INCEPTION Post Release - Page 3

The ending is a dream for sure (as far as im concerned). Not only are the kids wearing the same clothes as they are in every previous memory of them...but they're also sitting in the exact same spot.

Edit:

The reaction from the packed theater last night was awesome all around. Lots of clapping, and "OHHHHHHHHHH!"s. I love when the audience really gets into a film experience.

Follow me on this. The whole film is a dream. The street chase, the closing in wall, Saito appearing out of no where to pick Cobb up. A dream makes sense untill you wake up and look back at it. Cobb is so many levels in, and the reality we see is just another level. Now remember the totem, and how no one can touch it. How they then can reproduce it later, and make the dreamer not know if it's a dream or not due to them knowing everything about the totem if they touched it. Why did Cobb let Saito touch the totem at the end? That way, Saito, who is an figment of Cobbs on mind, can reproduce it within another level, and cause Cobb to beleive his level of dream, is reality. That is why the top is spinning, but wobbles when he hugs his kids. He is dreaming, but his dream is turning into his reality.

There are other clues too, to this.
The kids not aging, and wearing the same clothes
Saito calling a "unknown person" to free Cobbs name (to me, name = mind knowledge of the dream)

The whole movie was Cobbs inception of himself. Placing a thought within himself, unknowing. That thought being the totem, and it being the window to reality and dreams. His own subconcious incepted his mind in the end.

Something little I saw this second screening that I noticed the first screening but didn't connect until now...

The idea that he might have killed her could just be his inner fear, that he didn't do enough and that he accidentally suggested for her to do something. If you notice in the supposed flashbacks with Mal that he unknowingly motions for her to come inside when she's on the opposing balcony. This could be intentional. His motions are weirdly saying come over here, which would be impossible as if she moved forward she'd fall off. He, however, is meaning for her to step back inside her room, not the one he is occupying. As small of a detail this is, he can't get over the MIXED signal he just gave her: The hand motion in the real world or the detailed implant he gives her in the dream. It's all the same.

I think you're spot on with that.

how great is it though, to feel the need to see a film again right away. Haven't felt this way in a long long time.

Well at this point after 1 viewing, I'm definitely in the camp that believes that Cobb is in a dream and that all of the characters are projections in his mind.

But I need to see it again, while I didn't fall asleep, I am having trouble digesting and processing so much information from the midnight showing.

I don't see the ending as Cobb living in a dream world for the rest of his life; I think it's more his working out his grief and survivor's guilt of his wife's suicide. I don't think we're seeing the analog of someone choosing to live life out in the Matrix. I think we're seeing someone, in a dream, come to terms with mourning, moving forward, and stepping away from trying to fix something that can't be fixed.

