Inception

I think the action scenes were just fine... without them the movie would have been a bit dull.

Seeing this again tomorrow afternoon, and I've got a small mental list of things to look out for. How marvelous is it that I feel the need to do that?

Well, it was fun to come home and finally read this thread. I didn't want to before.

Wonderful film, I liked it a lot. I especially enjoyed DiCaprio, although after this and Shutter Island, he needs to do a comedy. Either that, or actually have a real living wife.

Just one thing -- while the top was spinning, I started to laugh because I suddenly thought about all those people in the theatre holding their breath waiting for it to stop.

Nolan could easily have faded to black and then there would be this sound of it hitting the table....

When I saw this,my mind was hurt because so much ideas about the explanation of this movie came into me. I really loved it because you needed to think to understand this huge mind twisted movie, i loved how the dreams were so twisted.Cobb's (DiCaprio) life was very depressing,I cant believe how Cobb could handle everything,his wife dying, not seeing his children,going into dreams,trying to leave the wife but i bet a part of him wouldn't want to leave his wife but he ended up doing it.

I have a lot of questions, not meant to detract from the movie, because I think it was one of the best movies in recent memory. I just need some clarification. SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

There may be obvious answers to this, I'm so confused tying things together, that sometimes I lose hold of the obvious stuff, so please be patient with me. I'm going to try to break down the climax chronologically, because I see some inconsistencies that I think Nolan is too good to forget, so I must be fundamentally mistaken about something.

Fischer was shot as soon as he entered the snow fortress by Cobb's projection of Mal. He then went to limbo, was captured by Mal, who was holding him hostage to get to Cobb, and then he awaited revival, seemingly dead, on the snow level. Saito died considerably later than this, much later factoring in time differences in each dream level.

As for Cobb, he and Ariadne left the snow level and went into limbo to find Fischer before Saito died, where they met Mal in their house. If Fischer was in limbo so long, why did he still appear as his young self when Ariadne found him and kicked him off the building? Saito was there, it seems, for a shorter period than Fischer, yet he became an old man. I accept that after he watched Mal die in his arms, he resolved his guilt and was able to keep her out of his subconscious. But what happened that made him wake up on the shores of his subconscious? Isn't this the same limbo in which he and Ariadne just killed Mal? Did he pass out from the stab wound and wake up still in limbo, but in the place where he always starts? He couldn't have died, because I think that would have woken him up. At least that's how he and Saito wake up in the end.

Ariadne was about to shoot Cobb to wake him up, but then he said he was going to look for Saito. So after kicking Fischer off the building to initiate his kick, she herself jumped off and left limbo. So those two went back up to the snow level. That means Eames, Ariadne, Fischer, and Saito's dead body were on the snow level (Eames' dream), Arthur was on the hotel level (his dream), and Yusuf was physically in the van as he drove it off the cliff on the rainy city level (his dream).

Are the waking up rules basically this?: First, you need to sync up kicks on every level for every person with the Edith Piaf countdown; the lower the level you're on, the slightly sooner your kick must be (Ariadne and Fischer fell off the building in limbo to enter the snow dream, Eames jump-started and awoke Fischer as he fell off the building in limbo, moments later they exploded the fortress and fell into Arthur's dream just as Arthur dropped them in the elevator, which pushed them up to Yusuf's dream.) Then, Arthur, Ariadne, Fischer, and Eames (disguised as a projection of Fischer's godfather) escaped the sinking van. Did this kick push Yusuf up a level into being fully awake on the plane, since the furthest level he dropped to was his dream (the first one)? Or did he also escape the van under water in his dream? I can't remember, but either way, it raises questions for me. If he was still in the van underwater, does that mean only the timer can awake people from the first (Yusuf's) dream? And if Cobb and Saito shot themselves in limbo to wake up, were they somewhere in one of the dreams until the timer went off? It appears they awoke a little later than everyone else, but does that mean the timer didn't wake them up?

Since they were under such heavy sedation, they would fall into limbo if they got killed on any of the three dream levels. But in limbo, if you die, do you just wake up? Because that's basically how Cobb and Saito woke up back on the plane. Why didn't Ariadne just shoot herself and wake up after kicking Fischer off the building? Or maybe she didn't understand the rules of limbo? Also, I can't remember, did she reawaken on the snow fortress level and wait for Eames kick of blowing up the fortress, or immediately enter Arthur's dream in the falling elevator?

