Inception discussion thread

[sup bro?]

Interestingly IMDb lists two separate pair of actors who played the role of Dom's kids. AFAIK they just showed the same kids in the flashback sequences. If they really sound old on the phone then 'it's still a dream' theory is probably true.

 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1375666/fullcredits#cast

 

ANother question, if Mal was able to escape the limbo by jumping off the building why didn't she try waking up Dom??

[Snake]

The kids are shown when they are age 3 and 5...it was in the movie credits!!

[G33kgamer]

if Mal was able to escape the limbo by jumping off the building why didn't she try waking up Dom??

 

This thing alone makes the end real .. good logic mate

[sup bro?]

The kids are shown when they are age 3 and 5...it was in the movie credits!!

 

I'll check that during the second viewing. Any clue about the other actors (20 months and 3 years)??

[dullu]

Just came back

 

 

The basic point is that both Matrix and Inception steal so much stuff from THIS

 

I was lucky to have read this in 90s

[Cyborg]

Guys,

 

I have been hearing a lot about this movie from my friends and although I have not been able to view it yet, I can't wait to watch it. It's good to see so many people discussing this here. My friend Gautam reviewed this movie recently for our website and he would love to discuss the movie with you all. Do read the review and let us know.

 

http://www.indianauteur.com/?p=1525

[dante77]

^^YOU are not suppose to be in this thread without watching the movie

[Cyborg]

lol, I din read anything which you all r discussing. Told my frnd ppl r discussing the movie and he wanted them to read his review. So posted the link.

[theneurotoxin]

yeeesss. The whole thing is a dream from the start - and he only knows the truth when he uncovers his own dark secret in limbo in meeting Mal in the kitchen - that Mal put an idea in his head.

But if that was the idea in Dom's mind why wouldn't he react similar to Mal and try to kill himself so that he exits limbo.All the events in the dream conjured are to lead to a happy ending with his kids.

The only explanation that sits well with your theory for me is that Mal failed in trying Inception on Dom during the course of the highest dream layer.

[achilles]

yeeesss. The whole thing is a dream from the start - and he only knows the truth when he uncovers his own dark secret in limbo in meeting Mal in the kitchen - that Mal put an idea in his head.

 

the Mal that we were shown was Cobb's subconscious. except for in the flashback parts that Cobb was narrating. it was his guilt that manifested Mal in all his dreams.

[sup bro?]

Guys,

 

I have been hearing a lot about this movie from my friends and although I have not been able to view it yet, I can't wait to watch it. It's good to see so many people discussing this here. My friend Gautam reviewed this movie recently for our website and he would love to discuss the movie with you all. Do read the review and let us know.

 

http://www.indianauteur.com/?p=1525

 

I wanted Anuj to review it

[theneurotoxin]

the Mal that we were shown was Cobb's subconscious. except for in the flashback parts that Cobb was narrating. it was his guilt that manifested Mal in all his dreams.

So he believes.Mal could have pulled a Mr.Charles on Mr.Charles.

 

 

me cry.now i am beginning to think it's a dream.

 

[Cash]

Ending was obviously Real as that totem almost started to fall down when that dumbo stopped the movie just to confuse us.

[MarketTantrik]

Fantastic movie. I'm not gonna even try to decipher the various inconsistencies. Just bask in the experience.

[mango_man]

Inception= Vanilla sky meets Matrix.

 

 

Edit- @the ending

 

my version of interpretation says that the whole movie was in limbo which was experienced or rather controlled by leonardo..

 

gotta watch it again god-damn

[mango_man]

The fact that we're discussing the ending is a clear indication that the director himself has pulled the ultimate inception by planting it in the minds of the viewers.

[Bulovski]

The totem belonged to Mal - not Dom. If Mal had put in an inception she could've also made the totem fall. The totem is a physical object just like any other object in a dream - the projections can choose to follow the laws of physics or not, as shown in Ariadne's first dream share.

[Madhav]

@achilles - quoting you here instead of the movie discussion thread for very obvious reasons...

 

 

try to notice the daughter's age when they talk on the phone.

 

i know dude!