We never see Cobb in waking life - but that doesn't mean he's in some permanent coma.

~~~~~~

At the end shot, there was a neat of mix of collective breath-intakes and gasps. Then clapping. Midnight premiere audiences really are different, and usually better.

I really hope that Nolan never explains the ending, and to be honest I don't expect him to.

Fabulous film-making, and the two words that kept springing to mind throughout were 'thrilling' and 'ambitious'- because how many big movies in recent memory have been either of these things?

For all we know, the life he takes at the end, may last 50 years within that dream, but it may only be minutes in reality, or less.

I've heard so many people think he must stay in a coma or something. No, not at all. if 5 minutes in reality equates to 60 minutes dream time. Then, 5 minutes of that dream equates to 60 minutes of time for the dream within the dream. So on, and so forth. I think that just shows how many levels he is in, at the end of the film.

He own selfishness with his wife, is probably what is going to cause him to become "scrambled eggs". Wanting to grow old together, over and over and over again. Going in layer, after layer, after layer.

Also, the ending, from Cobb waking up on the plane onward, is so super-warm and happy that it plays like a dream even without the spinning top.

I definitely agree with this. It's just to perfect. As everyone of the characters also gets a nice smile and nod as they "exit".

I don't think, atleast to me, there's any doubt that the ending, is a dream. But to what level of dream, whos dream, etc... is the real question.

Depends on your read of the movie. As per Devin's explanation, the levels don't really exist except in the way Cobb is constructing his dream world. The ending from that perspective is just Cobb's dream continuing, only with him having resolved to an extent his feelings of guilt.

After 1 very late night viewing, I am still believing that it is Cobb's dream. He has created the heist and it's characters to cure the virus that is the idea he killed his wife. If only to solve his other conflict of "memories" or dreams of him and his kids uninterrupted.

But, he could not do that knowingly, because she would continue to come back. he needed to use inception on himself, to rid his dreams of her, and his guilt. It was all an elaborate maze of dreams to create his inception.

I really need to see this again... I may leave work early

"Waiting for a Train" from the INCEPTION score is a huge riff (or rip off) of the MULHOLLAND DRIVE theme.

Tom Hardy isn't getting enough love. Wow, have I come to love this guy as an actor.

I think you guys are reading into it the wrong way. It's not important whether or not the top fell or continued spinning -- the mere fact that we aren't sure causes us to doubt. Nolan is planting the seed of an idea in our mind with a very simple image. He's performing an inception on us.

And that's why he's a goddamn master.

The more I think about it, the more I'm thinking that it's Saito that's doing all the manipulating after all. In a way, I think the story could be Michael Caine hiring Saito to do an inception on Cobb to force him to travel through his guilt over the death of his wife. Caine did say something along the lines that Cobb was using the whole process as some money scheme when the possibilities of dream manipulation could be used for so much more than that.

Seeing this again on Saturday.

that thought has crossed my mind too. It's a loop of a film, just like they pointed out in the creation of the dreams. No matter what "conclusion" you decide upon, it comes back around.

That's what I'm saying. I guess what I mean, is that he has been at this for a while. Cobb creates these heist situations to draw her out into the open, but hasn't figured out a way to remove her so she continues to haunt his dreams.

It's not about doing inception on himself to remove the memory, it's about putting the memory and nightmare to rest. The idea that is such a parasite and virus, is the one Cobb has about it being his fault Mal died.

Yes he is.

If it's real, why can't the kids visit Caine in France and see Cobb there?

to put her to rest, he needs to implant the idea that his dream is reality. Inception

what about the "magical serium"
what about the kicks that work, and kicks that don't work
who did Saito call at the end
who is the company
who is chasing Cobbs

It's NOT real. It's Caine, hiring Saito under the guise of hiring Cobb to do the heist, when in actuality it's the team going into COBB'S mind drawing him out and trying to help him get over the death of his wife. In the end, in the dream, Cobb is able to see his children again because he's allowed himself to do so. Just a theory.

I guess my problem with that is if you posit that the whole movie is Cobb's dream, and you are never outside that, it's difficult to ascribe the motivations of 'real-world' characters, because we never meet any.

We don't meet any, that's true, but there's subtle hints in the movie that lead me to believe that all of this - the heist, Ariadne's insistence that Cobb deal with the wife issue, Saito's insistence that he go into the dreams with them - that make me believe that it's all about the team trying to help Cobb instead of an actual heist going on. Again, just a theory, and I'm seeing it tomorrow again to see if it holds up.

Oh I very much agree with all of this.

Inception = There is no god.

Anyone else think the whole everlasting life, and instant creations was a metaphor of how the concept of God, is basically crazy. Cobb and his wife became gods within their dream, but it caused, atleast from what we saw in her, to become crazy. Being able to control everything, and to have your mind age years within minutes, caused her to lose it.

I may be off my rocker with that thought, but it just crossed my mind

I don't think that is what he is doing. But I may see your point if you are saying he is using an idea to destroy another.

But if we take the images of the movie to be our only truth, than she lost her mind because of the inception done by Cobb. It was directly related to the idea he implanted that she is never in reality.

