Eoin Butler: writer, journalist and Mayoman of the Year
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The single biggest ‘Inception’ plot hole as I see it…
As previously mentioned here, I saw Christopher Nolan’s Inception during the week (in a professional capacity) and wasn’t impressed. The film is being hyped as a rare ‘intelligent’ action film, but as far as I’m concerned, for every highfalutin concept the audience is asked to get it’s head around, there are at least ten precepts of basic common sense it must studiously ignore.
How does one person get into another person’s dreams? With a piece of wire. Of course, how ingenious! The Slumberland A-Team don’t wake up when their people carrier is careering through densely packed city streets and being riddled with bullets. But drop one of them backwards into a bath and – BAM! – they’re back in the land of the living. It just makes sense!
But even taken on its own terms, which I am really loathe to do (as I find the entire sci-fi/fantasy genre cringe-some in the extreme), there seem to me to be a couple of major plot holes. And this, to my mind, is the biggest… WARNING: ***MASSIVE SPOILERS*** One of the films most nonsensical conceits is that the totem DiCaprio’s character carries everywhere with him will spin forever if he’s dreaming, but only for a short time if he’s in real life. The film ends on a cliffhanger. Finally reunited with his children, DiCaprio spins the totem to verify that he is back in the real world. It wobbles a little but seems to spin a little longer than we would expect it to. Then the screen fades to black.
The audience is left wondering whether his wife was right all along, whether this ‘reality’ is not in fact just another dream. My problem with this ending is that the ‘reality’ DiCaprio is returning to is surely the same one he left when they hatched the inception plan. And in that ‘reality’, when DiCaprio explained the spinning totem concept to Ellen Page, the totem quickly stopped spinning and fell on its side.
So unless I’m mistaken, and it’s entirely possible that I am (my patience with the intricacies of the plot began to wear thin at about the hour mark), it seems to me that there was never any question that his wife was right, there was never any question that this ‘reality’ was not actual reality. Maybe I’ve gotten this all wrong, and if I have, can someone kindly explain how?
July 18th, 2010 at 4:08 pm
You got it wrong because its an ancient concept. Plato explored it and I’m sure others before him. The Matrix took a hit at it as well. The theory that we live in something other than “reality” only has strength because it cannot be proven or disproven. There is no way to know if we do live in a state or “dream” or awoken.
BUT IF YOU WANT TO TALK PLOT HOLES! How about the fact that Arthur was able to: 1) Fight off a man in zero gravity. 2) Wrap the entire crew in wire. 3) Set the explosives off in the elevator shaft. All within the “3 minutes” he was supposed to have? He was in the second dream world, which was supposed to last 20 times longer than the first dream world… They said they had 10 seconds from the music playing on the first dream world, that gives Arthur a little over 3 minutes, and the rest of the crew an hour.
And another plot hole bursting at the seams. When Cobb was in limbo, his wife stabbed him in the chest. They leave Cobb to find the last crew member who was sent to limbo. Somehow, Cobb is able to leave limbo (it is not said or shown at all how) and enter Saito’s limbo. Now, had Cobb died, he would have simply gotten a “kick” out of limbo. How did he enter another limbo?
The movie attempts to be “confusing” and “intelligent” but only manages to be predictable (I don’t know about anyone else, but I was calling the movie out at each turn, super predictable) and riddled with plot holes.
July 18th, 2010 at 5:51 pm
Chris, I’m with you on 90% of that. But I’m not sure that you’ve explained away my ‘spinning top’ plot hole?
July 18th, 2010 at 7:33 pm
I saw the ending a little differently. The thing is, we never see how Cobb escapes from limbo with Saito. We simply see him waking up and assume he is back in the real world until he spins his top. Then we are presented with this question: Did Cobb finally escape limbo with “Old Saito” or is he stuck in a dream he no longer remembers creating like his dead wife was?
As to how he was able to get to limbo with Saito, it is explained that the limbo fallen into will be the limbo of whoever in the group who has experienced it before aka Cobb’s.
July 18th, 2010 at 9:12 pm
I would like to suggest another possibility: it seems to me that Cobb was in a dream from the moment of the basement scene. If you will remember, he tried to spin the top after he “woke up” from the super-sedative experience, but it fell from the sink. After that it never showed him trying again until that moment. In other words, the whole airplane scene was itself a dream. I theorize that this dream was actually an act of inception on Saito’s part, in retaliation for the attempted stealing of his own secrets. Cobb’s father-in-law chose Ariadne (who, in Greek mythology, helped Perseus escape the labyrinth) as someone already paid off to do this work (she learned faster than anyone else). Did you notice how Saito “appeared” just in time to save Cobb? He thus gained Cobb’s confidence and right after that Cobb took the drugs. The others went down with him to insert the idea (inception) that he was in the real world and was going to get his freedom in the US. Thus, in the end, Cobb came back to the “real world” and finally tried the top, thought we could not see how that turned out. Anyway, it seems evident that he was still in a dream because his kids had not aged one day from his old memories. This also helps clear up a lot of the “holes” since (pace Eoin), the dream world has fewer rules (i.e., it’s not reality).
