While I didn’t feel underwhelmed, I do think that Nolan could have taken a lot more advantage of the random nature of dreams. The movie took itself way too seriously. The environment of the dreamworld should have been a lot… weirder, especially when going down deeper and deeper in levels of the subconsciousness.
The acting was top-notch. Leonardo DiCaprio further cemented his acting chops with his challenging portrayal as the complex idea thief Cobb. Cobb was an awful, amoral person, but DiCaprio managed to make him sympathetic, which I feel is the gold standard of acting. Sadly, Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s wonderful performance as Cobb’s partner Arthur did not receive the screen time it truly deserved.
Speaking of amorality, one of the brightest points about this film was that the protagonists and antagonists seemingly switched roles. Cobb, Arthur, Ariadne, Eames, Saito, and Yusuf were all terrible people. They effectively spent hours and days unapologetically mind-raping Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), who, all things considered, is actually a pretty decent guy.
Another point the movie fell short on was the sound engineering. I had a very difficult time hearing what a lot of the characters were saying since they were drowned out by the background music. Perhaps that was more the movie theater’s fault than production’s, but I’ve been to other movies at this theater and sound was never a problem.
Last thing: Best. Fight. Scene. Ever. You either already know what I’m talking about or will once you see the film.
Good movie, great idea, much of it amateurishly executed. I give it a B.
I thought they did a good job explaining this - the reason the dream world wasn’t ‘weirder’ was because the ‘weirder’ it gets the more ‘aware’ the subconscious is of the intruders. So they want to craft the ‘world’ as normal as possible, so as to not tip off the subconscious.
That said, Fischer’s subconscious was trained - which the team wasn’t aware of - Once they are made aware of this, I’m wondering why they didn’t adjust the ‘world’ more…
I agree with this completely.
Usually there are times in a DiCaprio movie where I’m taken out of the movie because of how young he looks (I guess it effects how much I ‘buy’ his acting). This time, not once. He was really good in it.
I agree.
I’d give it an A. I don’t think it was amateurishly executed, but YMMV.
Just want to put my 2 cents in about the whole spinning top thing. And that involves invoking the steronz rule of movie dreams. I’ve had this rule for a while, but I’ve never put it into writing, so hopefully it makes sense. Well, actually, I have a rule and an opinion. And I guess the rule is also an opinion, but… well, here’s my combined rule/opinion policy, we’ll say:
Opinion - If the entire movie/book/series ends with the whole “everything you just watched was a dream” trick, the trick damn well better be necessary for the plot. If it’s just a “gotcha” moment at the end, then to me it’s the functional equivalent of some guy saying “I have a frog in this box” and then opening the box and saying “Psych! It’s actually a lizard.”
Rule - If you’re going to pull the above trick, the main character (i.e., the dreamer) must be present for everything in the preceding dream. Otherwise you’re asking me to believe that the dreamer dreamed things he wasn’t aware of, and you showed me those things, so I as the audience know more than the dreamer, who should know everything because it’s his world.
So if you accept that rule, then this movie can’t be Cobb’s dream, because there are things happening outside of his dream-level that matter. The rainy-city (level 1) you can kind of excuse by saying that none of it was improvised, and perhaps we witnessed the whole van-off-the-bridge event because Cobb assumed it to have happened according to plan. But Cobb would have no idea that his partner had to do all those zero-gravity stunts. He’d have no reason to create events a level that he wasn’t privy to.
Usually with ambiguous endings I don’t care one way or another – I’m not the sort of guy who needs to know what the artist intended because I consider the artists decisions to be arbitrary. But in this case I think the movie falls apart if we take it as a Cobb-dream. Given that, I think all the stuff about Cobb being chased IRL by various people was an intentional attempt by Nolan to “get” the audience, just in the same as the spinning top at the end. And since both of those things violate my rule, I just write them off as stupid director tricks. It’s kind of annoying too, because the movie didn’t need those tricks to be good.
I actually think that there is a difference between LEVEL 4 and Limbo. Level 4 is Cobb’s dreamworld. Fischer is revived in level 3 with the defib unit and then sent level 4 just before they drop level 3. That way Fischer can be brought back up by Ariadne. Cobb knows that Satio has died and gone to Limbo, so he kills himself in level 4, which results in him washing up on the beach in Limbo. He goes and gets Satio and that’s why they return awake on the plane after everybody else.
One thing that I just thought of that is troubling me is that they make a point of saying that each additional dream level is more unstable then the last.
This didn’t seem true to me - they all seemed stable (with the exception that the ‘prior’ level could effect the new level). Maybe I was expecting ‘instability’ to be something different then the exception I pointed out?
Except that since he’d already died in Level 3, Fischer should have been in Limbo so how’d they bring him back and why didn’t they just defib Saito too?