I really need to stop debating, dissecting and discussing. The memories I have of the film are creating ideas that are stopping me from being creative and open minded. I need to see the film again!...

A little moment that really gave me goosebumps in the film: After Ariadne has made the bridge and Cobb starts talking about how she can't take memories into dreams. The people attack her and Mal comes through them with the knife and she wakes up just as she gets sliced...

Those were the kind of dreams I used to have when I was younger. And it's never been better realized than here. Your adrenaline gets pumping and you can really feel her get stabbed.

Yeah, I didn't realize it was him until today. He does quite a bit with a supporting role that isn't that much on the page. And he gets the best line of the movie: "You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling."

Anyone else have a trailer for Charlie St Cloud before this. Wow. The packed midnight crowd at the Arclight for Inception was definitely not the audience for that movie. It was so bad it got a mock round of applause from everyone there.

No, I did see it on imax though and we got the incredible Tron Legacy trailer, the very tired and unfunny Megamind trailer and the still entertaining Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows trailer.

yep I got that one too. I was over tired last night, and needed a rush. Some guy (and it's not that I don't think Tron Legacy won't be good), stood up and gave the Tron Legacy trailer a standing ovation. Everyone looked at him like he was nuts. Then, Charlie St. Cloud came on, so I decided to give it a standing ovation. Most of the audience laughed pretty good.

Wanted to add that most of me doesn't want Nolan to give his definitive interpretation/meaning for the flick. We've learned something from BLADE RUNNER, no?

But more seriously...Nolan's own inception is the wonderful ambiguity with which we can view the movie. Wonderful because the main point - Cobb's moving through and past his guilt - remains intact, no matter which particular interpretation you take.

This is what I first noticed when listening to the score. Hans Zimmer definitely integrated a lot of John Murphy's style from 28 Days Later, as well as from Sunshine...mostly in the use of the percussive guitar riffs. Zimmer did something similar after collaborating with James Newton Howard on Batman Begins, and I began to hear tones of Newton's scores in his Zimmer's other work. Frankly, I'm glad he moved on.

While I've often derided Hans Zimmer for his lack of originality, maybe it's better to consider him like a very sophisticated synthesizer. There may be better composers of singular works, but no other film composer working right now has a greater range for reinterpretation and experimentation.

Personally, I really liked Inception, a lot. But I was hoping for something a little less "grounded" in a photographic sense. Of course, said film would last for five or six hours and resemble the work of Tarkovsky or Bela Tarr.

Did anyone else note that the final scene of the film was more or less an homage to the final scene of "Stalker"? The adventurer returns home from a surreal world of shared imagination, is reunited with his family, and then... something strange is happening at the dining room table. In the case of "Stalker," his daughter psychically moved a cup, which throw the audience's understanding of the nature of the Zone and the outside world into confusion. In "Inception," it's a top. Of course, "Inception"'s ending only teases at the truth, but perhaps because of this lack of explicitness the ending is more powerful... like a work of inception itself.

Well I'll talk about the beautiful cinematography. Pfister once again proves he is a master. He is one of my favorites and this film is testament to the beauty he can create shooting on film and doing the photochemical process. I love that he and Nolan like to shoot anamorphic. The amazing thing is that this film is mostly shot in 35mm, but the 65mm and even the couple Hi-Def shots flow seamlessly together. It's really a spectacle to see the light, color and tonal shifts even within a single scene.

I don't think it's been brought up, but I realized a little bit ago that the spinning top serves the same essential function as the origami unicorn in Blade Runner. Not a big fan of that film so I admit it took my brain a while to catch it.

Meh?

I liked INCEPTION. That's all. I walked out of an early screening Tuesday night with an audience that was on board and enthusiastic throughout, that screamed like so many other crowds for the final cut-to-black, that buzzed and twitted (and probably Twittered) with excitement and confusion and affection... and I felt left out in the dark. It was good, often very good, but a far cry from the greatness that I've been hearing and reading about since seeing it. I feel the same way about INCEPTION as I did about THE DARK KNIGHT after seeing it for a second time - it's big, it's loud, it's a hell of a lot smarter than the average $200m summer movie and it's fairly exciting throughout, but that's about all the enthusiasm I can muster for the thing as a whole. I liked it, I'll recommend it to others, but I'm just not on board with all the love.

There are individual components that I thought were genuinely spectacular, namely the visual effects and a few of the action pieces; Arthur's zero-gravity fight is just mind-boggling in its believability and execution, and is the only action scene in the movie that genuinely thrilled me. The shootouts, car chases and the gigantic snow-capped finale are all very Nolan-y action beats: the guy conceives fantastic action scenes that end up feeling very flat on screen. There's a lot of big, wow action beats in INCEPTION that look great and sound great, but leave me feeling nothing at all except the occasional sense of geekish wonder at how much such a sequence cost or how painstakingly it was orchestrated. I never got a visceral thrill from any of the movie's numerous action beats, with the aforementioned zero-grav fight being a shining exception.