July 18th, 2010 at 9:19 pm
Even if you’re right Ralph, and to be honest I can’t even be bothered putting the amount of thought required into figuring out whether you are or not, then surely it only serves to illustrate how ludicrously overcomplicated the fantasy elements of the plot are.
Meanwhile, the morality of what they’re doing to Cillian Murphy is barely given a second’s consideration. Ditto for the motives of all characters other than DiCaprio. Why the fuck is Ellen Page getting involved in fucking up this guy’s life? Is she in it for the money? Who cares, here’s another cool explosion!
July 18th, 2010 at 11:04 pm
I’m just back from the cinema and its late so here’s my review in three words…. long and boring. G’night!
July 18th, 2010 at 11:13 pm
P.S.Is it true that you can’t read in dreams and if so couldn’t they just have made that the test? That shit about spinning tops didn’t make any sense. I’m going to bed now and I’m deliberately going to dream about spinning tops falling over just to prove a point.
July 18th, 2010 at 11:53 pm
My brain can’t understand your point with the spinning top eoin, but the following:
“The Slumberland A-Team don’t wake up when their people carrier is careering through densely packed city streets and being riddled with bullets. But drop one of them backwards into a bath and – BAM! – they’re back in the land of the living.”
was (if I’m not mistaken, which I obviously could be) explained as the sedative entirely numbing the body, except the inner ear.
July 18th, 2010 at 11:59 pm
First of all, what the hell kind of sedative numbs the entire body but not the inner ear. Please?
My point re: spinning top is straightforward. It spins and falls over when DiCaprio demonstrates for Ellen Page near the beginning of the film.
This proves that the reality they’re in then is indeed reality. That also proves that the wife is wrong about that reality being just another dream. And assuming that’s the reality he ends up back in at the end of the film, the the cliffhanger ending is a nonsense.
July 19th, 2010 at 6:12 am
I thought the totem was to make sure you weren’t in someone else’s dream, not proof that you aren’t dreaming at all or are in “reality”. Nolan needs to come out and explain a bunch of crap or tell everyone there’s going to be a sequel or better yet, prequel that explains everything or at least more, until Inception 3 which would be the end all/explain all of the Inception franchise.
July 19th, 2010 at 10:43 am
OK, I get what you’re saying now.
I don’t think you *can* safely assume that the reality Leo wakes back into when he opens his eyes on the plane is the same reality from the start of the inception plot. Nolan films it exactly like the start of the other dream sequences: i.e. Leo opens his eyes, blinks and looks confused as to where he is. It may well be another dream.
As to the ending, I liked it not because we didn’t see whether the spinning top fell, but because Leo didn’t and didn’t seem to care either. He was content just to be back with his kids, whether in reality or in a dream.
Overall, I’d like to see it again. I’d say your point on it lacking emotional depth is true. It’s not a Schindler’s List. But I’ve rarely been that entertained in the cinema, and the two hour discussion that my mate and I had after on it was just great.
July 19th, 2010 at 2:17 pm
Wait till you get stuck into Twilight lads, months worth of material in that……
July 19th, 2010 at 2:34 pm
@ dave (lower case) – so did you dream about spinning tops falling over?
@ Dave (upper case) – no, no sequels. I couldn’t take it.
@ Chucho – fair enough, too complicated to think about
@ Stan – no, no… I got a whole pile more questions about this film. Why does Ellen Page design a dream in snow without even checking that everyone can ski? Why does she create a world where the only way you can make a couple of people fall backwards is by blowing up an entire fortress under heavy fire? It just doesn’t make any sense….
July 19th, 2010 at 8:23 pm
The top falls over.
right before it fades to black
its starts to teeter
and you have to listen carefully after that.
You probably didn’t hear it because of the collective sighs and moans from the audience.
how do you know she didn’t check if everyone can ski?
why question ariadne’s creativity?
I think the only question I have is how the drug makes everyone share 1 dream.
A drug inducing the dream state and the machine that pumps the drug into your arm is believable, but how does it connect you to another dream?
Its the only question I have but it doesn’t factor in on how good the movie is or not.
And I really don’t want to hear the answer because it will just be a bunch of hollywood sci fi mumbo jumbo because the technology doesnt exist.
And I don’t think it needs to be explained to the audience during the movie because its only necessary to the unimaginative few who need to see how Cobb and Saito wake themselves up.
July 19th, 2010 at 8:38 pm
Oh, I forgot to mention,
the top isn’t even Cobb’s totem.
Cobb’s totem was
the ability to see his children’s faces.
