t1: SPOILER ALERT:As we sat there watching the movie, the first time the top was spinning, my companion leaned over to me and said “There’s the last scene.” Anyone want to offer up a concise explanation of why you wake up when you die in a dream but that if you die during a dream within a dream you never wake up? And what about the apothecary who has the really good secret sauce stored in that pretty glass bottle on the shelf behind him. I guess despite all of the high tech goodness of the machine in the briefcase that syncs everybody’s dreams, sometimes you have to go to a dusty storefront in the third-world to get the good stuff.Sorry Mr. Kopel, the movie was crap. One of the best of all times? Get thee a Netflix subscription so you can watch some good movies.

why did the crew members die and fell into a deeper level instead of waking up in reality? gees…ppl why cant you accept the fundamental assumptions of the film? it’s a sci fi film for gods sake why you want it to be realistic? cmon I mean prove to me superman’s race can breath in the outer space and survive and if not evidence that they dont need O2 to survive. wouldnt that just ruin the joy of watching films??

But remember, in Cobb’s case, he took the top from his wife who originally created it. That is evidence to suggest that the spinning top has been ineffective/irrelevant from the start and that the entire film is a dream from beginning to end.

Margeret Amster: I’ve read the user-reviews that rated it C, D or F and concluded that they were being incredibly young or not wise enough to follow the storyline to obtain any satisfaction

Geez. I don’t suppose everybody who liked the movie is the type of clown that thinks people who see things differently from them are dumb?

second history:

Having seen 142 films so far this year, and 112 last year, (mostly from the 1930s-70s, with a few silents), I think Inception was probably the best picture I have seen that was released in 2010, but not of all time. I really enjoyed the film and its ideas. All of Christopher Nolan’s films have involved ideas, even the Dark Knight series.But the best of all time? Hardly.

neurodoc: Gee, I was about to say that if you are that into movies and thought so highly of this one, I might discount some not so favorable reviews. But then you mentioned favorably Dark Knight, which my wife and I were repulsed by.

I said the Dark Knight series, which includes Batman Begins, which I agree was much better than The Dark Knight. TDK was pretty dark (pardon the pun) and unrelenting, and less appealing than Batman Begins. I was surprised it didn’t get an R rating for violence, but that just go to show you the looser rating standards for violence versus sex.

And Ken B’s comment just makes us all the more aware of how much we miss George Lazenby.

Cobb’s subconscious paints a damning perspective on the woman he professes to love, much akin to how children love their mothers but are conflicted over how bad they make them feel, a sense of love as betrayal that often adults never resolve.

Cobb kills the Mal figure several times: the limbo train (mutual suicide that looked coerced by him ostensibly for the two of them to move on); the balcony jump (she does herself in despite his “love” for her when he realizes she’s mean crazy); shooting her when she kills what he thought was his last chance at success (Fischer/ vault access) and emotional redemption (done by him for him, at last, but on a visceral level); and, last, by a cooler bullet from his architect-guide proxy (for him by his higher reason and knowing finally reconciled to ridding himself of his demon Shade and plaguing memory of her sabotage “love.”)

Cobb’s Fischer projection deals with an emotionally distant father whom he thinks regards his son as a failure. The solution to reprogram the damaged adult son’s thinking is “inception,” implanting the idea that his dad would’ve wanted him not to please him by being like him but to be his own man, whether true or not. This sounds like psychotherapy in which the answer is constructive projection, or positive self-deception.

In the end, we see the real inception isn’t the dream manipulation of Fischer but at a point closer to his having the photo of the pinwheel and him, or from when he actually had the pinwheel as a child, or from years before that, even. Is there any point on a pinwheel that actually starts turning first? In the end, we don’t completely know beginnings or what moves us.

I agree with elaine. It felt to me like the 6th Sense, The Matrix, and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service blenderized.

If I might, a little tongue-in-cheek but not too much, it seems that movie director and pressured pater of films Nolan via dream director and confused father figure Cobb via the secondary dream director and confused son Fischer just might have “father” issues.

I like the idea of creation as nested autobiography engendered by the tension between self-defeating anxiety and constructive endeavor motivated by approval issues. We owe dear old dad/parent, audiences, and the Genesis God for inception.

And yet any point of inception is difficult to pinpoint, a major point of Nolan’s movie. Also that a successful movie can be catharsis by dream for the audience and fantasy flowering from therapy for its creator.

To me, Inception feels a bit like a Bond-paced version of The Sixth Sense, but sans the definitive twist ending to be more meta, metaphysical for the art and meta-controversial for commercial appeal. So, OK, I think the ambiguity works well enough.

1) Cobb remained the same age but Saito is old.
2) Cobb’s children have not aged.

In one hand, the end seemed to indicate Cobb has woken up after a long sleep. And on the other hand, there is no aging, indicating a dream.

Inconsistent.