 

the more i think, the more it seems like the end scene was a dream... These points ---> Phillipa's voice on phone, Miles using the words "Come back to reality Dom!" (When he tells him about Mal is not letting him architect dreams), Mombasa - very dreamy chase.. having a maze like quality to it (escaping wall-gap, Saito's presence, etc), absence of grand-mother but presence of grand-father in the end (Miles was a college professor in Paris? yet he is found welcoming Cobb in America), Cobb coming home through the similar elevator "prison of his memory" entrance, kids sitting/playing in the same way(with same clothes) even during the end scene/supposed reality... i don't know where to end...

Another very important pointer is Cobb's refusal to look at his children's faces.... Possibly since he remembers his kids faces and doesn't want to look at them in a dreamworld as it'll make him believe that its reality instead of dream (totem reference anyone??)

 

After such brainstorming, this is what i get in my mail from a friend...

 

If a dream can only truly be manipulated by the dreamer and the architect, then why is Dom Cobb, who is never the architect and who supposedly is never the dreamer, unable to keep his subconscious projections <Mal, the train, etc.> from blasting through the landscape of the dream?

 

 

The idea of 'Inception' is to be a story crafted in the architecture of the mind - Cobb's mind. What people perceive to be real isn't necessarily so, because the mind can make things appear to be as real as ever. An important thing to remember is the start of the film. Dom Cobb wakes up in a place that we later find out to be limbo – more importantly, Saito's limbo.

 

What happens next is something that is meaningless the first time a viewer watches the film. Saito is seen handling Cobb's totem (which was a top that he took from Mal while in limbo). At first, this is meaningless. Upon a second viewing, the viewer should realize that everything that happens after this scene (the jump cut to Cobb's attempt at extracting information from Saito, and so on) is something much deeper.

 

Saito promises to give Cobb the one thing that he wants, and that's to find the way back home. How does he convince Cobb to do this? He tells him to "take a leap of faith." This is another line that goes unnoticed at first. On a second viewing, the viewer should remember that line as something that Mal told Cobb when she jumped off of the building. Is the picture becoming clearer yet?

 

Cobb seems to appear wherever he needs to go, whether it is Paris, or Mombasa, just like it were a dream. While in Mombasa, Cobb gets chased by anonymous agents (which he perceives to be Cobol agents) through a fantastic action sequence where Cobb escapes the dream-like narrow tunnel and is rescued by none other than Saito. A bit later, Cobb and Saito visit Yusef who brings them into a basement with various figures connected to the dream machine. The idea was for Cobb to experiment with the deep sedative. He does, and when he "wakes up" he tries to use his totem only to be interrupted by Saito. Cobb never does find out if he is in the real world or not. In fact, he hasn’t been yet. He’s been in limbo ever since he got there with Mal. Ever since then, he's been going deeper and deeper to the point where he created Saito as a projection to help him "get back home" - Did you really think Saito can just pick up the phone and make murder charges disappear? No. But, Cobb believes it and thus Saito is used to thrust Cobb further and further into a state of limbo – where at the end of the journey, Cobb truly believes he is with his children after confronting and getting over his projection of Mal.

 

While in the limbo, Cobb, using Mal's totem, put the idea in her head that she was in the dream world. She was, she just hadn’t realized it yet. What the viewer forgets is that all knowledge of limbo comes from Cobb's character. To think that Cobb is 100% accurate about it is absolutely wrong. He wouldn't know dream from reality – not in the limbo that he describes to people – and definitely not if inception were performed on him to believe that limbo truly was the real world.

 

Mal and Cobb never really left limbo at least, not that layer of it. When Mal jumped off the building, she gave herself the very same "kick" that Ariadne improvised later on in the movie. Mal was right about still being in the dream world. Cobb was still engulfed in limbo and didn't realize it. When Cobb and Mal had killed themselves with the train, they simply moved one layer deeper just like Saito did when he was killed, Fischer did when he was killed, and so on (this happens again at the end of the film when Saito picks up the gun in front of Cobb).

 

Cobb, deep in limbo, unknowingly uses the projections of his team to keep going deeper and deeper until the idea of inception is performed on his mind, and he truly believes he was able to find a way back home. Saito's promise to Cobb was kept - in the form of Saito (a projection from Cobb) making sure that Cobb ended up in limbo, so that he could live his "life" with his kids (who are in the same position as they were all throughout the film).

