The "I've seen INCEPTION" thread (spoilers inevitable)

Cafe Society
41

Thanks for the help. I’m keep getting caught up in over-thinking the totem. I thought it was supposed to indicate you are not in someone else’s dream; not that you are or aren’t dreaming.

Also, I am caught up in over-thinking that it wasn’t his totem. Arthur told homegirl (can’t think of her name) that she couldn’t touch his loaded die. Why is it cool for Dom to have Mol’s totem?

I am pretty sure I have no clue and am chasing smoke, so I will just repeat that I loved this movie, and I was actually thrilled that I was able to follow enough to get the overall gist of it and enjoy it.

42

The totem was supposed to be an object that only you know the characteristics of. It is your one link to reality and the only way to be sure that you are in a dream, so you should not let anyone learn the characteristics of the totem and potentially copy it.

43

He took Mol’s totem as his own after she died. Which he could do because she was the only one other person who knew the properties of that particular totem.

44

The fog is clearing now. Thanks, guys. Now, off to make my friend think I’ve figured it all out on my own.

45

Like a lot of other posters, I have more questions than answers. My reaction to the film is a lot like awaking from a dream. The details to me are fuzzy but I had a very strong reaction to liking it and wanting to re-experience it.

I also feel that the totem is important but I’m not sure how to explain or rationalize it. I’m troubled by the fact that the totem wasn’t Cobb’s. I think there are two possible reasons for this.

  1. It’s because having Mol’s totem allows him to implant the inception of the idea that her reality was in fact a dream in her mind. Because she has hidden her own totem she has lost her ability to conceive or remember her reality and perhaps I’m crazy but I think that if you have someone else’s totem you can almost control their mind or control their dreams and their understanding of reality. That’s why I think the characters were so afraid of letting them go.

  2. It’s because the entire movie is a dream in limbo for Cobb as others have suggested. The reason I suggest this possibility is because Cobb does not have a totem his own or at some point he has hidden his totem just like Mol did. I think it’s conceivable that he and Mol were in limbo but that Mol realized they were in limbo (and if this were true then Cobb’s inception was in actuality only another layer of dream) and awoke from it by killing herself. But Cobb has yet to awake from it.

If those two points don’t make a lot of sense, then I will label them as questions.

  1. What does it mean if you can control someone else’s totem?

  2. What does it mean that Cobb has no totem of his own?

  3. Is it possible that Mol isn’t dead but is awake in the real world and the entire film is a dream of Cobb’s while he’s stuck in limbo?

46

Fantastic movie. One thing that interested me, though, was just how utterly horrible the act of “inception” is. It’s nothing more or less than a uniquely intimate form of brainwashing. To its credit, the film acknowledges this point, at least somewhat. And that makes the ending somewhat more satisfying - even though Cobb is a sympathetic character in many ways, he doesn’t deserve a happy ending. He’s allowed his obsession with returning home to grow to the point that he is willing to do something truly monstrous - getting trapped in limbo is no less than he deserves.

47

Of course, what’s to stop a skilled Extractor from learning the secrets of your totem? Now your subconscious belongs to me! Mwuahahahah.

48

While I like this twist, I can’t help but assume that if Mol had woken up by killing herself, she would have kicked Cobb to wake HIM up, too. Couldn’t be that hard, as it’s not as if he was under sedation or anything originally, right?

49

That’s what I think. I think that Cobb is, and always was, dreaming. Mal (not Mol, according to IMDB) was correct the whole time. They were still dreaming and she escaped by killing herself. Here’s some extra clues that this is the case:

  1. Grandpa says to Cobb “Come back to reality” when Cobb visits him in his Paris office.
  2. Cobb is chased by the Feds as well as bounty hunters in Mumbai. These are just projections of someone’s subconscious, sent to attack the dreamer (Cobb).
  3. Cobb acts exactly like Fischer does in the snow hospital. There, Cobb uses his “gambit” technique. I think someone is using it on Cobb.
  4. Mal dies and Cobb convinces the Chinese guy to “come back with him”. He then picks up the gun and the pair awaken on the plane. So Cobb can’t be in limbo.
50

I liked the movie, but the movie itself experience just wasn’t fun. It was just a puzzle.