BTW, I consider the following movies I have seen (not an exhaustive list) some of great movies of all times:
1) Chariots Of Fire
2) To End All Wars
3) Sophie Scholl: The Final Days
4) The Lost City
5) Gods And Generals
6) Joyeux Noel

Yes, there are plenty of times that he wakes up (in what we’ve agreed to call level 0) and spins the top and it falls – it is his ritual to himself to prove to himself that he isn’t dreaming. Since we agree he’s back at that level at the end, and it has been established that it can fall over in that reality, even if it were seen to fall, it wouldn’t prove anything. (If it kept spinning, it might.)

But, they go out of their way to explain in some depth the whole idea that you have to construct your own little object, the talisman that connects you to reality, and that you don’t dare let others in the dream interact with it, because, if I recall, it means you could lose touch with whether you are or are not in reality.

And then, having said you absolutely have to have your own object, they then pull a quick shell game and get us to swallow that Cobb using what he believes to be Mal’s talisman means something in relation to his contact with reality. We never see an object we’re told he made for himself to remind himself about reality – only what he tells us Mal made. You can make a case that it is a “real world” top that Mal modeled her talisman on, but then what’s with Cobb going into Mal’s innermost secret place and getting her dream top and keeping it?

If she’s dead and out of the dream on that level, then why is the top still “real” in that dream level, and if its entire existence was based on Mal using it to tell she is alive and in the dream, what’s it even doing there to be collected? Do everyone’s talisman objects stay behind when they leave a level or die in the real world?

So, one conclusion they trick us into buying can’t be true – that the top tells us and him whether he is dreaming.

We’re left with (as far as I can see) one of two other interpretations. Either this really is Mal’s object, which very likely means that Mal is still alive and her input is ongoing (in the level above level 0, or the “real world” outside Cobb’s reality), or that Cobb actually created this object himself, within the dream, and invested it with some meaning of his own – in essence, to do the opposite of what he claims, to keep himself in the dream.

Whether the top is spinning or not isn’t the important thing. As long as it stays a top and keeps existing, it ties him into his investment in staying in the dream at level 0. Actually, I’d say that the fact he has abandoned (or never made) his own connection with reality, and his connection to reality is entirely through Mal’s top makes a case that she was right and he has deliberately abandoned his contact with reality. Why? Maybe he and Mal aren’t married or even a couple one level up and don’t have kids, and that’s a dream he isn’t willing to give up. Can’t tell, but Something Else is Going On.

People say that the point of the last moment of the movie is the Schroedinger scenario about whether or not it will fall over. I maintain that the real significance is that the top is there at all. Mal is alive and sharing a dream with Cobb. Cobb is still dreaming.

“What bothered me was how many loose ends it lost track of.”

Upon wakening, all seemingly seamless dreams have inconsistencies and unresolved plot points. After sharing Cobb’s dream, moviegoers blink awake and think Wow, but what about…

“At the beginning, agents of the “Cobol Corporation” chase Cobb through Mombasa and then … they forget about him.”

Cobol/ Cobb? Perhaps his manufactured boogeyman, inner conflict that jumpstarts the deeper self-exploration.

“There’s a lot of talk about “labyrinths” and ‘mazes’ and ‘puzzles’, but none are ever encountered.”

In the movie were confusing street and hotel chases that go nowhere, and we’re lost. The third(?)-level snow setting was effective in that concrete and walls no longer ground and define physical space for us or the characters, until they gain entry into the “hospital” at long last. Protagonists have the ultimate challenge to overcome obstacles in an amorphous, non-cartesian, snow spray obscured whiteout setting before scaling unassailable fortified walls.

It’s interesting how, by contrast, the inner vault was relatively easy to access after the struggle to get to it. Of course, instead of navigating the maze of hospital halls for which there was no time, they used a direct shortcut (air duct system cheat device,) much like just slicing through an inner Gordian knot of submerged issues.

There definitely was a motif of off-kilter passageways and psychic passages. The final bridge works as transition to a breakthrough final stage of understanding before awakening. The plunge into water is baptismal-like shock therapy, falling out of the womb, what have you– getting out of the submerged van like (re)birth. However, we don’t see Cobb emerge, only his other sympathetic characters do, leading one to think he doesn’t work out his final issue. Sometimes (always?) in life we stop just before the Big Understanding when things are “Godunov,” and we make our peace with ourselves. To know more would mean we have to die, perhaps.

The movie as a piece is a puzzle, surely.

“The totems are described as proof you are in your own dream and not someone else’s but never serve that purpose.”

The totems are only self-serving false reassurance and fashioned from vanity and sentimentality. Only in a dream would someone dream up the idea of verifying reality. Awake we can’t verify, only describe, and from different points of view at that.

“Cobb warns that the ‘projections’ (the other people in the dream) will become aggressive if the dream is manipulated; this never happens.”

The movie, Cobb’s dream from start to finish, features only his projections, sometimes as his, others as prompted by his conjured characters who are also, one supposes, projections although they never get hostile. Perhaps they are akin to angels and the others as demon and wraiths of our divided nature. Cobb calls Mal a “shade.”

While it gets a little confusing as to who or what is a projection within the nested dream logic, Cobb’s subconscious is the source of all aggression, conflict and hurdles (which are never easily controlled in dreams and often seem random.) I agree that this plot device could’ve been used more effectively.

