I assumed the real totem properties of it were in its weight, sound, feel of the metal, etc as much as in its basic function. That’s why he doesn’t let other people hold it or try it. Any idiot can replicate a top. They can’t replicate the exact sensation of his top.
It’s because I DON’T have a superior intellect that I don’t get what was supposed to be confusing about it. The story struck me as being very easy to follow, and Nolan, I thought, did an amazing job of making it easy to follow while at the same time springing new stuff on the viewer.
You don’t have to think a movie makes sense to summarize its plot, but okay:
[spoiler]Cobb and Arthur try to use the dream-hijacking technology to steal an idea from Saito. They fail. They are then hired by Saito, who is impressed by their skills, to implant an idea on Robert Fischer’s head. Saito offers Cobb the added bonus of being able to return to America, which he fled because of the suspicion that he murdered his wife, and facilitates Cobb’s escape from his very angry former employers.
After hiring more people - Eames, a master of deception; Ariadne, and “Architect” who can design mazelike dreams; and Yusef The Chemist, who creates a sedative powerful enough to allow dreams of extraordinary depth and lucidity - and spending a lot of time and money on prep, the team drugs Fischer aboard a 747 and creates a succession of dream states.
The first dream state is a rainy city, dreamed byYusef the Chemist. They kidnap Fischer in this dream state, frightening him. Saito is shot in the dream, so his first dream state persona is dying. While riding in the van, the team and Fischer (but not the Chemist, who must stay awake to keep the dream going) enter Dream State 2.
Dream State 2, dreamed by Arthur, the dream within the dream, is the Hotel. In this dream they begin to really run a confidence scam on Fischer, they gain Fischer’s confidence and convince him that he is in a dream and they are his allies, and that in order to defeat whomever is invading his dream, he must enter a deeper dream with them into the mind of his father’s former confidante Browning, but they are lying; instead, they lead Fischer into another dream of their own design. The team, minus Arthur who must stay behind to continue dreaming the hotel (And engage in some astounding fight scenes) enters Dream State 3,
Dream State 3, dreamed by Eames, is the Snowy Fortress - the dream within the dream within the dream. They convince Fischer that this is Browning’s dream, and that Fischer must help to invade the fortress to find the secret that is being stolen from him. They succeed, though in fact Fischer is unwittingly being led to a scene that will convince him to break up his father’s megacorporation, which is the idea they’re trying to implant. Before Fischer can confront the image of his father, Fischer is killed by “Mal,” a manifestation of Cobb’s guilt, and due to the effects of the sedative and the depth of the dream Fischer drops even further, into a fourth dream state euphemistically called Limbo, which is an unstructured dream state from which escape is difficult. Saito also dies of his wounds. Cobb and Ariadne enter Limbo in an effort to save Saito and Fischer.
In Limbo, Cobb and Ariadne (it’s not really explained how they enter the same dream as Saito and Fischer, a bit of a hole) confront “Mal,” Cobb’s guilt. We learn the final peices of Cobb’s puzzle; he and Mal, at some earlier point in his career, had entered a Limbo dream state together and spent the conscious equivalent of many decades there, alone, building amazing dream states but losing their sanity. To escape it, Cobb implanted the idea in Mal’s mind that Limbo was not real, so she was willing to “Die” in Limbo to wake up. But when they did, the incepted though had not left her; she believed reality was also a dream, went mad, and killed herself, setting Cobb up for the murder in the hope he would be forced to follow her into death.
Cobb confronts Mal; she stabs him, after he tells her (really, himself) that he must get over her. Ariadne finds Fischer and kills herself and Fischer, kicking them back up to Dream State 3. Back at Dream State 3, Fischer imagines himself confronting his father. The idea is now presumably implanted that he should follow a different path from his father and break up the company - the idea Saito wanted implanted. The team then uses a series of “kicks” to wake the team up;
Eames blows up the Snowy Fortress,
Arthur uses explosives to simulate gravity in an elevator,
The Chemist drives the an off a bridge, hitting the water.
