A couple of questions about Inception

Cafe Society
1

Finally watched this movie last night, I certainly enjoyed it but had to stretch my suspension of disbelief to breaking point to do so.

They lost a lot of points with the whole ‘omfg! people only use 1% of the brain’ nonsense, the ‘humans as batteries’ conceit seems to make a lot of people hate The Matrix but this line is just as bad.

One thing is they never really explain the ‘dream-access’ technology, as far as I could figure it is that its actually a form of virtual reality that can only be utilised on unconcious minds, a form of technologically induced lucid dreaming. This would explain how ‘dreams’ can be designed and built, they’re just complex programs, which the unconcious human mind uses as a basis to build the dreamers reality around. In addition this would explain the time slow-down effect as they go into deeper levels and realities, it takes substantially more processing power to add the extra complexity, as the human mind allied to the computer processes are working so much harder more information is being passed through in a given moment and subjective reality slows down.

Another point is that I had difficulty seeing the main character and the other members of the team as heroic or even sympathetic as we were apparently supposed to, the basic plot is based on a plan to effectively rape an innocent persons mind and one who did come across as sympathetic.

Yes, I am overthinking this, why do you ask? :wink:

2

I think they made the correct choice to simply establish that the technology exists in the film’s universe and just get on with the movie. We don’t *need *to know how it works, and any real-world explanation would have ground the story to a halt and been ridiculous anyway.

3

This bothered me as well. This is something that comes up a lot in fiction but is simply ridiculous.

No, it is actually your dream. You build it by being able to visualize and hold the visualization. They never really explain how it lets one person enter another person’s dreams, but the drugs are what let you maintain a specific dream and be aware of it. They never mention it, but there must be a different drug for the person you want to not remember what is happening.

As for the time effect, that is actually plausible, to an extent. Dreams mess with your sense of time, and your brain can actually change how you perceive time. The feeling of time slowing down during certain stressful times (like falling) are well documented. Two things I have read recently seem to suggest that this effect is not because you brain is moving faster, but rather that memories are sampling more quickly. Response time does not go up, but memories seem longer. Since dreams are all internal, you could generate memories/images at a faster than normal rate. They took it to ridiculous lengths, of course.

They were a group of criminals, but the crime was supposed to seem benign. They did not hurt the son, in fact I would suspect they made his life happier. Also, if you believe their employer, they are making the world a better place. Of course, depending on what you read into the ending, at least one of them may have paid heavily for the crime. In fact, thinking about no matter what really happened at the end Saito didn’t get off lightly.

4

I think you actually are looking at that backwards.

The “deeper” you are going (adding addtional dream layers) means more processing for the brain. But the time for that person in the deeper level passes faster, not slower: The person in the deepest layer might experience years in the dream. Years of doing whatever. Years of detail that need to be created. In a higher level dream, it may seem like only months pass. Months of detail. The uppermost layer may by days or hours of subjective time. But still longer than the 15 to 30 minutes of time in the real world.

The folks left behind in the upper layers do not experience any knowledge of “slowing”. Consider the scene where the van was dropping off the bridge. It’s shown to the audience in slow motion. But the dude in the driver seat is not experiencing that dream sequence in slo mo. (And I think it’s his brain creating some of the dream details at that point, taking some of the “load” off the mind of the “mark”.)

5

Open Spoilers in the last paragraph.

True, but my son was taught the same thing by his sixth-grade science teacher :eek: and luckily I had a link to a paper stating that the brain percentage thing was BS. So was it an error of the writer, the character or making a movie fit the lowest common denomenator of Americans?

And do you deride movies that use a television and don’t explain how it works? Or a sci-fi movie that doesn’t explain how a laser blaster works or terra-forming? The time-effect as others have explained is an effect of how dreams affect the sense of time. Even the movie’s score plays with that idea.

I never though of the characters as sympathetic. DiCaprio And Gordon-Levitt’s reaction when Lukas Haas gets taken out of the helicopter for God-knows-what is “meh”? Ellen Page’s reaction when she finds out she’s in training to deliver some brain-fucking on people is “cool”? They’re in danger of being captured by the Corporation when they fuck up? Welcome to a life of crime. The Pharmacist is a glorified drug-dealer. Ellen Page thinks no one knows about Mal (the scene in the warehouse) but Gordon-Levitt DOES know about Mal and how she wrecks their shit up and still goes in. Even the fact that Mal kills herself because of the inception put in by Cobb put him in an unsympathetic light because he basically forces her to commit suicide in limbo-land. Nope, no sympathy.

6

The curious thing is, that in the universe of the movie, “extraction” is presented as a relatively safe and well understood process, whereas “inception” is edgy, difficult, and dangerous.

Whereas I found it easier to suspend disbelief for inception than extraction. Inception is an extension of things that exist–hypnosis, drugs, subconscious suggestion. I can handle the idea that it’s possible to plant an idea in someone’s head. I can even handle the idea that it’s possible to lure someone into a prefabricated dream.