Also, in limbo is time completely relative? Did Saito only age because he so frequently referenced dying an old, lonely man, so that is what happened to him. I don't think Mal and Cobb literally got old in limbo, if they did, I don't think they realized their aging. Since it was a dream, they saw each other as forever the same as when they first started the dream. Is this why Cobb could be in limbo so long without aging, because he didn't imagine himself aging? Because, think about it, based on the snow fortress level time, he went into limbo about five to ten minutes after Saito at most. Then, for about five to ten minutes snow level time, he and Ariadne walked through Cobb's old 'subconscious neighborhood' before reaching Mal. Factor in time spent talking with Mal, watching Mal die, and doing whatever he did to wind up on the shore, and he was in limbo for long enough so that if Saito was that old, he should at least looked half as old if not as old as Saito.

Good luck answering these, they're really poorly organized and some may not make sense, but I just typed questions as they popped in my head. I think I must have forgotten some parts of the movie, so please correct me if my sequencing or something else is wrong.

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"I want a film I watch to express either the joy of making cinema or the anguish of making cinema" -Francois Truffaut

No, they're valid questions, but I honestly don't think that they deserve need to be answered--that is, you shouldn't fret about them like you're missing something.

You're not. I've seen the film twice, and there's no way around them. The time in limbo is definitely just a big plot hole. Personally, I don't care, and neither does anyone else as long as stuff generally works.

I prefer the symbolic/psychological route to the hard sci-fi boil down of dream dynamics. The machine is NOT EXPLAINED at all. It isn't about the machine or the technology or the dynamics, which, I agree with you, are all messed up.

Then again, let's get something straight. These are dreams not VR simulations like in The Matrix. I don't know about you, but when I dream, there's sometimes very little logic involved. The Architect is the one who is able to maintain a stable environment to fool the subject. In Limbo (lolradiohead), there is no architect. It is just "infinite subconscious" or "what is left over from the other people who have been there, that means YOU Cobb!".

One of the "complaints" about the film I've been hearing around is that Nolan doesn't quite take full advantage of the Lynchian dream logic. I get why he doesn't in the Extraction/Inception sequences--because it would be totally against the purpose of those procedures--but Limbo should have been more insane. Maybe it was? Maybe those plot holes were just Limbo being Limbo.

This is an adequate excuse for me. It is a dream after all.

I agree, that the safest answer is probably to dismiss everything as occurring in a dream state, so no logic is necessary. But the entire purpose of Nolan's screenplay was to ground the dream world in logic. There are entire scenes of exposition establishing set rules for the subconscious. That's why I think everything that happens is supposed to have a 'logical'-- according to Nolan's invented dream logic-- explanation.

I don't want to accept that everything can be random because it's a dream. There should be consistencies, since Nolan worked so hard at tying these three worlds and limbo together through painstaking editing.

At least answer me this. Do they all awake from the first dream (Yusuf's rainy city) when the timer winds down? Did Cobb and Saito wake up when they (presumably) killed themselves? Or did the timer wake them up? Or they killed themselves, wandered around between worlds, and the timer woke them up. I'm just wondering, because the movie goes to great lengths to set limbo up as this black hole of raw consciousness that grabs hold of people inside like quicksand, and they just get stuck there. After all, that is what happened to Saito.

--Actually I'm remembering something I thought when first watching this. I think Saito didn't even know it was a dream and that's the whole problem! He thought it was real, so he aged; Cobb knew it was limbo, so time was irrelevant to him and he didn't age. When Cobb reminded him, awaking to reality is as simple as killing yourself. Just like Mal and Cobb did on the train tracks. Duh! Maybe?

I can't believe planetnews gave me a -ve rep for this statement.

I wonder what people would have wanted instead of action then, I would have gone with Holden's pink elephants with lasers, but we know that won't happen unless it was directed by Lynch (instead of elephants, there would be rabbits though).

I think the action was absolutely necessary.. I don't see a lot of things not happening in the film if it wasn't scenes like car chase, etc..
They just provided thrills..

How else would saito get shot??
Everything would have been just easy right? just walk in a dream & walk out..

Before repping someone negative, atleast reply to the post, suggesting what's your opinion,

I've never encountered a forum with that feature before , so I might as well use it haha. I think the whole thing is pretty bad anyways. It's sort of an online middle finger; the semiotics are nonverbal.

My answer to you then: Paprika/Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. There are always 2 types of Star Trek films, right? Kirk v. Kahn and exploration. Why then have they only ever had one exploration film? Because it sells, I guess?

Dreams are wonderful to explore, as Kon and especially Gondry show. Explorations of the unconscious, what Jung called this infinite reservoir of all your past/future possibilities. Exploration of the Escherian architecture more than just twice would not have outworn the novelty. That's the first time I've ever seen the impossible staircase realized in live action.