Everyone wakes up, save, we assume, Cobb and Saito.
In Limbo, Cobb, dazed and confused, is brought to Saito, who is incredibly old and so we presume has been in Limbo for what seems to him to be many decades. The two men just barely remember each other.
Everyone awakens in the real world on the plane. It appears, superficially at least, that Cobb and Saito woke each other up, likely by killing each other in Limbo, but we do not actually see this happen before everyone awaken on the plane. Cobb, as Saito had promised, goes through U.S. customs unchallenged, the charges apparently taken care of. His father takes him to his children. Before seeing his children he spins his top - if it stays spinning he is dreaming, if it falls, he is in the real world, or so we have been told. But when he hears his children he forgets the top, and embraces them.[/spoiler]
It’s not the “fourth layer” so much as it’s the bottom layer, and apparently Limbo is some kind of collective subconsciousness. Everyone goes to the same Limbo.
Right, though according to the film, Limbo would be the same for all dreamers currently sharing the same dream, and if one of the dreamers had been there before (as with Cobb) then Limbo is how he left it. Presumably if Cobb had not been sharing the dream with them, Saito would have created his own Limbo.
I didn’t find the film confusing, but I can see how if you don’t pay attention to who is in what level at what time, you could get confused.
Nothing to add to the plot description etc,
but I must admit I chuckled at the scene where they were discussing just how they were going to “control” the first class cabin…
“well its gotta be a 747 so no one walks through”
“you’re going to hafta buy out the entire class”
“then you need to replace the cabin crew”
Whereupon Saito walks in…
“Oh, by the way, I bought the airline”…
yeah…small things amuse me 
Agreed, including such a bizarre patriarchal element would make even less sense.
Both I and the Mrs found the film quite linear and easy to follow. This was not as challenging as (for example) Memento, in which I kept trying to mentally rewind every segment and review every known fact of a narrative in reverse… confusing but (unlike Inception) quite rewarding. Or, orders of magnitude more difficult, Primer… good grief, that was an insane film to keep track of.
That’s what I got from it. Although it seems that Cobb used it in a different way: he proved that he and his wife were in a dream by making it do an unrealistic thing.
That seemed to suggest that if you’re in a dream without knowing it, you can still have a small effect on the dream.
That would have been a better way to use totems in the movie, thinking about it. With my aforementioned d20, whenever I’m not sure, I will it to roll a 7 and then a 2. If it does, then I’m in a dream, whereas in reality it can never do that because it’s loaded.
So yes, I’m willing to concede that symbolism took precedence over practicality with the totems. Although what I took away from the end shot is that Cobb didn’t care any more, as he had got what he wanted.
I liked Inception, but I wouldn’t call it a cinematic masterpiece and I wouldn’t call someone an idiot for finding it confusing. The film could be confusing because the plot depends on completely made up fantasy elements. As another poster pointed out, the film relies on lots of technobabble to explain how these fantasy elements work. The plot was, if not highly complex, highly detailed. If you had a brain fart and missed/forgot/misunderstood one of these many details, you might very well spend the rest of the movie thinking “Wait, why are they doing that?” or “Why don’t they just do X?”
Fantasy movies,(and I’m going to throw in lots of movies classified as Sci-Fi in here as well) can often be confusing because the artist needs to introduce the audience to whole new worlds that function by different rules. Before I read the books,I found the Lord of the Rings movies confusing as hell. Because they are confusing as hell! I mean sure, I got the basic concepts. Pretty people were the good guys, ugly people were the bad guys. There was this disembodied dark lord who needed this magic ring, and a coalition of different peoples were trying to destroy it. But come on, the little details were impossible to pick up for a first timer. What does the ring do, besides invisibility and restoring Sauron’s body (and does it even literally do that)? What the fuck was Boromir going to do with it? Orcs come out of the ground? Because of magic? So Gandalf knows that the dwarves in Moria have been wiped out, or is it just a hunch? And God all the different places, it was hard to get a feel of what was going on where. Bree. Rohan. Isengard. Barad dur. Minas Tirith. Minas Morgul. Mordor. The Shire. The wood elves. The city elves. And the history of everywhere. So Rohan dispossessed some hill folk. But they’re the good guys. Gondor has stewards. Because Aragorn doesn’t want to be king? Now I didn’t write all that because I think the LOTR movies are terrible. I actually think they’re rather good. I’m merely trying to point out that Inception could be confusing because like LOTR, it was set in an elaborate fantasy world that had a lot things of going on in it that don’t exist at all outside of the film/books.