July 20th, 2010 at 1:16 pm
Inception was a massive let down. Too long too confusing. Also I forgot how much I hate Cillian Murphy. Grrr.
July 21st, 2010 at 11:25 pm
Just saw it. One of those movies that lays down some rules to the audience and then becomes ambiguous as hell about them. That way you can interpret what you like from it and find enough proof to convince yourself your version is right.
Case in point, maybe the whole damn film is a dream construct of DiCaprio’s. Him and wifey are real damn old and take a trip into dreamland, go deep deep into each others constructs. Live eventually in HER construct to HER rules where time at this point means little, they’re young and have kids (they never had any in reality). Eventually she grows to hate playing house forever with eternally young kids and bends the reality to block out the children and grow old, returning them to their true age cause and she wants to return to die together, like they promised.
He however is happy where they were and wants to return to the kids and youth so he incepts/convinces her that this shit aint real and that they should step out of the construct quickly by commiting suicide, however when they die they just in fact step up into his version of the construct. He brings them back to youth and the kids but she twigs it aint real and he has betrayed her. She then sets up shit that plays to the rules of his universe. An inception where he cant return to his kids without imprisonment. She thinks that he cant repair the construct reality he has made without turning it on himself and he will have to die to step out of it entirely and return to reality.
He resists and remains in his own construct but is a prisoner of its rules. He then creates a perfect team and circumstances to enable him to purge her from the deepest recesses of his subconscious and remove the confines of her inception. Then he can at least return to the kids without breaking his own rules.
Few things that play to this, he always pictures the kids the same way, talks to them over phone. Grandpa Caine has never seen the kids to avoid creating a timespan. At end the kids are the same age.
He uses her totem, did he ever have a totem of his own? He uses as when he returns to his own construct he can will it to topple, look at how intense he looks at it, repeating “this is real”. Deeper he is unable to control it.
The A-Team, everybody and everything he needs to purge her and her inception from his mind. One phonecall and everything goes away, really, how perfect?
Of course, this can all be bollix but just a quick theory to show how ya can read anything in to this somewhat entertaining, well acted but overall directionless/choiceless storytelling.
OR IS IT?!!!
July 22nd, 2010 at 12:21 pm
Okay, I’ll be honest… You’ve lost me there, Colin.
July 22nd, 2010 at 1:45 pm
Yeah, spat it out after I got back last night. Never read it over. Perhaps Nolan approached the script in the same way.
July 23rd, 2010 at 12:08 am
The movie is a list of rules. I doubt I’ll take the time to make a complete list of everything they tell you and re-watch it… BUT… I have heard much chatter about “what’s the audience’s totem?” as that would be the key to what is what…
I believe the plot holes are our totem… so in every scene that is clearly a plot hole… well that is proof it’s in a dream… which means the whole movie…
…and I honestly can’t even say who’s for sure… or if any of the characters are even real… since many dreams are populated by people that don’t exactly exist…
…it seems a puzzle with no answer and many answers… and you get out of it as much as you want to put into it…
July 23rd, 2010 at 12:15 am
I disagree. Physical exercise. Good works. Those are activities in which you get out as much as you put in. With science fiction on the other hand, the more of an eejit you are quite honestly.
July 23rd, 2010 at 8:32 pm
Since I enjoyed the movie, and it’s one of my new favorites, I’m going to do my best to defend it.
Logically, why waste time brutally critiquing a speculative film when you don’t like speculative fiction stories?
This film is not science fiction. It is contemporary fantasy. At no point was any effort made to describe the scientific intracasies of the dream-entering process. There’s a machine in a case, and that’s it.
The guy makes neurochemical concoctions, like for a living. Who says he couldn’t manage one that left inner ear (dizziness) unimpaired?
With good fantasy, the logic of the plot relies on an unspoken set of “rules” for whatever magic the story exhibits. The same goes for the dreams in this film, which also lead to my categorizing it as ‘fantasy.’
Each dream is a separate reality, all with the same rules as apply to the initial dream reality. The real world is scarcely represented in the film; most of it takes place at least one layer of subconscious into the shared-dream-mind, which is in itself an element of contemporary fantasy, in no way scientifically plausible as it is presented in the film.
If you pay attention to the film with these basics of contemporary fantasy in mind, noting the ‘rules’ the film does an exceptional job outlining early on, the film flows effortlessly, never breaking stride in its logic and flawless writing.
And nevermind the dialogue, acting, casting, and cinematography. It’s all masterfully executed.
Also…in regard to the issue of morality. Did you even watch the ending? The scene with the father/son post-mortem redemption, and the truth that is revealed in that moment, spoke volumes about the nature of emotion, life, reality, and relationships.