Plus, Ariadne had apparently spent a good deal of time creating a maze in the James Bond snowbase but they lacked time so they had to just cut through it. Well, there's a massive time killing chase sequence that would have been much more interesting than Saito tossing a grenade into the airvent.

I'm not going to argue that this film would have worked without action at the end since it began with action and has action music and stuff (i.e. I'm not going to rewrite the script without action), but Nolan didn't have to force it into an action film as he did. Isn't it kind of funny that DiCaprio just has to be holding a gun on the movie poster? Same thing with The Matrix. A Virtual Reality simulation has so many more possibilities for me than just martial arts fighting, as awesome at that was.

Action is Inception's weakest point as a film; that is, as a work of art. The token twenty mins of action took it down from maybe something around an 8.5/10 to a 7.0/10 for me; that is, 7 parts good, 3 parts bad.

I'll try to knock a few of these down, if I can. I don't think we have any big plot holes here, but I'm going to see this flick again in an hour or two, so I'll probably be back with more specifics. But here's my interpretation after a single viewing:

We don't see Saito as an old man until after Fischer is kicked up out of limbo. We kind of jump forward after that, to Cobb waking up on the beach. We have no idea how much time has passed, but whatever it was, it was enough to age him.


No idea, but it is still a dream, and consistent with the "don't remember how you got there" theme that comes up a couple of times.

I think the way we see people wake up (or not wake up right away) is probably inconsequential. But yes, my understanding is that, at the top level, they're waiting on the timer. That's the final "kick," and it's one of the reasons everything has to be synced up, I believe. I think Dileep Rao (Yusuf) said in the Q-and-A I linked to earlier that you basically need to time it so that the first kick is from the bottom level, and on up. If the 3rd level kick came before the 4th, for example, it wouldn't work, because they wouldn't "be" on the 3rd level yet.


Yes, it seems that limbo, dying wakes you up. But there are some caveats: one is that this is only true if you're in limbo with one level. Dreams-within-dreams is another matter, and it'll only kick you up to the next-deepest level.

I think the thing is that, once you're in limbo, you lose yourself. You become less aware of what's happening and even less willing to stay. I believe it's supposed to be a fairly herculean mental feat that Cobb was able to become aware of his limbo with Mal, and even decide to leave it. Even then, it seemed to take him decades to muster up the awareness and ability to do this. I think Cobb's exceptional on this point. Also, there may be a major difference between whatever Cobb and Mal were experimenting with, and Yusef's sedative cocktail. Not to mention, again, the dreams-within-dreams thing, which could account for other differences.

They did get old, but as you say, they didn't really realize it/visualize themselves that way. We see them that way late in the film, when Cobb reflects on it. So it's a little tricky, because we have how old they are, and how old they feel, or allow themselves to seem. So I think you're touching on something important here that explains a number of differences. Also, Saito was, it seems, probably a decade or so older when he entered limbo than when Cobb and Mal did, if that makes any difference.

I think the key to 90% of this is the way the film depicts the passage of time. We never really know if it's 1 minute or 5 that passes between scenes or cuts. If 5-10 minutes can be a decade, then I don't know if it would be too hard to find a few shots or jumps that would account for the difference, since we're constantly cutting away to other levels.

Mainly, though, I agree with what you said in the beginning, which is that the things that seem like big problems can't be, given how much time Nolan clearly put into this. That may sound like a brush-off for anyone who thinks they've found a plot hole, but I think it's true.

Whoa, I saw it this afternoon and right now, I am utterly confused and flabbergasted by what I've seen. There is just so much to process and I didn't have enough time to actually do all this processing, because complicated stuff just kept coming. I was overthinking one thing and before I knew it, the next line already had me pondering again.

What I can say though, is that this is one of the most experimental and thought-provoking films I've ever seen. Yet I'm unsure on how to rate it. I think I need to rewatch it multiple times before completely understanding everything, let alone begin to rate it.

SPOILERS from here on.

This is the theory that I've worked out so far on how everything works out. Bear with me here please: Cobb says that if you die in a dream when you're under heavy sedation, you fall into limbo. But limbo is:

A. unconstructed dream space
B. the dreamspace of whomever in the party that has spent the longest time there, i.e. Cobb

In the snow level (level 3), Fischer dies because of Mal's action, thus falls into limbo (i.e. the dreamspace that was constructed by Cobb and Mal). Cobb and Ariadne then decide to rescue Fischer from limbo. This is possible, because Cobb has constructed the world that is limbo. Therefore, when Cobb and Ariadne are hooked up to the machine, they enter Cobb's dream (i.e. limbo). Right?