I also feel compelled to add that I like the fantasy genre overall, partially because movies that are supposed to be set in the “real world,” are generally so unrealistic they might as well be set in some sort of alternate dimension.
Hmm. Maybe the reason people found Inception confusing was because they wanted to know details we were never going to find out?
For example, I accepted that you could go into people’s dreams in this universe. People didn’t question it in universe, so I went along with it, accepting it as part of life. If from the outset I was hoping that it was going to be explained, then doubtless I would be paying less attention to what else was going on.
Can you or someone else give an example of technobabble? One of the things I took note of was the extreme lack of technobabble. They’ve got this device that can induce shared lucid dreaming. It’s never explained how it does that, it just does. From there, and from the fact that you can manipulate the dream through your own will, everything else seemed to follow reasonably enough.
You might call the explanation about the “kicks” technobabble, but that seemed easy to relate to; that’s what happens when you’re falling in a dream and you wake up suddenly. Who hasn’t experienced that at some point?
If it makes you feel any better, I thought Cillian Murphy was Tom Welling for the whole movie until I got home and looked it up on IMDB.
I thought Inception was a decent popcorn flick, but it was by no means the best move ever the way some people say it is (not here, but other people I’ve talked to). It wasn’t even the best Leonardo DiCaprio movie of the year–Shutter Island was light years better than Inception. And SI has the crazy wife trope as well.
Having taken a second look I concede that this was particular and not general. (Haven’t seen it since its theatre run and remembered, “You have to go back to the basic… the relationship with the father.”)
That said, it doesn’t much change the point… the emphasis on Coibb Sr.'s, “Come back to reality,” echoes Mal’s stated desire for him to “choose” his reality. (ie, be happy in an ersatz reality.) There isn’t really any reason to underline that so heavily if Dom wasn’t being rooked at this point.
Think so? It bored the tits right off me, and seemed little better than Identity (or the parody screenplay within Adaptation.) Everything was telegraphed from about 15 minutes in = I spent the whole movie hoping that all of the spoonfeeding was just misdirection, and that there’d be some little surprise coming to make it more interesting. Nope, it was really that trite and obvious.
Perhaps I’m using the term a little broadly, but the whole movie was technobabble, including everything you just said. The entire notion of going into another person’s dreams, all the dream within a dream stuff, the architect stuff, limbo, the subconscious attacking the intruders, the concept of inception itself, it’s all technobabble. They invent the notion of going into someone’s dreams, then they make up a bunch of rules for how that works. Just like Star Trek makes up this spaceship that travels at warp speed, then makes up a bunch of rules about how that works. Now technobabble doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Well done Sci-Fi makes good use of technobabble. And don’t think Inception used their technobabble poorly at all. I enjoyed inception. I didn’t think it was brilliant or anything, but I certainly don’t think it’s bad.
How is that different from every other sci-fi/fantasy movie that takes place in a world that is somehow different from ours? Of course if you create something new you have to create rules for how it works. I don’t understand your complaint here.
I believe it was me that brought it up. I remember thinking that way right after seeing the film and discussing it with friends. However, to give you an example would involve me rewatching the film, seeing as I saw it several months ago. Unfortunately I won’t be doing that, I’d rather watch something else.
Maybe someone can clarify this point for me:
The totem is supposed to work because only you know the exact properties of the object, and so if you notice it doesn’t have those properties, someone else is dreaming it for you.
