Inception

[Relaxing Dragon]

What's everyone's opinion on the end? I'm still uncertain.

We really liked it.

What??? That's not enough for you??? 

Did you join the rest of the audience in letting out one big groan?

[AmazingThor]

I'm sticking with the theory that

it was all a dream. Kinda lame, I know, but there is ample evidence that none of this is real and Cobb has been trapped in limbo the whole time. My theory is that when his wife jumped off the building she finally made it out of the dream and entered the real world. Evidence:
1. You'll notice that Cobb is never seen traveling. We're told he is wanted in the US and being hunted by Cobol so you would think just hopping on a plane would be difficult yet he just appears in whatever country he needs to go to
2. There are a lot of coincidences like when he is being chased in Mumbai Saito just happens to arrive. The forger just happens to know the perfect chemist,  his father just happens to have the perfect architect, etc.
3. When Saito is offering him the job, Saito uses the phrase "leap of faith." We later learn that this phrase was first used by Cobb to his wife to get her to lie on the train tracks and later by his wife to Cobb to jump from the building. But how does Saito know to use that phrase?

[Relaxing Dragon]

I'm sticking with the theory that

it was all a dream. Kinda lame, I know, but there is ample evidence that none of this is real and Cobb has been trapped in limbo the whole time. My theory is that when his wife jumped off the building she finally made it out of the dream and entered the real world. Evidence:
1. You'll notice that Cobb is never seen traveling. We're told he is wanted in the US and being hunted by Cobol so you would think just hopping on a plane would be difficult yet he just appears in whatever country he needs to go to
2. There are a lot of coincidences like when he is being chased in Mumbai Saito just happens to arrive. The forger just happens to know the perfect chemist,  his father just happens to have the perfect architect, etc.
3. When Saito is offering him the job, Saito uses the phrase "leap of faith." We later learn that this phrase was first used by Cobb to his wife to get her to lie on the train tracks and later by his wife to Cobb to jump from the building. But how does Saito know to use that phrase?

1. He does travel a few times, such as at the beginning after he leaves Saito at the airport (and he's traveling via private plane there, and given that Saito had the power to make the charges go away later, he could've called for a safe passage here), and he specifically mentions going to France because of the bureaucratic nightmare it is to extradite someone from there to the US, hence why he thinks he won't be pursued (see also: Polanski, Roman).
2. Saito said he'd been tailing him, so it's likely he was nearby when the chase started and was able to pick him quickly as a result. As for all the team members known, the line of work Cobb's in seems like a highly specialized profession, which means there probably aren't a lot of people doing it, and as a result all the good players know all the other good players.
3. Well, it's not like that's a really uncommon phrase, is it? Plus, since all we ever see of the wife are memories, it's possible that she said that just because the memory of Saito saying that was in his head, and thus influenced the wife's character (we've seen that Cobb's mental state in regards to memories was a tad fragile, so stuff getting mashed in from the outside world could happen).

[stansimpson]

What's everyone's opinion on the end? I'm still uncertain.

It was obviously meant to be ambiguous... and I hafta leave it at that.  I would've been unhappy if the top fell, cuz it'd be too saccharine for such a deep thriller; it doesn't deserve a "They lived happily ever after" moment imo.  If it'd kept going, it would've felt way too down; it would've made the audience feel cheated if it ended with a "It was all a dream".  The true masterstroke is the wobble.  Your story ends with choice A or choice B, and I think Nolan beautifully chose a third option with the greatest maximum subtlety imaginable.  The man takes restraints and creates poetry out of it.  That's why I'm happy with leaving it as ambiguous as it is. 

The answer, as I would put it, is "There is no answer".  To quote "Memento", Nolan, like Leonard, created a puzzle that couldn't be solved.  That, to me, is the true answer.

[Courtney]

What's everyone's opinion on the end? I'm still uncertain.

It was obviously meant to be ambiguous... and I hafta leave it at that.  I would've been unhappy if the top fell, cuz it'd be too saccharine for such a deep thriller; it doesn't deserve a "They lived happily ever after" moment imo.  If it'd kept going, it would've felt way too down; it would've made the audience feel cheated if it ended with a "It was all a dream".  The true masterstroke is the wobble.  Your story ends with choice A or choice B, and I think Nolan beautifully chose a third option with the greatest maximum subtlety imaginable.  The man takes restraints and creates poetry out of it.  That's why I'm happy with leaving it as ambiguous as it is. 

The answer, as I would put it, is "There is no answer".  To quote "Memento", Nolan, like Leonard, created a puzzle that couldn't be solved.  That, to me, is the true answer.

I very much agree, but I like the details that seemingly could lead to an answer, even though they don't - like everyone staring at Cobb in the airport as though he were in someone else's dream, the totem not being his, Mal being on the opposite side of the hotel when she jumped. It's interesting, and I'm just really excited a movie made me think. It's been awhile.