In Momento, I was invested in the main character, here it was just watching too many characters navigate a puzzle.

In the snow, I couldn’t keep up w/ who was doing what to whom.

In the end, I think it was more an exercise in “looky what I can do” as opposed to entertainment.

51

Saw it last night – definitely glad we splurged and got the Imax tickets – and my main response was, would someone please teach Nolan how to edit an action scene? I had the same reaction I did to Dark Knight, which was not having any fucking clue at all WTF was going on while the guns are blazing and the vehicles are tumbling. You’re not babying us if you allow us to visually distinguish, at least in general, which are the good guys and which are the bad guys. Dressing every single fucking one of them in a white parka with a hood … obnoxious, really fucking obnoxious. Filming the whole scene in a murky monsoon – ditto.

52

Agreed. The entire mountainside action scene becomes a complete waste which is a shame since it looks like it took a ton of effort to put together.
One clip in particular had a snowmobile towing some people behind it. Were these the bad guys? Were they the good guys? Who knows? Then some guy tosses a grenade at them at and they explode everywhere. Oh, I guess they were bad.
Then they had the visually impressive avalanche that I don’t know who or what it was threatening. It kind of hit then was gone.

53

I usually have a horrible time keeping track of characters; I have poor facial recognition skills to begin with and I’m so out of touch with pop culture that I don’t recognize actors. However, I didn’t find this movie particularly confusing at all. Maybe the ambiguous action scenes brought everyone down to my level.

I really liked the shifting gravity and free-fall scenes. Anyone with a better feel for physics (or who has watched more vids of ISS astronauts) know if they did I good job with inertia and conservation of momentum? It seemed ok to me, but I try to stay gullible when I watch movies.

54

You really couldn’t tell if they were the bad guys when you saw there were more behind the snowmobile than had even gone to sleep in the beginning much less made it to the 3rd level? The fact that we’d just seen Ames running around taking out a bunch of them and that was the whole point of the action scene didn’t make you think “Oh, there’s Ames, taking out a bunch of them with a grenade”? And why would the audience care if the avalanche was threatening the projections? Why would Don care? Sure, we didn’t have visually distinct clothing and it was all white against white snow, but it’s not as though it was illogical and impossible to follow.

55

Besides, there was movie cliche reality.

Side Identification Protocol
If gun is fired and hits target then gun was fired by good guy,
Else gun was fired by bad guy.

56

I agree. In fact that was the “on the way home” conversation I had: did you think the top was stopping or not? FWIW I thought it wasn’t.

I thought for sure the story would end with us finding out Dom was the rich heir and this was all an attempt at planting an idea in his head but the ending we did get was good too.

57

I saw it again last night* and it was almost even better the second time. I had a great time watching it unfold the first time with every scene and plot development fresh and new, it was a delightfully wonderful experience that can never be repeated, but this time I could concentrate more on the puzzle and layers and pick up more clues. I didn’t have any trouble keeping track of who was who at any point, for either viewing, but this time I knew all their names, instead of thinking “the chemist” or “Juno” or “Holy shit! Lucas Haas!!” which, actually, I did the 2nd time, since I didn’t recognize him the first time.
The movie did very well at the box-office, it made $60 million over the weekend, not bad for a movie of its type.

  • I hadn’t planned on seeing it again so soon, I went to an odd but fun double-feature of True Romance and Rio Bravo, neither of which I’d seen before, at the Gene Siskel Center, part of an ongoing Tarantino retrospective (movies by him, movies that influenced him, and movies that were influenced by him). It popped into my head that I wanted to see Inception again, this time on a bigger screen, so I impulsively figured out what time it would be playing on the biggest screen at the theater closest to the Siskel and bought a ticket just before I left the house. After Rio Bravo, and damn, what a great movie!, I took a bus to the other theater. I could have just walked, since the theaters are only a few blocks apart. In between where the Gene Siskel Film Center is and River East 21 where Inception was, they had blocked off Michigan Ave. to film scenes for Transformers 3. There’s a joke there somewhere but I can’t flesh it out. It was amusing to me in a vague sort of way.
58

I also had no trouble navigating the snow fights. I did notice that Ames had a different hat on when he went outside to place the charges. So his hand-to-hand was easy to follow. And I guess you may have gotten confused when Ames threw the grenade into the top of the truck, he waved at the driver.

