

[OCBronco]

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.

As I mentioned in a different post, I think there are three or four legitimate possibilities at the end of the film. Just as in Total Recall, the film ends before we can find out which one is correct. I don't see this as a problem, myself.

[OCBronco]

One thing I think the movie deserves credit for is how philosophically sophisticated it is. Most Hollywood films are really quite lazy in this area.
Nolan really took his time to try to work out the logic of his worlds, and also think through how these things impact the characters on a human level. The film raises interesting issues, not only about appearances vs. reality (the standard Matrix stuff) and knowledge, but also about personal identity (who am I? on what grounds would I say that I'm the same person I was before now?), and the reasons we have for believing what we do, as well as the reasons we have for being motivated to do what we do.

[uplink]

How did they get out of the limbo part at the end when Cobb meets the asian guy? Suddenly they wake up on the plane. Cobb looks confused implying that it didn't make sense to him, an expert in this technology. How did he visit his kids at his old house, who was taking care of them, how would he not be arrested if he showed up at the house? Seems the whole movie was likely a dream.

[SonOfLe-loLang]

Originally Posted by uplink

How did they get out of the limbo part at the end when Cobb meets the asian guy? Suddenly they wake up on the plane. Cobb looks confused implying that it didn't make sense to him, an expert in this technology. How did he visit his kids at his old house, who was taking care of them, how would he not be arrested if he showed up at the house? Seems the whole movie was likely a dream.

Well, i think it might have been a dream, though I bet Nolan isn't even sure if it is, judging by the end. You can chalk their looks on the plane together simply as shock that it worked...or a long journey thats finally over? Who knows. The grandfather was taking care of the kids (he mentioned this at the beginning), he wasn't arrested because Ken Watanbe made that phone call (which he promised to do).

[Killericon]

Ugh. I've very rarely been so disappointed with a movie. Memento is my second favourite movie of all time, but it seems that Nolan bought into himself.

[Taco John]

I thought it was great. I'd even go so far as to call it an accomplishment. It was Ocean's Eleven, meets Flatliners, with a little sprinkle of The Matrix. All this while creating a unique movie experience that felt fresh the entire time I watched it.

I think Nolan is going to have trouble because there is a lot involved with his "dream physics" and a lot of people are going to get hung up on it. This is the best guide I've found that explores the physics of it and provides various theories behind the show's mechanics:
http://www.cinemablend.com/new/Incep...eam-19615.html

The thing that has me hung up the most right now is when Cobb went to Michael Caine for a new architect. Where were they at? I can't decide if they were in a dream, or if that was reality. Maybe I'm wrong, but I have a hunch that Michael Caine's character is more than meets the eye.

[OCBronco]

Originally Posted by Taco John

I thought it was great. I'd even go so far as to call it an accomplishment. It was Ocean's Eleven, meets Flatliners, with a little sprinkle of The Matrix. All this while creating a unique movie experience that felt fresh the entire time I watched it.

I think Nolan is going to have trouble because there is a lot involved with his "dream physics" and a lot of people are going to get hung up on it. This is the best guide I've found that explores the physics of it and provides various theories behind the show's mechanics:
http://www.cinemablend.com/new/Incep...eam-19615.html

The thing that has me hung up the most right now is when Cobb went to Michael Caine for a new architect. Where were they at? I can't decide if they were in a dream, or if that was reality. Maybe I'm wrong, but I have a hunch that Michael Caine's character is more than meets the eye.

I think you are right about the Caine character. So let's suppose that the whole movie is a dream, and that all of the characters are real people in the real world. There are two basic things we know: 1) This is a heist movie, and 2) If you know what another person's totem is, you can then gain control over that person to make them think they are in the real world when it is really a dream. It would seem to follow, then, that whoever can gain control over all the other characters' totems would become incredibly powerful. My only question, then, is who has control over the totems? Caine? Saito? Fischer? Someone else?

[OCBronco]

By the way, another thing that has me thinking the whole thing is likely a dream is the scene in which Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character shows the infinite staircase to Emma. This intrigues me, because the entire film is structured just like an infinite staircase: we begin in limbo (the lowest level), and work our way around until we find ourselves in limbo again. The staircase (or, in this case, the movie) simply loops back on itself, so it's never clear that we've gotten out of it, or that we're even supposed to.

[uplink]

I guess the plot was written to allow for many possible interpretations, that is why for instance the characters didn't talk after the dream on the plane.

[Bronco Boy]

The whole "inception" idea is Cobb trying to convince himself that his limbo is actually real life. That's why at the end, he spins the totem. To see if the inception worked. That's my guess anyway.

[chickennob2]

I came away convinced that the entire movie was a dream. That was the trick with the top right? If it always keeps spinning, you're in a dream. Well, he spun it at the very end and it kept spinning.

[Br0nc0Buster]

I think he was dreaming at the end, the way his kids were the exact same as he remembers them made me think he wanted to return and pick up from the exact moment he left at, even if it was a dream and not reality

[DHallblows]

Originally Posted by chickennob2

I came away convinced that the entire movie was a dream. That was the trick with the top right? If it always keeps spinning, you're in a dream. Well, he spun it at the very end and it kept spinning.

Yeah but you can hear a change in the top's noise right before it cuts away. You can't tell if it was gonna keep spinning forever or was about to start wobbling

[SonOfLe-loLang]

it makes the most sense if he was dreaming the entire time, it would explain why everyone ended up in his limbo (that city he and his wife built) and would forgive other inconsistencies. But i have a feeling if you asked Christopher Nolan, he'd just shrug

[Killericon]

Originally Posted by DHallblows

Yeah but you can hear a change in the top's noise right before it cuts away. You can't tell if it was gonna keep spinning forever or was about to start wobbling

At least 5 people in the theatre I was in groaned at that. Loudly. What a cop-out.