The morality of tampering with Cillian Murphy’s intentions — which, let’s be honest, was not the point of the film at all; ‘business is business’ is not the theme of the movie — is that Cobb was obsessed with a very personal issue internally, in addition to the external hope of going home to his children and proving to himself that he has reached reality.
Which, I must argue, he achieves. If the point of the ending was to say that he’s still dreaming, then what would be the point of the whole damn movie? This is the director of The Dark Knight, people; in case you weren’t aware, that movie was pure excellence. It bled gold, and not just at the box office.
The reason the top/totem continued spinning at the end was to reinforce the theme of film, which as someone mentioned earlier was in regard to the nature of reality as questioned by Plato and a number of philosophers for millennia.
While it is never seen toppling over on screen, the totem does wobble quite a bit mere seconds before camera abruptly blacks out.
Just the director trying to get audiences thinking. Not a crime, but rather a sign of good writing. And Christopher Nolan both directed and wrote the screenplay for this film. Quite a feat, but again, he made Batman Begins.
July 24th, 2010 at 4:27 am
@Chris… Cobb is stabbed by his wife in his dream within the other dreams, which he and Ellen Page enter, not in Limbo. Getting stabbed kills him and sends him into Limbo where he finds Saito.
1. If your head is covered with a sack how can you be convinced in a dream that a few drops of a sedative, which you cannot see being dropped on you and have never smelt before, will sedate you?
2. If you can just leave Limbo by killing yourself (Cobb and Mal on train tracks) why was it stressed so much not to die in the dream and enter Limbo?
July 25th, 2010 at 3:52 am
Hands down, this was best movie I’ve seen in years.
One thing that has been nagging me (after it all sank in), was:
– In the final sequence, when the characters all return to ‘reality'(all awake in first class landing in LA), Saito is just metres away from Cillian’s character, yet the two never interact with each other (they should be well-aware whom each other is, given they are both now heads of their companies in the same industry).
I found it odd that Murphy’s character didn’t suspect he was targeted in Inception right then & there, given he was trained for such an occurance….Hmmmmm….
July 25th, 2010 at 8:48 am
@Vega – I think he knew it was Saito’s airline he had to take, and was very begrudging about being forced to take it, and so didn’t want to talk to him as far as we knew.
Cobb didn’t leave his limbo and go to Saito’s, it was all the same limbo, but because Cobb was the only one who’d been there before, it wasn’t just unconstructed subconscious space, it was something familiar to him.
To be honest, I don’t think the top keeps spinning, it teeters at the end. Nolan just doesn’t show it, to give a bit of cheeky nod to Moll’s ideas and fears, and to inflame people leading to posts like this one, I suppose.
Oh, and Ariadne had to design a big impenetrable fortress so that Cillian Murphy would believe that’s where the secret is: Cobb explains the principle earlier on.
July 25th, 2010 at 12:56 pm
@ Shane – if you agree that the top must stop spinning at the end, as I was arguing above, then are you conceding that the cliffhanger ending is a sham?
What about the fact that the fortress was surrounded by snow? Ellen Page couldn’t tell anyone in advance about the places she had designed – so how did she know they could all ski?
July 25th, 2010 at 6:09 pm
Yep. I don’t think it’s a cliffhanger at all, and I think he probably shouldn’t have ended it on that. When I saw it, I didn’t think of it as a big twist or anything, just as a nice closing reference. But that’s just me.
As far as skiing goes, maybe she just asked at one point, there’s quite a lot of pre-job conversation we don’t see. Was it just Cobb that couldn’t know the layout of the place because of Moll, or was it everyone?
July 26th, 2010 at 2:00 am
Anyone who’s anyone can ski. Simple as.
July 26th, 2010 at 5:36 am
The thing I liked the most about this film is how it sucks the audience in by introducing aspects of dreams that we all identify with, such as not having any sense of where/how it began and how the sense of falling usually brings about a nasty awakening, but then insidiously slipping in plenty of Hollywood sci-fi mumbo-jumbo under the radar.
Overall a bit of a let down though. Too confusing for something so far fetched. For example the “dream machine” that everyone connects to is an ingenious component that makes it kind of pointless trying to disprove anything else if you’re happy to let that one go.
The idea of “nested” dreams and going up and down dream levels is something that must have been thought up during some serious substance abuse. And the theory of going into some state of limbo if you die because you’re still alive in the parent-level dream is just as ludicrous. It would stand to reason that if you die in a dream, you normally wake up, but if you’re in some drugged up state that prevents you from waking up, well you just stop dreaming and that’s it right? Either that or you just never die. It’s a dream after all and anything is possible.
This is the sort of movie where you can have many different interpretations of what’s going on and they’d all be right if the argument supports the view even if ourageous.
The ending is more of a let down and not in the league of The sixth Sense or even the last DiCaprio film, Shutter Island where we slowly learn that he really was crazy from the beginning of the film.
