My first impression was Caine played Cobb’s father-in-law but the apparent lack of tension between them over the circumstances of Mal’s death is what later threw me off. The fact that other posts in this thread seemed to refer to Caine playing Cobb’s father also made me think otherwise.
The movie struck me as Nolan’s Phantom Menace.
It HAS been unjustly criticised.
Fischer is NOT a powerful man YET, nor is he the head of the Fischer conglomerate – or if he is, it’s just barely; he’s on the plane escorting his father’s body to its funeral in L.A. He might well not have any idea who Saito is.
I am always suspicious of movies where dream play an important part, I went because other family members wanted to go. We were disppointed in the movie. In addition to the whole “was it all a dream” we found that far too much of the dreams involved people shooting automatic rifles at each other and blowing things up. Far too noisy. The only good part was when Lukas Haas explained to Juno how the dreams are constructed. That was kinda fun. Plus, he didn’t shoot her, or she him.
Wasn’t he dead before they even introduced her character?
I saw the film for a second time today and it answered several questions I had had the first time regarding the different dream levels & Limbo. I also noticed the wedding ring bit, and that yes we did see the top spin and fall twice in the real world. Also someone had mentioned seeing backwards writing, no it was just an upside down watch.
The film seemed to move faster the second time I saw it. The first time it did feel a bit long, but today it sped right by.
I saw it over the weekend; I mostly followed the plot but am still mulling it over. I liked it very much, and would like to see it again sometime. Even putting aside the clever, knotty plotline, it had style to burn. The ending was just ambiguous enough that virtually any explanation of it is as “correct” as any other.
Wouldn’t the fact that Cobb questions if he is in a dream or not be proof that he’s dreaming? Everybody has had dreams that felt totally real while we’re asleep, but as soon as we wake up we instantly know that it was just a dream. If you are unsure if you’re dreaming, you are.
but if it feels totally real, you DON’T wonder if it’s a dream until afterwards.
Well, for the 2nd weekend in a row, Inception’s weekend numbers dropped less than 40%, allowing it to keep the #1 spot and raking in a total of $193.3M in 17 days. This puts in slot #7 for 2010, and positions it well to eventually slip into the Top 5 (after Toy Story 3, Alice in Wonderland, Iron Man 2, and Twilight: Eclipse).
But if you are wondering, then you’re dreaming.
Maybe that’s only true (not that I think it is necessarily true) when you’ve never been in an artificial dream constructed to perfectly match reality.
Some interesting interpretatations and debate here. I agree with the assertion that the ending is ambiguous so that there is no “right” answer and we are therefore asked to consider the implications of either outcome.
I’m surprised nobody has mentioned (as far as I can tell) that at the very end of the credits the Edith Piaf music plays. Nice touch I think.
Some very funny Inception trailer mashups: http://insidemovies.moviefone.com/2010/07/29/inception-mash-ups-are-out-of-control-our-10-favorites/?sms_ss=email
Theme—You never know life is NOT a dream.
Deleted first scene—Cobb getting on plane. Falls asleep. Movie starts, whole movie goes by, with paranoia and logic/illogic and made sense when happening but not when waking up. Cobb wakes up. Goes home. Sees his kids, he sees the faces. Never sees them while dreaming. Refuses to see them while dreaming.
As for “totem,” i think that if it keeps spinning we know it is a dream but you never know that it is NOT A DREAM. This is one of the made sense while happening but does not in reality. Why cant one dream the top spins forever or stops spinning? The laws of physics may or may not apply in a dream. We never see anyone else use a totem just have them. And if it someone elses dream still your subconscious so you choose how totem works.
Also i dont think he said the top was his totem. I think for him in the “movie dream” his kids faces are. In his dream no one knows what they look like and he never sees them refuses to see them at limbo.
There is no way to know if awake. But that is reality.
Yeah, I never really bought the totem explanation. The top might fall over right away, in a few seconds, tomorrow, a month from now or never, depending on how the dream unfolded. But you could still be dreaming in any of those scenarios.
I may just be confused, but the totems wouldn’t offer any protection whatsoever from a self-generated dream, right? They are meant to protect you from a constructed dream imposed from outside, since the architect wouldn’t know how to make your totem feel right. But YOU know, so a natural dream could easily include a successful totem test.
Honestly, a lot of this just didn’t make sense to me. Why do you need a kick for the dream within a dream - if your actual body wakes up, you’d wake up, no matter how many levels down you were.
At first I thought limbo was a wonderfully terrifying concept along the lines of “The Jaunt” by Stephen King. The idea being that time dilates more and more as you go deeper, so a short nap IRL could be millennia in limbo, and there’s no constructed world there, so you are just forced to endure thousands of years of blank consciousness. When you wake up, you are insane/catatonic. Brrr. So much worse than mere death.
But then it turned out that limbo is just a beach where you can do anything you want.
Mostly though, I think the movie didn’t work well for me because I was waiting for Bobby to show up in the shower and invalidate everything, so I couldn’t get invested. And they essentially followed through with that (with a slight ambiguity), which left me feeling justified yet disgruntled.
I actually much prefer the interpretation that this is an art film about the movie-making process and the value of fictional catharsis. That article made me like the movie more than I did walking out of the theater.
They have two functions:
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They do something in dreams that they cant do in real life (like spin forever). If they do that, you know you are in a dream of some kind. If you can’t get them to do something impossible, then you know you are in real life.
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You give them a secret aspect in real life, that no one else knows about. That way, if someone else tries to give you a fake version of your totem that acts like the real life object to fool you into thinking you aren’t dreaming, you know that it’s fake, because it doesn’t have the secret real life feature.
Of course, Cobb took over Mal’s totem, so theoretically, he could be in her dream because she knows the secret aspect of her own totem. But there is no one else whose dream he could be in because nobody else knows.
Who’s Bobby?
The reason for the kick was to avoid spending months or years in the lower-level dreams, which would increase the risk of being ‘killed’ and going into limbo, and the risk of the target figuring things out and the inception not working.