“The chemist claims that falling will wake dreamers up, but when the dreamers are in a van that flips over, they snooze on contentedly.”

I dunno, but perhaps the heavy sedation gimmick allows for only the sensation of impact to rouse them. I’m unclear as to what point in their drugged state they can die and then awake as opposed to going in limbo. Can’t remember how the characters got from the van to the plane- did they kill themselves? Cobb and Saito died in limbo, I suppose, and that’s how they returned to “reality.” Was their death via the gun that the old Saito put his hand on?

You’re right, there are dangling ends when it comes to gravity :) But that’s consistent with dreaming, right?

“Cobb refuses to design dreams because then Mal will be able to find her way around; however, Mal seems perfect adept even in in dreams designed by strangers.”

Cobb has self-deceived that his only issue is the loss of his wife. The loss he experiences is not necessarily her actual death but could be estrangement, desertion or divorce on her part, or, on his, his avoidance of reality and she’s very much alive while it’s he who won’t leave a dreamworld.

In all likelihood, the corporation, trains, bullets and bad guys are all Cobb’s projections assigned to characters he creates. I particularly love the explosive charges that conveniently materialize (bought by the gross at Walmart?) to get them out of situations. IOW, brute force of willing issues away is often needed in conjunction with nuanced, finessed introspection and therapy.

“I liked Nolan’s Memento”

Oh, yea! It was pearcing.

The real point is supposed to be Cobb’s subplot- coming to grips with the fate of his wife. Unless it’s all a dream, and thus she’s still alive, Cobb is dreaming, and nothing that happens in the movie carries any significance. Putting that aside, Cobb’s prior life is mostly kept hidden and there is no connection with his feelings. His children are generic and his projection of Mal goes around killing people, screaming, or jumping off a building. All the characters are flat. Fischer (the younger) seems like a decent enough guy. The ‘antagonist’ is Fischer’s subconscious, which is curiously unable (despite “training”) to dream up better defenses than snowmobiles and some guys that can’t shoot.

There was very little tension in the movie — maybe because I knew most of it was a dream … or didn’t know if it was a dream. For example, the chase scene in Mombassa — that sure seemed like a dream. If you’re watching the chase wondering if it’s a dream, a lot of the tension is dissipated — at least for me. Maybe that’s why I didn’t care about any of the characters.

Even with the possibility of limbo or death, there was no real tension when the van was falling into the water.

Did Cobb’s almost constant pained expression elicit any empathy in you?

At the beginning, agents of the “Cobol Corporation” chase Cobb through Mombasa and then … they forget about him.

There’s a lot of talk about “labyrinths” and “mazes” and “puzzles”, but none are ever encountered.

The totems are described as proof you are in your own dream and not someone else’s but never serve that purpose.

Cobb warns that the “projections” (the other people in the dream) will become aggressive if the dream is manipulated; this never happens.

The chemist claims that falling will wake dreamers up, but when the dreamers are in a van that flips over, they snooze on contentedly.

Cobb refuses to design dreams because then Mal will be able to find her way around; however, Mal seems perfect adept even in in dreams designed by strangers.

I liked Nolan’s Memento, precisely because it rewarded carefully attention. The more you think about Inception, the less sense it makes.

Tanker J.D.: Techblog’s graphic also reveals a plot hole.The “dreamer” of each level has to be the mark, the guy into whom they are trying to implant the idea.The exposition part of the film makes it clear that the architect creates the dream’s physical world, but that the host dreamer populates it with his subconscious.In the latter part of the film, they are being chased by the mark’s subconscious projections.Thus, the mark is the dreamer at all levels.That one of the team members becomes the “dreamer” doesn’t make sense, b/c their subconcious projections wouldn’t attack the other team members…

They actually do address this: Ariadne is not creating the environments for the subject in any of the dreams. They weren’t even going to bring her along originally, but Cobb decided to because she convinced him he needed her to watch over him. Her job was to design the dreams and then teach the levels to the dreamers (who would be the ones listed in the graphic). They would be the dreamers, and Fisher would be the subject who filled in with his subconscious. Ariadne is never a dreamer in the movie, and is merely there to help Cobb. So no plot hole.

second history: Having seen 142 films so far this year, and 112 last year, (mostly from the 1930s-70s, with a few silents), I think Inception was probably the best picture I have seen that was released in 2010, but not of all time. I really enjoyed the film and its ideas. All of Christopher Nolan’s films have involved ideas, even the Dark Knight series.But the best of all time? Hardly.

Gee, I was about to say that if you are that into movies and thought so highly of this one, I might discount some not so favorable reviews. But then you mentioned favorably Dark Knight, which my wife and I were repulsed by.

LNThe action sequences in the snow-level dream were terrible.Everyone is wearing the same outfit, bad guys are all anonymous and faceless, and at this point there was no suspense regarding the survival of the team members.Doesn’t come close to “greatest of all time” status.

I really enjoyed this movie, but this so true. I thought the snow world really interfered with the suspense of the “ticking clock”, because there was no way to tell what was going on, what exactly Eames was trying to do; all I could decipher was one white figure shooting at anonymous white figures in a very clumsy manner. The location could have been much better.