Here we are left to ponder if he was dreaming or not, and in fact if the whole movie is a dream. Who really cares? And who can prove one way or another anyway?
July 26th, 2010 at 6:24 am
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell or a hell of heaven”.
We see things not as they are but as we are.
Change your mind about someone…
July 27th, 2010 at 12:32 am
@eoin Re. this: What about the fact that the fortress was surrounded by snow? Ellen Page couldn’t tell anyone in advance about the places she had designed – so how did she know they could all ski?
Because it’s a dream – in a dream anyone can ski, shoot, fist fight, make a people sandwich using electrical wire to shove in a lift, blow the cabling and thereby somehow trigger gravity in a weightless environment – it’s all doable in a dream. Didn’t you ever dream you could sing like jose carreras? (can you sing like him?)
July 27th, 2010 at 12:41 am
Sorry Sam, I forgot about all of those rock solid rules about dreams that Christopher Nolan didn’t just pluck out of his arse or anything while he was writing this monumentally boring, confusing film.
Here’s the Paris Review with a Freudian analysis of Inception (well, kinda)…
http://tpr.ly/9n9NqY
July 27th, 2010 at 6:51 am
Really, the only plot hole I feel like tinkering with is this:
We’re told, point-blank, that the sedative is designed to “spare” the inner ear, thus making “the kick” a viable key to recovery, even under chemical influence (which, as already established, is a prospect ridiculous enough). If this is the case, then any disturbance of the subject’s physical body–ANY sensation of falling, tipping, or sliding–should be sufficient to produce an awakening. We’re shown this during the sequence where the sedation is first explained: Arthur is pushed backwards in his chair, and then tipped over sideways, startling awake in both instances–each time, before the chair reaches a 45-degree angle to the floor.
So WHY, then, when the van careens through the traffic barrier and flips over four times in the dirt, spilling the sleeping subjects all over the backseat (seatbelts or no), doesn’t anyone wake up? Someone argued to me that it’s a question of impact–after all, in the opening sequence, Cobb doesn’t awaken until after he breaches the surface of the bath water, and all of the other instances of “kick” we’re shown in the film involve a collision between subject and object. But I can’t buy it–in the first sedation sequences, when Arthur is being tipped out of the chair, he seems to startle almost as soon as his body is set into motion, his arms and legs in action before his center of gravity even passes a point of no return.
Thoughts?
July 27th, 2010 at 7:29 pm
Somebody metioned this earliar. But if you can leave limbo by dying, as Saito and Cobb did, then whats the big problem with it.
If the problem with limbo is that you don’t know youre in it, as Saito didn’t then how come Cobb did know when he was in his limbo? does each person have their own limbo? Cobb the city and Saito the Japanese castle place. Can you create projections in limbo as Saito did?
Were was it mentioned that the childrens faces were Cobb’s totem? In limbo he turned his face away as not to see his chidrens faces and be tempted to stay. surley this means that they were not his totem.
Isn’t a totem something know one else knows such as how the die was waited for the other guy. countless other people would know what his childrens faces look like.
Did Nolan simply forget to make the children older, or was it intentional?
Who controled the people chasing Cobb in Mombassa? I heard that it was his backyard, or base, or something?
To answer mell. I agree it should have kicked them out of that level. But pherhaps as it was the first level and the seditive had not worn off yet nothing could happen.
July 27th, 2010 at 10:48 pm
Ok since you’ve been whining all the time here’s my explanations:
The flight
– Yusuf dreams the Van
– They wake up when the sedatives wear off
The Van
– Arthur dreams the Hotel
– They wake up when Yusuf’s van hits the water
The Hotel
– Eams dreams up the fortress
– They wake up when Arthur’s elevator impacts
The Fortress
– Cobb dreams the shared limbo
– They wake up from the floor falling from Eams exploisons.
Note that the Limbo is a shared state. Its originally empty but only one man has entered it: Cobb and Mal, from going too deep. Normally the Limbo isn’t a threat since you leave your dreamstate when you die. However under such strong sedatives you enter this limbo state when you die. The danger of the limbo is basically your sanity. Who are told that 5 min = 1 hour in dreams, even moor under such a potent mixture. So how to keep one insane in an empty world, it feels like you’re there forever. Cobb and Mal stayed there for 50 years. Note that as soon as these strong sedatives wear off the limbo behaves under the same principle, when you die you wake up. This is why people stay there for such a long time, you have to stay there until the sedatives wear off. When you come back to the real world, you come back “as an old man”. In Cobb’s case he’s experienced 50 years gone by, gotten older and then is put back into a young body. This is the threat of the limbo, basically your sanity when you come back.
The reason Cobb doesn’t want to be the architect anymore is because he is basically a nutter, we are shown this again and again how his projections and Mal expecially are very dangerious. Also we are told he cannot dream anymore. Basically when he dreams he enters the limbo and therefore Cobb and Ariadne can go and retrieve Fisher.