 

The team were projections in Cobb's mind the entire time. It's how he was able to go to Miles in Paris and find an architect named Ariadne (a name which comes from a Greek mythology story about a labyrinth) who improvised the "kick" at the end of the movie the same way that Cobb had seen (but not accepted as a dream) Mal do previously when she jumped off the building. It's how Eames happened to know of Yusef, and so on and so forth. Everything Cobb needed to make this inception work happened to work out for him. It's even how Cobb's lawyer knew so quickly that Mal had gone to 3 different shrinks to be declared "sane" and how he happened to have two tickets for Cobb to be able to get out of the country before the police would have arrested him.

 

The movie ends with Cobb appearing from place to place, going from limbo with Saito, to the plane where Saito magically makes one phone call to free Cobb from his problems, to walking through the airport, to meeting Miles who is with Cobb's children. Cobb spins his totem and it spins just like it was a dream. He fixes his eyes on his children and the totem begins to lose speed – this is because inception has worked – Cobb truly believes he is in the real world. His totem will not spin like it did in the dream, not as long as he has his kids. The title of the film is now shown to us, making complete sense because the title was really Cobb's journey through his own mind: INCEPTION

 

All this has definitely inclined my perception of INCEPTION as being Cobb's dreamworld in the end!!

I really do have to go for a 3rd show now, but this time, as a person who doesn't want to give a f**k whether the end world is a reality/dream/limbo/etc.

 

The most intriguing perspective to this movie is it's AMBIGUITY!!! I believe anything is possible. It is up to the viewer to decided it for himself, everytime he watches this movie... Its like a drug, yu just cant watch this once. Period!

 

 

[Madhav]

But was the top really Cobb's totem? I'm sure it was Mal's and even Cobb says that. Also according to what Arthur tells Ariadne, totems can only be handled by the owner. And a totem isn't just used to differentiate from the dream world and the real world also to tell whether a person is in their own dream or someone else's. At least that's what I thought it was based on Arthur's explanation.

This, plus, the old Saito also handled the spinning 'totem' top in the beginning... Also, from what i understood about totem is that it lets yu differentiate whether yu are in reality or in the dream of someone else... Now, what if yu are in your own dream (where yu are the dreamer and yu are the architect)? Once yu are in your own dream, you know your totem and sub-consciously yu can control it... Its like telling yu not to think of elephants, but yu think of elephants... So, yu tell yourself its a real world, but to check yu use yur totem and yur totem behaves as it should in the real world as you sub-consciously know/think that!

 

During the times Cobb's totem topples ---> Cobb always knew sub-consciously that he is in the real world, but to check he spun... and it toppled! Never was he shown spinning in dreamworld.

 

During the end scene ----> His totem would have toppled had his concentration stayed on totem, but on the contrary Mr. Miles distracted him by pointing towards his children who showed him their faces and Cobb forgot about the top instantaneously, and it spun and spun!! Culprit, Mr. Miles..??.. Ariadne was introduced to Cobb by him and she did pose as Cobb's saviour, a Messiah for him!!

 

did i make some sense??

 

Still cant figure out how they appear young when they are lying on the tracks to go back to the real world..when they have spent 50 years in Limbo.

See another hypothesis could be that... When Cobb was telling Ariadne about all that in the 1st dream level, it was Ariadne who was imagining Cobb and Mal to be lying on rail-tracks (Cobb was narrating and she was imagining) and at that time, Ariadne didn't knew about them growing old together in limbo... It was only unraveled in the end...

 

ANother question, if Mal was able to escape the limbo by jumping off the building why didn't she try waking up Dom??

Considering that Mal did wake up somewhere, Cobb was still in some deep sub-conscious level/ dream of his... and Cobb might have been heavily sedated going into that kind of sub-conscious level/limbo that Dom went with Mal.. So, Mal just couldn't wake him up by slapping, etc... She had to have given him a kick.. Now, the duration it took for Mal to arrange a kick for Cobb, we saw the events of Inception! (time relativity as go deep, minutes turn into hours, hours into days, days into years and decades )

[Madhav]

Also, did anyone else also notice what Dom said to Ariadne when they penetrated their 4th level and were entering Mal's apartment via that elevator... he said (when Ariadne kept asking or telling him something.. i dont remember exactly though!) that, " Listen, yu only need to know one thing about me... That is, Improvise!"

Now could this line mean that whatever Cobb said to Mal in the 4th level was all false, a trick to let go of her projection??? that line he said had a lot of meaning behind it...