But that rule was superceded by the new rule about the super sedative. It does seem like they were explained pretty clearly, but when you examine that explanation, there appear to be holes. At first, it seems like the kick wakes you up from the higher level - so the elevator explosion would wake the elevator people up from the snow dream. But then, what was the explosion at the snow fortress for? If it was to wake Ariadne from her limbo dream, why she have to jump off the building? And if getting killed sent Fischer to limbo, why didn’t jumping off the building send Ariadne further into limbo (unless it was the falling sensation and not the death that woke her up, in which case, we have a case of a reverse kick)…
Well, of course the pinwheel was a plant–it was planted by young Fischer himself. Fischer’s own subconscious is what put the pinwheel in the safe, though he doesn’t realize it. In reality, his father had not left any alternate will and had not held onto an old pinwheel. It’s likely that his father really did view him as a disappointment.
Remember at the beginning of the movie when they are trying to perform an Extraction on Saito. They explain that they create a safe or vault in the dream and the dreamer’s subconscious will automatically fill it with something important. Then they break into the vault to discover that person’s secrets. That is what Cobb had just done to Saito.
That’s kind of what they did to Fischer, with a further twist added. When they constructed the mountain hospital dream, they built the vault, but they didn’t know what would end up in the vault*–it would depend on the target dreamer’s subconscious. Fischer thought they were breaking into Browning’s subconscious, and that the vault would contain what Browning knew of the elder Fischer’s alternate will. But the real Browning wasn’t really there, and they were actually fooling Fischer into breaking into Fischer’s own subconscious. So the contents of the vault in the mountain hospital were supplied–unknowingly–by Fischer himself. The pinwheel was there because that’s what Fischer subconsciously wanted to find there. He sees it as validation that his father really loved him, but it was all a product of his own mind. To me, that was the beauty of the whole Inception mission–they basically just provided the opportunity for Fischer to convince himself that his father really loved him and wanted him to be his own man.
*When they are in the hospital, Eames gestures at the unopened vault after the young Fischer “dies” and says regretfully that he “really wanted to find out what’s in there.” (he says this before Cobb and Ariadne come up with the plan to bring Fischer back from limbo, whereupon he actually does open the vault)
**Eames-as-Browning did plant the *idea *of an alternate will, but the pinwheel was all Fischer’s own subconscious desire.
Yes, the explosion at the snow fortress was to wake Ariadne and Cobb from the limbo dream. They said as much in the movie–in the snow level before going down into limbo. So maybe her jumping off the building in limbo was unnecessary, though the building appeared to be collapsing anyway. She did want to get Fischer out of there and back to the snow fortress as soon as possible, so maybe by jumping off the building and killing herself, she was just being expeditious. 
I don’t understand that part fully, either. A likely explanation is that in the snow fortress/hospital when Ariadne and Cobb decide to go down into limbo, they are improvising at this point and the sedatives they use at that level are from a hospital kit they find in the room and not the “super sedatives” that they have been using in the higher dream levels. So dying in limbo while under that hospital sedative had the “normal” effect of waking them up in the hospital. Hmm… that still doesn’t explain how Fischer’s death in limbo brings him back to the hospital. It does seem to be implied that limbo is the lowest dream level, so maybe any time you die in limbo you get kicked back up to the next level. Apparently that was all Cobb and Mal had to do after their long life together in limbo. The danger is getting “lost” in limbo so that you never come back out of it. In any case, I agree that the limbo stuff is not all that clear.
By the way, I’m not trying to say that the movie is perfect and has no plot holes. I just think some people are quick to jump on something they didn’t understand and shout “Plot hole!” when, in fact, some of these things do have explanations that are either stated within the movie or at least implied by it. I don’t understand everything in the movie and I’m still trying to figure it all out myself. Discussing points and counterpoints like those raised in this thread is helping. 
The sedatives are so strong that they need simultanous kicks in both levels to wake up. They use the music to synchronise them. This is in the script, but I only caught it second time around.
I don’t see it that way. Look at The Sixth Sense - the ending makes sense retroactively because you realize the clues had been there throughout the movie.
In Inception you had numerous clues that the real world was a dream. Cobb being seperated from his children (in reality he could have just had them rejoin him in whatever foreign country he was living in); his desire to “return home”; his father-in-law telling him to come back to reality; seeing the dreamers in the Chemist’s shop and being told some dreamers get addicted to living in their dreams (which struck Cobb enough that he was about to spin his totem to see if he was in dream right then).
And I’m not trying to say the opposite lol. I like the movie enough, and most of it is clever enough, that I’m willing to give it credit and say it may all make sense and being internally consistent when all is said and done. (Aug 17 the script gets published, so more clues then…). But in the meantime, all I’m saying is that everything isn’t overwhelmingly obvious…
In a dream, he would just dream them as being with him. Whereas I don’t see anything unrealistic about a man who is a fugitive – and possibly emotionally scarred – choosing to leave his children with their grandparents while he settles thing and tries to heal himself emotionally.