Except… as they take great pains to emphasize throughout the film, when you’re dreaming, you don’t notice when things are wrong or strange. You just accept them. So how would you know whether your totem’s properties match reality or not? For that matter, how would you know that’s actually your totem?
For instance, let’s say I dream I’m married to someone (A) who is not my real-life spouse (B). When I’m in the dream, if I stop and consider whether A’s qualities match those of my spouse in real life, the answer will always be, “Of course”, because as far as I know, this is real life, and A is my real spouse. I’m not going to compare A to B, if B even exists in my dream. The fact that I’m married to A, and everything about A, will seem totally correct to me, because it’s all part of the dream.
Or take running, for example. Like many people, I can’t run in dreams. I usually end up pulling myself along the ground with my hands, in a way that would be completely impossible in real life. But when it’s happening in the dream, I never think, “Oh, this must be a dream, because I can’t run.” I just accept that this is the way to move quickly.
Therefore, why wouldn’t it be the case that if you’re in someone else’s dream, you’d normalize a “wrong” totem as well? What’s to prevent the dreamer from making up any old totem, and just letting you convince yourself it’s right? “Oh, yes - the watch my grandfather gave me. But does the second hand stick when it gets to the four? Yep! Okay, everything looks good.” The fact that no such watch exists - and you never even met your grandfather - wouldn’t occur to you until after you woke up. Right?
I think you are. Technobabble is a sciency-type explanation for how a black box does its thing.
Not technobabble: “When I plug you two into this machine, you will enter a shared lucid dream.”
Technobabble: “This machine injects a series of nanobots that implant themselves in your neurocortex and communicate with the machine which acts as a host server, thus allowing you to share a lucid dream.”
Fantasybabble: “This device connects the both of you to the Astral Plane which can be manipulated by your mind. It’s like lucid dreaming.”
Technobabble is about how a thing does what it does. Simply stating that a thing does something is not technobabble in itself. There is a device in the movie’s setting that permits shared lucid dreaming. How it works is not described nor is actually important.
Because it seemed especially contrived in Inception. Instead of one alternate universe, you essentially have four more. They then spend seemingly half the movie painfully justifying the rules of each one. I can suspend my disbelief for one, but Inception’s constant rule-inventing actually pulled me out of the experience.
Jesus Christ dude, read the very next sentence of my post. You quoted me as saying “They invent the notion of going into someone’s dreams, then they make up a bunch of rules for how that works.” The sentence that follows that sentence is “Just like Star Trek makes up this spaceship that travels at warp speed, then makes up a bunch of rules about how that works.” I then explain that I thought Inception handled this well, and that it’s a common feature of Sci-Fi.
Seriously though, why bother quoting me with confused emoticons if you can’t bother to read the sentence after the one you quoted?
I didn’t find the movie as a whole confusing, just individual elements. The only ones I can remember offhand:
Totems make less sense the more I think about them, even given everybody else’s explanations. If you’re in somebody else’s dream wouldn’t they have to know you have a totem to materialize it on you? If so, nine times out of then you’d be missing your totem. If not, it implies YOU “carry” your totem with you into the dream world, in which case your own mind is defining its properties and therefore it should have its quirk*. The only case where a totem would work is if the dreamer knew what your totem was but not how it acted.
I may just be remembering oddly, but I found the backstory with Mal confusing. So they grow old together, yet it shows him spinning the top in the vault (and them committing dream suicide) when they’re still young. I can’t quite comprehend how this timeline works, unless somehow they grew old and then used magic dream powers to reset their ages. Again though, I could simply be misremembering or forgetting something that clarifies this.
- My reasoning: The dreamer/architect should only define the physics of the world, so as long as you know the physical properties of your totem and physics are relatively similar to the real world it should act the same, like the chess piece that tips one way. The creator knows there’s more weight on one side, so as long as the physics of the world allow for objects to tip based on their weight it should act the same.