Now the reason you see Cobb wash again upon that shore is because he died in that van (drowned), since he missed the orignal kick (die = enter the limbo).
Pretty simple aye?
July 28th, 2010 at 9:16 am
Who was whining, if it was me you anwered very few of my questions.
July 28th, 2010 at 2:07 pm
@theoster
“But if you can leave limbo by dying, as Saito and Cobb did, then whats the big problem with it.”
– You can’t leave it unless the sedatives has worn off. Since things happen much faster in dreams for each level, the few minutes it might take to wear off you are experiencing dozen of years go by in the limbo, so when you finally get out of there you’ve experienced like in Cobb’s example 50 years gone by and are now an old soul in a young body. So it basically comes down to if you can keep your sanity while the sedative wears off so you can die and wake up, like normally and then keep your head straight…which Cobb was on the verge of managing.
does each person have their own limbo?
– No it’s a shared state, originally empty but then filled in by Cobb and Mal (when they got stuck) and then later by Saito (who also got stuck there). This is why they can retrieve Fisher and why Cobb finds Saito.
Cobb the city and Saito the Japanese castle place
– its all within the same limbo, Cobb’s city and Saito’s palace
Were was it mentioned that the childrens faces were Cobb’s totem?
– it isn’t mentioned, totem is a object that only you know the true behaviour of, e.g. how the chesspiece will fall, what side of the die is weighted, like you mentioned yourself.
Did Nolan simply forget to make the children older, or was it intentional?
– intentional, just to let people think a little and or make up their own mind if the ending was a dream or not, cutting of the spin and not making the children look older gives you the option to believe what you want.
Regarding the kicks
– its the impact that kicks you back, hitting the water, elevator crashing, floors of the fortress falling down. The clips of Arthur testing the sedatives and the kicks on the chairs are simply tests, just few secs of frames to show us that they are testing this potent mixture.
July 28th, 2010 at 7:06 pm
Thanks for clearing somethings up.
But I didn’t think the children’s faces were Cobbs totems I was questioning an erliar poster.
Also i noticed that whenever hes in a dream hes wearing his wedding ring, in reality he does not.
July 28th, 2010 at 9:44 pm
Hi, I stopped reading half way down because it’s late but I notice so far no one has mentioned the below theory it seems to be the crux of the basis of the film to my mind. Also I know why Arthur put Browning into the 3rd dream (to fool Fischer) but why would he take the effort to pull him out if he was just a figmant. Lots of holes but it was entertaining if empty.
Schrödinger’s cat is a thought experiment, often described as a paradox, devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. It illustrates what he saw as the problem of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics applied to everyday objects. The thought experiment presents a cat that might be alive or dead, depending on an earlier random event. In the course of developing this experiment, he coined the term Verschränkung
July 28th, 2010 at 11:19 pm
@ Laura – for what it’s worth, I stopped reading about a week ago!
July 29th, 2010 at 2:06 am
Its a freaking dream!!! There are no plot holes in a dream. Plot holes are the conscious, rational minds attempt to make sense of something that otherwise might be misinterpreted as a “plot hole”.
In other words if you find any in this movie they are by all means permissible and perhaps you should try a second or third viewing while allowing your subconscious mind to roam free. I suggest trying it under the influence of some hallucinogenic substance such as LSD or SHROOMS. It might help.
July 29th, 2010 at 4:55 am
Heres my take…its going to be black or white…reality or dream. In the real world, people walk, planes fly, dogs bark and there is no such technology that allows people to enter into dreams. (The setting seems like present times, not futuristic). However, in the dream world, people can float and fight, buildings fold over, stairs can disappear and there is a crazy technology out there that can allow people to enter someone’s dreams. Therefore, everything about inception is all a dream. So Cobb’s ability to go into people’s dream..its all a dream…because, no one can do that in real life. Had the movie stated that in took place in the distant feature, then I would be more incline to believe people can do this (futuristic technology)…but, it looked like our current present time…cars/vans/clothes are all current times…..therefore, Inception is a figment of the dreamer’s imagination…doesn’t exist…The whole movie is all a dream.
July 29th, 2010 at 5:03 am
I
July 29th, 2010 at 5:20 am
PLEASE READ. AND COMMENT.
I have seen this movie twice now and I am still confused. I believe it is not my fault I am confused but rather the director’s. The plot holes in this movie are ridiculous.
One that nobody seems to have noticed is: Cobb and Mal were stuck in limbo together for 50 years. They grew old together as it shows in the movie – their old hands holding. However, when they leave limbo, they are young again. They leave by laying their heads on the rail tracks and dieing. If they grew old together in limbo then why were they young when they left?