Eh, again, that just seems thrown in. It makes no practical relevance to the story whether he is or isn’t in a dream. Throwing in the occasional, “But maybe he is!” doesn’t change that it doesn’t matter.
> Spoilers about Inception and The Sixth Sense <
The story, as is, is about a guy who accidentally killed his own wife who is now trying to pull off a heist that is terribly dangerous. That’s true, so far as the story goes, regardless of whether he is or isn’t in a dream. But, in The Sixth Sense, in one version of the story he’s a living man who is helping a young child to get over his issues. In an alternate version of the story, he’s a ghost who is getting over his own issues thanks to a young child. There is a wide practical effect based on what happens on the end. The whole story before that point changes to something entirely different. In Inception, it doesn’t. Whether he’s deluding himself or not, the story that we experienced is the same.
I knew going in that a lot of people really liked the film but after seeing it I expected there to be much more debate than I’m seeing. I would give it a 2/5. The characters were extremely thin, the dialogue was really plain and the acting was meh. But what really, really prevented me from getting into the movie was how absurd it was.
Now I don’t mind a preposterous movie. The Bourne Identity is ludicrous as is the Matrix but both movies are very enjoyable. But Inception goes way beyond the ridiculousness in these movies. The psychology is just so, so bad. People hiding their subconscious secrets in dream safes, subconscious “projections” with military training, and was it just me or were their brains communicating through IVs? The movie was presented so as to indicate that it was an “intellectual” film which makes the absurdity that much more bothersome. The film completely failed to draw me in because I had no idea what it was asking me to imagine. In contrast, it is pretty easy for me to be drawn into something like Harry Potter even though the Harry Potter world is ostensibly further from our own than the Inception world.
There were definitely some cool effects but even as an excuse to show off a few effects I think Nolan could have done way better than this film.
That was the point. At some subconscious level (and Cobb explictly said in the movie that people can’t control dreams because they are subconscious) Cobb realizes he’s in a dream and his family is waiting for him in the real world. And situations like this are expressed as metaphors in a dream - so he dreams that his family is in the United States and he cannot return there.
As for the idea that Cobb simply chose to leave them with his grandparents - did you see the same movie? The whole purpose of his life was to be reunited with his children - to say that he was staying seperated from them voluntarily is ridiculous.
I think you completely missed the point. Watching the movie, it appeared that we were watching a character named Cobb working as a dream enactor and using his powers to run a complex heist. But then in the final scene it’s revealed that literally everything we saw was just Cobb’s dream - the person who appeared to control other people’s dreams has actually been trapped in his own dream all along.
It was like the moment in The Usual Suspects when Detective Kujan looks down at his coffee mug. He suddenly realizes that everything he (and we) had heard from Verbal Kint throughout the entire movie was a lie.
I spent the whole film thinking that Cobb was dreaming. That’s what all the clues seemed to be pointing towards. So my view of the film is that it was all a dream. If it was real then surely Cobb would have had his children with him wherever her was. At the end they were posed the same way and in the same clothes that he had last seen them.
When they were in the 4th level I wondered if there was going to be some big twist over who was actually getting ‘inceptioned’. I think I spent so much of the film trying to figure out what was really going on that I didn’t sit back and just appreciate what actually was going on. So I think a re-watch is in order.
One question I’m still wondering about is to do with Cobb and his wife. What were they doing that had them end up in limbo? We know that the sedatives used for the heist were relatively new. Normally dying in a dream wakes you up, but under these sedatives if you got killed in your dream then you went to limbo. So were they using similar sedatives? And how was Cobb aware that they were in limbo but Mal wasn’t? And how did he figure out that they were?
I think one of the big things for me was the fact that Cobb’s totem, wasn’t actually his own. Also once we saw him and Mal being hit by the train they woke up. But if they ended up in limbo by being killed in a dream then were they waking up in reality or were they waking up in the dream that they had been killed in? And why could he not just tell Mal that they were in limbo? Why did he have to go through with the inception?
I also think there was something a bit off with her suicide. She was on the ledge opposite. But when he kept telling her to go inside he was motioning towards himself. If she were to follow his instructions then she would be going towards him i.e. jumping. Which made me think this was some sort of mirroring of what actually happened. Plus if Mal jumped from the balcony opposite then surely forensics would show that. There would also be records of her renting that room etc.
I think everything was kept very shady. Mysterious charges, being chased by faceless goons, walls practically closing in on you.
Michael Caine as Mal’s Father doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Does he believe Cobb? And if he does then why on Earth would he help him out with another Inception plan?