[Nergol]

I may be the only one who has this opinion, but I really wasn't impressed with Inception. Long story short, it wasted a lot of opportunities, and I'd seen the same concepts done better in other films.

Full review on my blog, if anyone's interested.

[stansimpson]

What's everyone's opinion on the end? I'm still uncertain.

It was obviously meant to be ambiguous... and I hafta leave it at that.  I would've been unhappy if the top fell, cuz it'd be too saccharine for such a deep thriller; it doesn't deserve a "They lived happily ever after" moment imo.  If it'd kept going, it would've felt way too down; it would've made the audience feel cheated if it ended with a "It was all a dream".  The true masterstroke is the wobble.  Your story ends with choice A or choice B, and I think Nolan beautifully chose a third option with the greatest maximum subtlety imaginable.  The man takes restraints and creates poetry out of it.  That's why I'm happy with leaving it as ambiguous as it is. 

The answer, as I would put it, is "There is no answer".  To quote "Memento", Nolan, like Leonard, created a puzzle that couldn't be solved.  That, to me, is the true answer.

This is from "Lost" co-creator Damon Lindelof and his whole take on the ending:

Spoiler

  He used 140 characters to say what took me several paragraphs!

[Toby Danger]

I absolutely loved this film. A near perfect mix of action and thoughful science fiction. And it's great to have a story with a futuristic concept which is carefully explained and doesn't just create strange situations just for the hell of it like so many other movies do.

[ScottotD]

This is now ahead of Toy Story 3 as my favourite movie of the year.  We literally left the theater, joined the que to buy more tickets and sat down to watch it again.

[gbeenie]

Did anyone besides me end up feeling foolish sometime after seeing the movie? To wit:

"Wait. That was Tom Berenger?"

[ScottotD]

Spoiler

Inception infograph

[Edward J Grug III]

No more spoiler tags - anyone browsing a thread of a movie that is out that they don't want to see spoilers on is an idiot.

Anyway, I really enjoyed it - and think I will enjoy it more on a second viewing. But in the end I am not sure I was as blown away by it as I wanted to be.

Still, I thought it was really great. It was a great piece of entertainment that probably won't become a favourite film.

(Scott H linked this on his  facebook, and I like the theory a lot:)

The Hidden 'Inception' Within Inception

As pretty much everyone knows by now, Inception's titular concept is the placement of an idea into a character's subconscious — a notion that the film presents as being more or less unprecedented. And the plot mostly concerns the efforts of our heroes, led by master dream extractor Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) to somehow convince Fischer (Cillian Murphy), the heir to a major energy titan, to split up his father's empire, without realizing that the idea came from them. But since this is a Christopher Nolan movie, we're not convinced it's all that simple; the director's films almost always turn in on themselves. We think there might be another inception going on in Inception. Needless to say, there are spoilers here, so you should probably not read this if you haven't seen the film. (Though if you haven't seen the film, you probably won't know what the hell we're talking about anyway.)

The process of inception works, we're told, by placing the simplest form of an idea deep into a character's subconscious as they're dreaming, through a series of suggestions that effectively lead the character to "give himself the idea" (in the words of Tom Hardy's master forger Eames). And the subconscious, we're told, is motivated by emotion, not reason, and that a positive emotion trumps a negative one. The very deepest level of the subconscious is represented by a safe or a vault, inside which the mind keeps its most private thoughts and/or memories.

"Do you want to become an old man, filled with regret, waiting to die alone?" These words (or something close to them) are uttered three times in the film. The first time, the words are those of Saito (Ken Watanabe), in his helicopter in Kyoto, when he first approaches Cobb about the possibility of inception. The second time, it's in the first level of Fischer's dream, after Saito has been shot, and Cobb tries to tell him that he's not going to die: "You're gonna become an old man," Cobb says, and Saito replies, "Filled with regret." Cobb completes the thought: "Waiting to die alone." Already, it's clear that this dialogue has to do with more than this particular moment in the film. It's also significant that this happens just as Eames (Tom Hardy), pretending to be Browning (Tom Berenger) is trying to plant the idea ("incept"?) into Fischer's head that his father may have wanted to split up his company. Fischer's and Cobb's fates seem strangely intertwined through the film. ("The deeper we go into Fischer, the deeper we go into you," Ariadne says to Cobb.)

The final utterance happens near the end of the film, in Limbo, as Cobb finds the aging Saito. This time, Saito begins the exchange: "I'm an old man," he says. "Filled with regret," Cobb replies. There's something specially poignant about this scene, coming as it does on the heels of Cobb having told the shadow of his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) that they did grow old together in their dream together on Limbo, many years ago, and that he has to let her go.