Another is(and maybe its not I may just be stupid): the entire end of the movie while they are in limbo. First of all Cobb apparently stays in limbo because he guesses Saito has now died and ended up in limbo. But, he gets stabbed in the chest by Mal, and then when Ellen Page is about to shoot and kill Mal, Cobb stops her. Ellen Page jumps but they never come back to Cobb and Mal. You then see Cobb wash up on the shore of limbo again, like in the very beginning of the movie. But wait… wasn’t he already in limbo with Mal, and the reason he stayed was to look for Saito there. How then does he wash up on the “shores of his subconscious” when he is already in limbo. Then what even further confused me was that Saito was old while Cobb was young, and that in the beginning of the movie it is the same scene – but in the beginning, the very first real dream that isnt limbo is in the exact same room, where Cobb tries to steal from Saito. Many questions can be asked here. Perhaps the Cobb is not in limbo when he is with old Saito and maybe it is just a legitimate dream state. Or maybe Cobb died from the stab wound in limbo, then washed up on the shores of limbo again. What is never gone into is what happens when you die in limbo when the sedative is still in effect.
One more thing that leads me to believe there is no reality. The use of “leap of faith” by both Saito and Mal in what were are lead to believe are reality. Saito says it in the helicopter while proposing his offer to Cobb and Mal says it before she jumps off the ledge to her death. Hmmmmm?
July 29th, 2010 at 7:16 am
Christopher Nolan is among the few directors/writers (Scorcese, Spielberg, Eastwood) who has the gift of regularly producing outstanding movies. He’s just like a Picasso and churns out masterpieces. A lot of directors get lucky for an individual flick and fail to duplicate their achievement. For Inception, Nolan masterfully engages his market as he builds up the account to intrigue you by way of the highly end though injecting activity scenes and graphic results to excite you.
July 29th, 2010 at 11:48 am
Honestly, I didn’t give a crap about the plot holes and they seemed to become a moot point after a while when I understood the possibility that the entire experience may well be a just a dream anyway. The entire movie is a conundrum.
I thought it all made sense in that context.
I agree that I had to really relax my rational mind so I got baked the second time and fell asleep. The third time me and some good friends all took LSD about an hour before the show.
Amazing in I-Max.
lol
July 29th, 2010 at 11:56 am
Okay so we are all arguing over whether to go the beach or to the park, but the car won’t start and we can’t go anywhere.
We could fly through the colors of pale concrete and metal looping through flesh and blood…
July 29th, 2010 at 9:07 pm
So Limbo. Lot of interesting things to explore there.
You end up in Limbo if you die in a dream but do not wake up when it happens. This appears most easily done through heavy sedative usage.
Since going deeper into multiple layers of dreams requires heavy sedatives (an insignificant applied force in the real world could wake you up easily if you’re in a third dream within a dream, they did basically paralyze their entire bodies for the duration of that 10-hour flight), it sounds like the Cobbs couple basically ended up there because they sedated themselves too heavily to wake up at all and then when they tried to wake up they ended up there. Only a guess, and the truth of the matter wasn’t even touched upon beyond “we tried to go deeper and ended up there” but ok, sure, let’s leave it at that.
So the heavy sedatives made them incapable of waking up from being killed in the dream, ok. Nothing suspense of disbelief-breaking there.
Waking up from Limbo appears to be possible by just killing yourself like in any regular dream. Oooookaaaay… So the reason they were “stuck” was… Ok, so they WEREN’T stuck.
Does this mean they were just playing around, that they really, really liked being in there, that they were afraid that killing themselves may not actually be enough or that they at this point in time didn’t actually know that killing themselves would wake them up (not impossible, Leo may have opted for a “either we kill ourselves and fail, or we die, or we may just get back to the frickin’ real world if we’re lucky” solution to the problem)?
Again, not clarified (though I guess it sounds like “really, really liked it” is a likely answer.)
Now comes the fun part.
So. Assuming we accept that despite not being the dreamer, Leo’s subconscious could still affect the dream world (freight train, etc.), how is it that they end up in that Limbo where the Cobbs had been “stuck” before?
Now, bear with me here, because there are multiple ways to look at this.
Someone said earlier that they would end up in Leo’s limbo because he’s the one who had been there before, but I do not actually recall this being said in the movie. All I recall them (and by them I mean Ariadne) saying is that he was the only one who had been there.
So, there are either two ways this could go.
Either everyone has their own, individual, Limbo.
In which case the question is why they ended up in his specifically, despite him not being any of the three dreamers in their three-layered escapades.
And why his limbo would be prioritized, when they had three other dreamers. Or hey, how about the person who actually died and went there? What about his Limbo? And why would Saito end up in Leo’s Limbo?
Or there is one, common, Limbo (which is the way I believe the movie pretty much conveyed it, the individual-Limboes explanation being more a product of intuition than anything else).