This post ended up being pretty incoherent. So I definitely think that rewatch is in order.
Let’s assume the entire thing was a dream. Cobb’s been in it for years, right? That means that he’s either been sedated for a very long time, or he’s down a couple levels. It doesn’t seem likely to me that a person would be sedated for months on end. If he’s several levels down, who put him those extra levels in?
In the last scene, the children are actually not wearing exactly the same clothes that we see them in throughout the movie. Someone on IMDB took note of their clothing the second time they watched the movie. This is what the poster wrote:
I still haven’t decided whether I think the last scene was a dream/reality or whether Cobb was dreaming the whole time. But it’s harder for me to say that he was dreaming the whole time; one of the reasons is that we see some events happen without his presence (some interactions between Ariadne and Arthur; only Eames witnessing the redemptive moment between the Fischers).
I think the act of dying was not the actual trigger. It was the “leap of faith” that was important. Committing “suicide” required you to completely reject the world you were in as a dream and it’s the rejection not the death that releases you from the dream world. So you could escape one dream by death and end up in another because you still believe that second dream is real.
then by that logic, leo would have been kicked out of limbo before he even got the chance to incept mal. i think the act of dying is the trigger to leave limbo though admittedly it’s the realization is the hard part.
But I think you have to really be convinced. Not just “I’m pretty sure this is all just a dream so I want to wake up now.” You need to get to “I’m so absolutely positive this is a dream that I’m willing to stick a gun in my mouth and pull the trigger.”
I finally saw it and after the hype was underwhelmed. As pointed out there was little that made us really care about the characters, and it was pretty clear from the get go that it was going to be at least implied, if not an actual attempted twist, that what we were thinking was reality was a dream too (especially when they revealed how time perception expands exponentially deeper in).
For what it is worth I read it as all his dreamworlds, turtles all the way down (or up in this case), and enjoy the movie the most reading each non-Cobb character as an expression of a different part of Cobb’s personality and as representations of his inner conflicts and fantasies. (And as creations of his mind they are operating as part of him and his conflicts even when his is not consciously aware of them, that is not present in the scene.) But the nature of those conflicts were not fleshed out enough for me to care enough to enjoy the film more then eh okay.
I only saw the movie today and am committing the heinous crime of commenting without first reading the entire thread. (Definitely on the agenda for tomorrow, but in the meantime please excuse any repetition.)
I enjoyed the movie a lot, but I think it’s quite self-consciously derived from the works of Philip K. Dick. Because of that, I don’t balk at all at paradox, and I think that the only actual players in the drama were Dom and Moll, and that everyone else was projection.
I came away with the impression that there was a perfect symmetry: Dom’s inception of Moll was “This world is not real.” Moll’s inception of Dom was “This world is real.” We were explicitly told that the best angle to exploit in order to foster the idea that the germinal idea is the subject’s own is the Father Relationship. Dom’s father urges him, “Come back here… come back to reality.” It’s Dom’s father who introduces the provocatively-named Ariadne as the ideal architect.
(Her name suggests someone who offers a way out of a labyrinth, but her actual role is to construct them.) Her totem is a chess piece - and it can be no coincidence that the apparently spend a bunch of time in the subconscious of a “Robert Fischer” who substantially resembles iconic photos of Bobby Fischer at his prime. Fischer is an artifact himself, just another layer of the labyrinth. She appears to be a total ingénue, but she inexorably forces Cobb to take each step that ultimately brings him “out” of self-conflict and into excepting his self-created world as genuine. We are asked to contemplate a set of Penrose stairs – at the end of the film, Cobb has just reached the landing - and believes himself to be at the top level - but the top level is in actually the very lowest level - he’s as deep as he can possibly be.
I had forgotten who the mythologic Ariadne was! I very much like your read on it and it helps make this movie a bit more interesting to think about.
Agreed. A very interesting take. Thanks, Larry.
I’ve been undecided over whether I think the whole thing is a dream or not, and I’ve decided that I think it is. I also think the wobble of the top at the very end is an indication that he’s about to wake up. That last cut away from the just wobbling top is the moment the dream ends.
Larry, if I’m understanding you correctly, you’re saying that the entire story was Cobb’s effort to embed himself more securely in his dream? That he subconsciously wanted to stay in the dreamworld so he (again subconsciously) invented a scenario that would eliminate any paradoxes and make the dream narrative seem more plausible?
I agree that’s an interesting take, but what do you make of the spinning top at the end? Are you one of the people who feel it was going to fall over? Or, if you feel that it was spinning indefinitely, do you feel it was just a wink to the audience or that it had context within the story and meant that Cobb’s efforts to eliminate all evidence that he was dreaming had been unsuccessful?