But as explained, killing himself in level 4 kicks him completely out of the dream, not into Limbo (otherwise he and Mal would have gone to Limbo, even though when telling this story he was saying they were already in Limbo, when they put their heads on the train tracks.)
I know I’m harping on this point and should just wait until I see it again so I can see for myself if I misunderstood something, but so far nobody has said I’m wrong in recalling that Dom said the dreamworld he and Mal went to was Limbo (because when it was revealed that the sedation meant dying during the mission would send them to Limbo, everybody else on the team knew Dom had been to Limbo before and the Dom/Mal dreamworld was the story he told explaining the previous trip.
My understanding on that was that the time dilation countered the instability. So while the third level might be so unstable that it would likely collapse after say 15 minutes of real world time that this would still be years at the 3rd level.
I think you’ve got it right. IMO, the entire concept of Limbo was a mistake. Everything else is a dream that exists in a single dreamer’s head, except Limbo which supposedly transcends a single person. Fischer dies in level 3 and goes to Limbo, so Cobb and Ariadne jump into Cobb’s brain which apparently can shortcut to Limbo (because he’s been there before?) to go after Fischer. Then Fischer and Ariadne suicide while Fischer gets jolted and somehow that kicks them out of Limbo, but Cobb suicides and goes back to… Limbo again? Where he and Saito suicide which kicks them out of Limbo?
So apparently Limbo isn’t all that hard to escape from, unless the plot requires that you stick around.
I think it’s a mistake to try to figure out if Cobb is dreaming or not. He’s neither. He’s both. Remember when the Chemist took Cobb to his basement? There were people that came to dream for “40 hours a day”. The old, creepy guy (movie cliche for “sage”) says that they actually come to be awakened, and questions who is allowed to declare what is reality and what is not.
Cobb, at the end, is perhaps in a “quantum superposition” of dreaming and not dreaming.
That’s one possible interpretation. I, personally, think that there are two possible things for the top to do. One, fall down quickly, or two, spin for a while and then fall down. See, when an architect is mindfucking you, they imitate your circumstances. They’d inevitably get something wrong, right? Because they didn’t research things enough? So if they knew you always had a top in your pocket, they’d design one that was a normal top. But Cobb says that his is unbalanced. It works as a totum because it’s something that other architects will reliably screw up. You see, when Cobb spins his top, it doesn’t spin and fall over. It just goes straight to the falling part. It spins for less than a second.
So what would that architect put in your pocket? A forever-spinning top? No, that’s unrealistic. No real top spins forever. It only did that in limbo (or appeared to, at least- not proven!). They’d give you one that spins, spins, spins, and topples. So if you were in someone’s dream world, your top would spin for a while, then fall down, like it does at the end of the movie.
Conclusion: Cobb is dreaming.
It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. I don’t think you’re supposed to hear everything that’s said, with the exception of Saito’s lines. He just mumbles.
Just saw this and enjoyed it, but really just wanted to say if this movie doesn’t get an Oscar nom for its score then there is something serisously wrong.
Personally I’m not into the idea that the whole thing is a dream (including wife suicide), for the simple reason that had his wife escaped he dream, she’d be able to wake him up (there’s no super-sedative at that point).
However, one thing I picked up on during the movie that I thought they’d come back to was the phrase “Leap of Faith”. It is used by his wife right before she’s about to jump and used again by Saito as a phrase that gets the reluctant Cobb to take the job at the beginning.
Of the mumbled lines I missed, I wondered what Fischer Sr’s last line was? Actually if someone could tell me the entire Fischer conversation in the snowy hospital, that’d be helpful. I seemed to miss exactly how the Inception worked on Fischer Jr. (and which part was engineered and which part was Fischer Jr’s subconscious)
Another argument for the everything-we-saw-was-a-dream idea was how totally hollywoody the “real world” action sequence at the beginning was. Tons of bad guys whose bullets never quite hit the good guys, a businessman who shows up IN PERSON in his limo in the middle of a gunfight, etc. In a dream, that’s totally plausible, but in real life, much less so.
Of course, it IS still a movie… I definitely do agree, though, that the fact that we saw things outside Cobb’s POV is a strong argument AGAINST that position.
Here is a question I had: is the dream sharing technology supposed to be a secret only the rich and powerful know about or does everyone know about it but few have actually seen/used it?
Did anyone else think the movie was going to be an infinity loop? It starts with Cobb washing up on a beach, there’s several examples of an infinity loop, then he washes up on the same beach again. I’m still not sure why they redid that scene.
Quick question: I just read something and I wanted to see if it jiived with anyone else’s memory of the film.
Supposedly in every dream sequence, Leo is wearing a ring (can’t accept wife’s death). In every reality sequence (including the final scene!) he is not wearing the ring.