In which the question is why (and how?) everyone in the world can be connected to it. I guess both of those can be explained with the fact that the movie is a fantasy sci-fi movie rather than a sci-fi movie, but still. It’s kinda weird.
I can imagine why nobody else would have ended up in that Limbo, though. Not everyone would sedate themselves strongly enough to go THAT deep into it all.
It sounds a lot like extraction isn’t exactly the most common of practices (as he said, there are very few legal applications of it, so I have a hard time imagining it being a wide-spread trade, especially since there are drugs and fancy machinery involved) so it makes sense that not many people would have tried pumping themselves full of horse tranquilizers and going as deep as they can. I got the impression that the Cobbs were being pioneers in their experimentation since, well, it was experimentation.
Oh and in the case of both interpretations, what happened in the end was basically that Fischer ended up in Limbo (either the common Limbo, or Leo’s Limbo godknowswhyhislimbowouldbeprioritizedbutohwell) because he died, where he met and was captured by the projection representing Leo’s wife, whom his subconscious likes going around projecting everywhere.
Saito was sent to the same Limbo, but for some random reason not to the same physical location within it. No reason why there couldn’t be more “islands” in the ocean (who says the ocean stretches forever anyway? It was originally a blank space, so I can’t imagine they didn’t create the oceans themselves, which means they really didn’t have a need to make it endless. Not that it matters, because dreams are deliciously vague about where boundaries are anyway) or why he couldn’t have ended up somewhere else on that beach and just couldn’t find them (by merit of the place being frickin’ huge).
Leo stayed behind in that Limbo (be it a common one, or Leo’s own) to find Saito before leaving.
Maybe the knife wound and the resulting death sent him somewhere else in the Limbo, or maybe it made him lose his memory, or maybe it made him fall in the ocean. This was intentionally left out, there might even be a point in not even thinking about explaining it (fantasy movie, wooooooo magiccccc etc.), but eh, yeah. Many ways that could have gone.
So he didn’t kill himself to get out of the limbo, to get himself to the kick in the third layer of the dream and stayed behind. And then he and Saito killed themselves so they could escape from it, the key here being that they had forgotten why they were even there and finding the other lead to them finally remembering. Or rather, it lead to Saito remembering. Leo went in on purpose, which appears to keep you aware of its nature as a dream.
Oh crikey, this is a wall of unorganized text already… Oh well, just a few short things to add as notes then.
* It is strange that they even COULD go into limbo just by hooking themselves up to, ehm… I guess the dream of the guy who just -died-? Does that mean dreams only reach four layers down? Or that Limbo is just a place you dream of inside a dream if you die?
* The totem clearly stopped spinning at the end, I can’t see how anyone doesn’t just see the camera cutting off before it falls over as something being done either for dramatic effect, or for comedic effect.
Everyone in the cinema I saw it in laughed, which I must say is pretty appropriate.
The last two frames I saw clearly showed it toppling, and there’s no way that’s just because they cut too late or anything else. (surely that spin-top must be 3D-generated for it to spin that perfectly in the exact same spot for that long)
* In a way they did the kid a favor in making him have good memories of his father and trying to stand on his own two feet. Totally sweet, if I might say so.
* I’m pretty sure they only grew old in Limbo because they figured they reasonably SHOULD grow old if they hang around for that long. It’s not just a world of dreams, it’s a world of dreams that they are in full control of. Wanna be purple-haired and more ripped than is physically possible? Think it and it happens. They did liken themselves to gods.
*Man, I love Cristopher Nolan for not only conjuring the exact same kind of plot I love to conjure myself, but actually making a high-quality movie like this out of it.
*There are at least two viable explanations for why the weightlessness in the second dream didn’t affect the third dream, yet people I have talked to in real life about the movie only point this out as the “big gaping hole” in the plot, not even paying the whole Limbo cluster**** any attention.
*I love the whole Limbo cluster****. I gotta make myself one of those sometime.
Hope you enjoyed this wall of text full of my unorganized ramblings.
There’s at least six more points I could discuss, but there’s so much that I can’t even keep track of it.
Despite all this, there are possible explanations for all of these things.
I have not seen any holes in this movie so much as I see things that are counter-intuitive due to their abstract nature.
Well played, Nolan. Well played.
August 1st, 2010 at 7:50 pm
Firstly, you’re wrong because, quite simply, he could have just span it harder at the end (perhaps in frustration)? Problem solved!
Also, people like you really annoy me. I don’t mean to sound rude, but why go and see a brilliant sci-fi thriller if you hate sci-fi films?
Also, how can you ever enjoy a film if you find suspending disbelief impossible?
Films are about escaping to another world from someone else’s mind – don’t bother going if you’re so wrapped up in logic and reality that you can’t do that.
August 1st, 2010 at 8:50 pm
I saw it because It was being discussed on a radio programme I was appearing on. Mentioned at beginning of article.