I did a search and didn’t see anything about this. I’m hoping that I’ve missed something, because I thoroughly enjoyed this film up until about ten minutes ago when something dawned on me.
SPOILERS AHEAD!
Okay, so everyone is debating the intricate details of this film. People are discussing Ariadne’s name and how it alludes to the Greek story of Theseus and how the Greek Goddess, Ariadne helped him escape by giving him a sword and a ball of red fleece thread that she was spinning, so that he could find his way out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth. Also there’s the fact that when Cobb is dreaming he’s wearing a wedding band and when he is awake he isn’t wearing it, etc.
Well, all of that fun and speculation disintegrated in front of me when I thought about the basic motives of the characters and the situations they were in.
Cobb wants only one thing. All he cares about is getting back to America. Why? To be with his children, of course. He wants this so bad that he is willing to scheme an intricate and extremely dangerous situation for he and his team in order to make it happen.
None of this seems necessary to me. All Cobb has to do to be with his children is get the grandfather to bring them to Paris! I mean, the grandfather already teaches a class there and everything! If I’m right, then nothing that happened in this film is necessary.
Grandma doesn’t want to come to Paris. She has legal custody (Mal’s dead, and Cobb is a fugitive) and she blames Cobb for Mal’s death.
With the pardon, he can return the US and at least get the right to visitation, although the intricacies of any custody agreement are obviously left vague.
Where is this stated in the film? The closest I found was the cold way the grandmother acted on the phone, but she DID allow them to call, so it seems likely she’d be willing to allow the children to at least visit under supervision, if what you’re saying is true.
Also, the grandfather would have just as much right to the grandchildren as the grandmother, and he could allow them to visit Paris regularly.
And if the Grandmother hates him so bad, why is it okay for Cobb to show up at the house at the end of the movie? Just because he got back on some pardon, doesn’t mean she’d allow him to see them, though if he was fully pardoned, there wouldn’t BE a custody issue. He’s the father.
There is a graphic going around the internet with this exact idea behind it, so you’re not the only one who thought so, OP. However, my feeling was that what Cobb really wanted was to retire - the part about seeing his children just sort of served as a synecdoche.
It’s stated in the film that the easiest way to pull of an “inception” is to use the image of the father so that the subject comes to accept the implanted idea as his own. “Cobb Sr.” only serves as a puppet to plant the seed that was so prominently emphasized: "Come home - come back to reality. " But “home” is not “reality.”
It would be a mistake to expect any logic more solid than dream logic from the top level of reality presented to us in the movie - which as Cobb’s wife observed has more in common with an anxiety dream than any plausible reality.
As for plot holes. This is a movie in which the central character is wanted for murder. He has gone into suicidal depression because he can’t under any circumstances see his kids in the U.S. because he is wanted for murder. But this little problem is taken care of in the time between the guy waking up on the plane and landing - by phone.
This is a movie in which “the most promising student” Michael Caine has ever seen has to be told what inception is from the ground up for a twenty-minute exposition scene. She’s good, though. She takes the time to program in the entire infrastructure for buildings, like the unseen cables for elevators. (I wonder what she did for the plumbing system?)
And you’re looking for plot holes?
The problem with Inception isn’t that the dream plot is complicated. It’s that the things it shows you plainly are so mind-bogglingly stupid.
^ a good number of plot holes to be sure, and i’m convinced some are even intentional to create the illusion of “complexity”. the hole being… level 4 vs limbo. there is definitely a discrepancy there with regards to kicks, and reverse kicks. that being said i’ve definitely downgraded this movie from being “groundbreaking” to mere “eye candy”. it’s certainly not dogmatic and you shouldn’t expect everything to hold up when scrutinized. it’s just a movie after all.
hijack: a better approach for the movie would have been to explore further the ETHICAL implications of inception. leo clearly knows the consequences of an inception gone wrong yet chomps at the bit to incept someone else, if it only means to go see his kids again. he’s clearly learned nothing about the ethical ramifications of tampering with someone’s free will.
I think the problems you have with the film owe more to your not watching it very closely than to actual problems in the scripting. The clear suggestion is that the law problems are readied to be wiped out but they’re holding off for the phone call. Like, say some dude at homeland security (or whoever snags wanted criminals at the border have been paid off and are awaiting conformation). It isn’t gone into because the film isn’t meant to be a gripping drama about the complexities of bribery.
Also, she was an architect or artist. Her vision made her suited to building dreams, not her background in dream manipulation. So I don’t even know what your objection is about on that point.
I would assume that the maternal grandmother has custody and doesn’t want the kids to go to Paris.
I think you’re a little bit too enthusiastic in your search for plotholes, since both the things you mentioned aren’t plotholes. He was being blackmailed into this task with the promise of seeing his children again, but it was pretty clear that the guy had already worked out all the arrangements, the final phone call that happened on the plane was the final insurance–ie, Leo couldn’t doublecross him and kill him or leave him in limbo because then the call wouldn’t happen. Everything else was ready to go.
The most promising student Caine has ever seen was an architect student. She was the best artist. Caine might have been Leo’s old mentor, but it wasn’t like he was teaching a class on dream manipulation. Leo introduced her to the concept of the dream manipulation and inception because of her other skills.
Just because a movie doesn’t spell out every tiny little thing doesn’t mean there’s a flaw with the movie. I don’t really need them to tell me there’s some reason the kids can’t live in France. That’s a pretty easy one–as already pointed out, the custodial guardian doesn’t want to live in France. If he’s on the run for murder, why would she be like “Yes, let me bring the children to visit the fugitive who murdered their mother. I’ll just take care of all the passports and other difficult aspects when it comes to international travel, and I’m sure it won’t cause the children any trauma at all to see their fugitive father for only a few hours before he inevitably goes on the run.” He was wanted for murder. That puts a crimp in visitation. And honestly, I don’t think that’s something that really needs to be spelled out, I think that’s something we can all comfortably assume.
From what I recall, it went something like: his wife had three different psychologists/psychiatrists declare her sane, and she had also told either them or a lawyer that she was in fear of her husband, and she staged the hotel room to look like there had been a fight between the two of them.
Also, since they were on ledges on opposite sides of the street (so he couldn’t pull her indoors) wouldn’t it be proveable that she didn’t fall from Leo’s building?
They were in the same building. They were in the same hotel room. It was just that the shape of the room had the two windows facing each other. That’s why she took the time to destroy the hotel room where they were staying, so it looked like a brutal fight rather than a standard issue suicide.
Really? If it was the same room, he could have run round and grabbed her.
It’s not a plothole, though. The rooms were close enough and high enough that by the time she was squished into the concrete it’d be quite feasible for her to have fallen from either of those windows.
The biggest and stupidest plothole in Inception is:
Instead of having to go through the ordeal of making Mal want to commit suicide to wake from her limbo, why didn’t he just kill her? The result would have been the same.