My absolute favorite fight scene was the zero-gravity fight in the hotel-hallway. That is exactly how I expected it to look. You can’t create enough force to punch the guy without him flying away, so you try to punch while holding him, but who’s holding who, so you have to go to a kind of floating MMA type fight and put him in a submission hold, but without the ground limiting your maneuverability. So terrific!

I’m still confused as to what would have to happen in the scenario that the top didn’t stop spinning, so I prefer to think that it did:D

59

Two additional points

  1. I think the action scenes are irrelevant and I think Nolan knows this. It’s a foregone conclusion they will survive. This is a movie where death is irrelevant to a large extent because so much of it (perhaps all of it) takes place in a dream world. What suspense or drama is there in a chase scene or a shoot out when even if you’re hit all you feel is ambiguous pain and even if you die you merely revert to a lower dream level or to limbo where you can be resuscitated. At the same time though, they have to be in the movie because it is somewhat of a action/heist/crime film and these sorts of requisite scenes are mandatory. I just think Nolan has little interest in them other than going through the motions and I as a viewer had little interest in them.

The only compelling portion of the action scenes was how close the assailants came to each person left above affected what was happening in the deeper dream levels. The only reason we care that the van is going off the bridge and into the river is because we know that affects how much time Levitt has to wake them up which affects how much time they have to get into the snow fortress which. . . etc.

But even then that only places a clock on the lower tier action, we know they have to hurry. I still never think we’re as an audience aren’t afraid for their lives; we only fear they won’t complete the tasks they have to.

  1. Whether the top continues spinning or falls down is an unanswerable question. The debate is almost beside the point. The more interesting question how each possibility changes the reading of the film. But there is absolutely no way to conclude whether it falls or does not. It’s too literal to suggest that because it’s wobbling it will fall. This isn’t like Butch and Sundance being trapped and we fade out because we know they will be killed. This is more like the ending of Before Sunset where we’re unsure of whether he will stay or not.

Additionally, I think having a coda after the credits where we see what happens to the totem would ruin the ending. It removes all the interesting implications of the ambiguity and merely just tells us the answer. As soon as the first person saw that part, they would say on the internet how it actually happened and there would be no doubt or room for discussion on the issue.

60

I enjoyed this movie quite a bit. I definitely grokked the ambiguity of the spinning top ending … there’s a reason Nolan cut the film just as the top gives a great big wobble, you know. I chuckled out loud at that moment.

I do have to say, though, the practically identical presentation of the kids all throughout the movie, including that last scene, just adds to the uncertainty. Did Dom succeed in real life and return home, or is he satisfied to “return home” in his dream world? It’s all depending on what we think, isn’t it?

I personally didn’t have too much trouble keeping the snow battle straight. I seem to remember that Fischer’s projections (the guards) had some darker patterns on their jackets, while Dom’s team was more nearly pure white. One question I did have about that scene, though … when that avalanche came, and Dom and Ariadne were climbing the mountainside … what exactly were they doing that for? It didn’t appear necessary at all for any mountain climbing to access that hospital.

Some other mind-bending thoughts: I realized the presentation of Mal, in all her emotional pleading and treachery against Dom’s operations … was never Mal at all, but purely Dom’s imagining of her. In other words, when Mal stabbed Ariadne on the bridge, or shot Fischer in the snow hospital … that was Dom’s projection doing that to sabotage his own plans. Pretty weird, I thought, although that realization wasn’t fully formed until a while after I’d seen the movie.

Another later thought: I kinda get the notion of needing an architect to build the dream world for the purposes of the team operating within it … but exactly how does that created world get into the dreamer’s head? I mean, it’s obvious the architect doesn’t HAVE to be included in the team. Ariadne basically forces Dom to bring her along on the flight, she wasn’t included in the original setup. Do you “load” the architect’s world like loading some software? Or does one of the other team members have to memorize the layout? I know, I know … it’s not important to know how, I was just wondering.

I really loved Memento, enjoyed The Dark Knight, and thought this was a great movie. Kudos to Christopher Nolan.