This may well be the real "inception." Cobb's character has been consumed by regret — regret at what he's done to his wife, regret at having abandoned his children, regret at not being able to return home. In his dreams he's built an elevator (literally!) that stops at floors, each defined by a moment he regrets and that (as Cobb himself explains to Ariadne) he has to "change." This elevator, and its forbidden Basement floor, which opens to the hotel room where his wife leaped to her death, could be seen as the vault in which Cobb keeps his innermost thoughts, much like the hospital/hangar where Fischer imagines his father's deathbed, or the safe in Saito's dream-fortress from the earlier scenes of the film. Interestingly, in Nolan's first film, Following, one of the characters is a thief named Cobb who breaks into people's homes and likes to say, "Everybody has their box," referring to a box into which people always place seemingly random objects that are of sentimental value to them. In Inception, too, everybody has their box — be it a safe, a fortified hangar surrounded by armed guards on skis, or a stop on an elevator on which no one is allowed. In other words, the hotel room where Cobb last saw his wife, which is the forbidden floor on his Dream Elevator of Regret, is his "box."

Regret is the idea that defines Cobb (which makes his recurrent use of the Edith Piaf song "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" as a musical countdown to the end of a given dream rather ironic and touching), and in order for him to be free, he has to defeat it. The second part of the message that Cobb and Saito exchange in their final scene in Limbo — "Take a leap of faith. Come back, so we can be young men together again" — is in direct contrast to Mal's desire to pull him further into his dream so that they can grow old together. Cobb defeats his regret by finally telling Mal that the two of them did grow old together in their shared dream. In other words, he fulfilled his wedding promise to her. This is, perhaps, the thing that Cobb once knew but had forgotten; it's also a positive thought that trumps the negative feeling that he betrayed his wife. It seems like a realization on his part when he actually says it to her; but it's been basically suggested to him through Saito's repetition of the "old man, filled with regret, waiting to die alone" meme.

So, is Cobb being pulled back to reality by this thought, or is he being prodded further into his dream? That depends, perhaps, on how you view the very end of the film: At this point, Cobb seems to be finally freed of his regret and of his memory of Mal, and has been reunited with his children. The final shot seems to indicate that he may be still dreaming (because his totem keeps spinning). If so, then he has either lost himself in Limbo entirely, or Mal was right all along, and his world was always a dream.

But whether he's still dreaming may ultimately be irrelevant: The important thing is that Cobb has been freed of his demons, and can now be reunited with what to him appear to be his real children — be they a projection or reality. Or, as the old man in Mombassa puts it, referring to the opium den of dreamers in Yusuf's basement: "They come here to be woken up. Their dream has become their reality. Who are you to say otherwise?"

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2010/07/inception_theory.html

[Edward J Grug III]

Here's my nit-picks.

...Making a big deal out of tricking Cillian Murphy into fighting his own subconscious only to abandon the concept once he hits the Snow Level is lame. When that happened he stopped being the dramatic conflict and Mal (a nonexistent antagonist) became the threat.

Did they abandon it? I'm not sure that they did - he was sent to distract his own subconscious, wasn't he? But, I think the threat was always Dicaprio's mind. That was established right at the start of the movie with Mal ratting them out, and then in the first level of Cillian's mind with the train etc etc...

...Trying to explain away Mal as a remnant of DiCaprio's guilty conscience doesn't work when for the entire movie her character is a murderous Freddy Krueger. And apparently she was a crazy bitch in real life, too, so there's no pathos for DiCaprio beyond emo-whining.

She wasn't crazy in real life until DiCaprio accidentally planted it in her mind. Also, all of the "people" that populate subconsciousnesses attack people in dreams, she just happens to be the strongest/main person from DiCaprio's subconscious.

...Cillian Murphy, heir to a billion-dollar conglomerate, is trained in subconscious corporate counterespionage yet doesn't recognize he's sharing First Class with his billionaire rival.

Even if he did, why would it be odd that another billionaire is sharing first class?

quote author=Darth Macho link=topic=16665.msg567063#msg567063 date=1279419859]

...Every character has the same 'voice' in a dialogue sense. Any one of them, including Saito, could give three sentences about Technogaga and it would sound the same.
[/quote]

Supporting the theory that the whole movie was a dream.

...If you're still explaining the rules by the Third Act you've done something wrong.

So you just wanted a lecture presenting all of the rules at the start of the movie? I thought the exposition side of the movie was really well handled.



Here's my one nit pick - why was the old man make up so terrible? I swear Dan Aykroyd had better old man make up in Nothing But Trouble.

[stansimpson]

Here's my one nit pick - why was the old man make up so terrible? I swear Dan Aykroyd had better old man make up in Nothing But Trouble.

At least Saito didn't have a penis nose.


Easily the strangest thing I've said today.

[Edward J Grug III]

More fantastic Inception deconstruction and makes me lean even further towards the whole movie was a dream:

http://www.cinematical.com/2010/07/19/dissecting-inception-six-interpretations-and-five-plot-holes/