So they enter Cobb's dream / limbo and Ariadne notices the lightning flash (i.e. the defibrilator) and tells Cobb that they have to leave. Cobb tells her "no, I will find Saito and bring him back with me". Then, Ariadne pushes Fischer off the building and lets herself fall down as well (i.e. the kick to drop down to level 3: snow level).

I am then bugged by the question of howCobb ends up washed up on the shore. I presume it's because he died from drowning in the van? I like to think this, as we see Cobb seatbelted down (yes, I just made that verb up, I think) in the van and then a direct cut to him washing up on shore. I thus assume this signifies the drowning in the van, meaning that Cobb died in a dream while under heavy sedation which would mean that he is plunged into limbo.

Then he persuades Saito to take the leap, i.e. shoot himself, in order to return to reality. Cobb must've realised that the other levels had collapsed by now, which means that if you kill yourself in limbo, you go straight back into reality, much like Cobb and Mal already did.

Am I about right with this theory or just way off the mark?

I'm still trying to wrap my head around why Saito is so old in limbo, but what I've worked out so far: A good 10 minutes passes between Saito's actual death in level 3 (thus plunging him into limbo) and Cobb's drowning in the van. This could mean that Saito is already in limbo for decades,whereas Cobb is immediately found on shore by Saito's guards. Hence, why he has not aged, but Saito has.

I guess... Inception was definitely worth my € 8,5. And I'd gladly pay that sum again to see it once more asap.

SO I guess Planetnews is just going to -ve rep just coz he doesnt agree with me & he feels my point of view is not correct...
Got -3 from him already,...

Just coz he wants to give me a middle finger coz he feels my views are wrong and whatever he says is correct..

I have a feeling he will negative rep me here as well.

What kind of answer is that..
I asked you how would Inception work without the action?? How would show the car chase, saito getting shot, Saito going into limbo..
Or did you want the whole movie to be based without guns...
The movie is a sci-fi action film... Majority went to see that & they got lot more than that....

You can't compare Eternal Sunshine, Paprika to this... You can't be artistic and expect to make money like Inception..
I think Inception was perfect the way it was made.. It seemed like it turned out just the way Nolan wanted it to.

GP I'm sure that neg reps weren't supposed to be used in this way.

I have no problem with -ve reps Christy.. They dont affect me in anyway.
But giving -ve rep in every consecutive post of mine, just coz I mention that the action was necessary... That was a bit annoying! Also. maybe I over-reacted..
Apologies to all...

BTW anyone else felt the car chase & action scenes were unnecessary??

Action scenes ? Action movie ? I would take that question up with someone who didn't like it. Dicaprio shooting guys and sliding on knees to catch them is awesome.

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I get it. It's impolite to derep someone, but the option is there. Just like how the Japanese are allowed 40 days of vacation, but you're considered a jerk if you ever take more than 20. I get it: metarules.

And to Genesis Pig: I'd criticize the action in any film. It's a film, not an action film. If you want to allow all kinds of concessions to a film just because it's marketed a certain way then fine. Don't stop me from criticizing action films. I wouldn't criticize the action in something like Transformers because it's new, something to see. Awful, awful film, but the action was not dull. Not to say that you've got to be new all the time, but Inception just felt very old all of a sudden when the action scenes came in--save for the 0-G, that was exhilarating--the rest was pointless, depressing almost. Inception's concept is brilliant and exciting because its so original. The strange choice to fill it with a lot of action totally destroyed a lot of the tension for me. The second time around was even worse. You just don't care about what's happening at all. What Nolan could have done was stylize the aggressive projections more so they could have been almost "satirical" figures since killing them is basically no more than getting past a locked door. They could have been almost funny like archetypes from James Bond films. Redshirts, if you will. He took them too seriously for me to take them seriously.

I basically hate all action films anyways. Nolan has been the only director to do them well. This time he failed in action though. The rest of the movie was wonderful, but we've got to look at the work as a whole.

Feel free to derep. I won't consider it impolite.

Why would I derep you for your own personal views.. What you have stated are your own personal views..
Just the same you feel Godfather is overrated among other things... they are your own personal views.. not necessarily wrong or right..
You are just talking about how the movie should have been according to you.. So I would never derep someone for sharing their own personal views.

The movie is making its money, plus getting good reviews... lots of fans already..
So I think Nolan did an awesome job!!... He did everything right..