But to enter someone else’s dream, as if it’s a phsical place, and come back with real objects? Can’t go there.

7

What real object are you talking about?

8

That always pings my radar as well, but I don’t remember them saying this in the movie. Do you have any context to help me remember?

9

Toward the beginning, they come back with papers out of a safe. Or was the idea that they learned the combination in the dream and got the papers in real life?

10

I don’t recall the scene exactly. Did they wake up with papers in their hand, or did they just remember some trade secret and write it down once they woke up, and brought those to their client?

(I usually forget dreams pretty damn quick. Like within minutes.)

11

I believe the idea is that the information the person is keeping secret is written on those papers.

12

After reading the IMDB summary . . . I guess the latter. But still. I found it more believable to lure somebody into a prefab dream than to barge into theirs.

13

The paper and the safe were dream constructs. IIRC, Cobb was trying to read the papers before the flood hit, then he woke up.

14

Me too, but I saw Inception twice and I don’t remember anything about that in the movie.

The papers in the safe were in a dream. The paper contains a Big Secret which they read, thereby learning the secret.

15

EXT. PARISIAN CAFE - DAY
Cobb and Ariadne sit at an outdoor table.
COBB
They say we only use a fraction of
the true potential of our brains…
but they’re talking about when
we’re awake. While we dream, the
mind performs wonders.

http://www.raindance.org/site/scripts/Inception.pdf

From when Ariadne and Cobb are discussing things at the cafe.

I didn’t deride the film, in fact I said I enjoyed it, but if you set a film in an apparently ‘real world’ or ‘near future’ setting it helps to at least have some explanation for how the central technological conceit works.

For example, apart from the battery thing, The Matrix did a good job of setting up a plausible and internally consistent story-universe with its own interal rules and logic.

If a storyteller and characters can just make up what they need to resolve their problems and situations as they go along then whats the point?

I think what bothered me is that if the ‘dream technology’ is simply a means of accessing anothers dreams how were they able to control the setting and make plans as to what was going to occur? I don’t know about everyone else but my dreams are pretty random…:slight_smile:

As to the spoiler part of your post (sorry don’t know how to do spoilers) the problem is it may have been a beneficial outcome but it was based on a blatant and self-serving lie.

Its something I’ve come across elsewhere, if your mind is speeded up you can pack more thoughts into a given set external timeframe, what may seem like years from your point of view may only be seconds in the external world. And in the context of Inception I figured that the deeper they went the faster their minds were working so the more subjective experience they could pack in the further they went from the real world.

I mean that you personally wouldn’t experience any slowing down in time from your own perspective (in the context of Inception because they are no longer operating in base reality) but the duration of your experiences would increase.

I once had the idea for a science-fiction story where a scientist (insanity is optional) experimented with cybernetic implants to speed up his thought processes, he ends up going mad because what to everyone else (for example) is a six hour flight from London to New York lasts to him for almost a subjective month, and thats just with an acceleration factor of 100.

16

Right, but in the OP you said “subjective reality slows down”. I thought you got that backwards, as they are doing much more (virtually, anyway) in less real time.

If I misunderstood you, I apologise.

17

That’s why they needed a team, and each time they went deeper they had to leave someone behind. They weren’t going into the mark’s dream, they were bringing the mark into a team member’s dream.

18

Doesn’t really answer the OP’s question, but I seem to recall at one point in the movie they explain, briefly, that the dream infiltration technology was originally developed for the military.

19

Yep, this is important to remember. There’s a dreamer that creates the dream world. He/she is the one who can manipulate stuff while they are in the dream, like bending buildings and removing stairs. The mark is then brought into the dream, filling it with their secrets.

20

True, but what was his other option? He could abandon her to her own private limbo (in which she could recreate him if she wanted to), and go back to his kids and tell them what, Mommy decided she didn’t want to wake up?

The person left behind was to run the dream sequence (drugs and equipment). I think all the dream worlds were created by Ellen Page except the lowest level which would have been either Saito’s or Scarecrow’s. It is also possible that the lowest level wasn’t anyone’s dream. The almost made it sound like it was place that existed independently of the dreamer, but that shaped itself to the dreamers who showed up. It also had a much higher rate of time change. Saito spent decades down there but it was only minutes in the next level up.

Part of the tech is that you can choose who has control (I am assuming either through the tech or the drugs). In training Ellen Page’s character was building worlds in Leo’s head because part of the challenge is to make it familar so the subjects subconscious does not reject the setting and attack the other dreamers.

Maybe. But remember, they wanted to know what idea they were implanting. If the idea was to kill himself they may not have agreed to it. As it was, the worst that would happen if the subject did what they wanted (barring any trauma caused by them during inception) was to have been slightly less rich and powerful.

That occasionally get played with in Marvel comics with the character Quicksilver. He is a total ass partially because to him we are moving so slow that he has time to read a book between each word we say.