Less forgivably, though, I didn't feel anything at all. Cobb's agonized journey fell totally flat for me emotionally. I thought the great cast was sorely under-utilized: with the exception of DiCaprio and Cotillard, most of the actors were relegated to delivering nothing but line after line of cleverly worded but still quite transparent exposition. They all acquitted themselves nicely, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Tom Hardy being the only standouts, simply by virtue of bringing more presence to their perfunctory dialog than anyone else. I hoped early on that Ellen Page's character would turn into something more substantive than just a rookie-whose-presence-justifies-explaining-everything-for-the-benefit-of-the-audience, but she never went anywhere beyond that.

I have other thoughts on the film, many of which are quite positive, but I thought I'd throw out a minority opinion for discussion. As previously said, I did quite like the movie, but think that a lot of the praise being sent its way is unwarranted. Thoughts?

I tend to think that Cobb's emotional journey is going to be pretty universal- to boil it down, this film is about a man dealing with loss, and how his memory of what he has lost fucks him up and sabotages him- and who hasn't felt or experienced that?

I'm not totally in love with the action execution of the snow assault, but as it's intercut with the van and Levitt trying to create a kick, it doesn't hurt the sequence much- again, the editing is a wonder that makes sections of the film more than the sum of their parts.

What an incredible film. I'm ecstatic to have seen it now, but even happier to have the desire to see it again immediately. Not for "clues" or "explanations" but rather just to experience it again. It's a film that while individual pieces may not make sense for everyone at any given moment, the film as a whole is consistently making sense on an intrinsic level. This is also the first Nolan film for me where I felt the emotional beats clearly and strongly: Devin was right in that making the emotional subtext text, Nolan is able to examine far better.

It's hard to really comment on this part of your post, because it's also the most subjective element to any piece of art: the emotional reaction(s) it provokes. I thought Nolan did a wonderful job, in very short interludes and scenes, communicating the intimacy Cobb felt with Mal. And it might just be my easily-pulled parental heartstrings, but I certainly empathized with his desire to see his children again. Just the voices on the phone did it for me, though of course that could be argued to have nothing to do with Nolan's skill as a filmmaker.

But I think DiCaprio gave another solid and even at times understated performance as a man who is immersed in a strange environment, seeking to reconcile himself to the past. He managed to communicate both confidence and fearful uncertainty, alternating, in one scene (at the bar with Fisher). That's some damn good performing. But if his plight doesn't connect with you...then it doesn't connect with you.

I thought that scene really spoke to his maturation as a writer and director. I found it unusual that such a superficially ordinary scene was as powerful as it was.

I think people are going to have difficulty relating to the emotional core of the movie. Yes, it is ultimately about grief over the loss of a loved one - something pretty universal - but its wrapped up in so many layers of science fiction gobbledy gook that its hard to find a foothold. He feels grief not just that his wife died, but because when they were both 70 year old dream versions of themselves he secretly implanted a notion in her brain that drove her insane! That's such a crazy concept, and I think it will hold people at arm's length a bit.

The movie is such an incredible construction. I was really in awe at the whole second half, how every layer effected the layer below it and so on. Keeping track of it all during the writing must have been such a pain.

And I don't think the entire film is a dream, or at least was intended to be that at all. It's too reductive, the film doesn't actually gain anything by it (I would argue it loses quite a bit, actually, by suddenly making every single character a mere projection -- I was moved by the son's journey to saying goodbye to his father, and this theory suddenly throws all of that out the window in service of making it 100% Cobb's movie) and asking plot holey questions like, "Wasn't it convenient that Watanabe showed up at the exact right time during the chase?" doesn't point to it being one big dream but just slightly exposes the filmmakers' willingness to button a scene too neatly.

Well, I suppose it's a matter of what you bring to the film. If you've been in a relationship, I think that you can relate to the sort of exclusionary world that Mal and Dom create for themselves, or at least the desire to live an idyllic life with someone else. The film shows that such a possible world (that, outside of dreams, is unattainable, really) would require infinite controls and rules, and would be ultimately pretty inert and unsatisfying... the film illustrates quite capably the dangerous perversion of living out one's dreams... in this case, literally.

I don't agree that the actors/actresses are underutilized. They played the characters flawlessly and were very integral to the film story.

In keeping with the theory that it was all a dream, than they were only there to support Cobb. Hence, why we never really learn of any type of back story. They are given assumed roles and fulfill them. The only character that differs is the "new" character Ariadne, which ends up being more than an architect. She becomes the catalyst by which Cobb rids himself of the guilt caused by Mal's suicide.

Tell me if I've got this right.

There were three dream levels, and then there was limbo.

The kick in the first level was the car falling into the river.
The kick in the second level was the elevator.
The kick in the third level was the facility explosion.
The kick in the fourth level was free-falling from a building.

Now, they specifically stated that the sedative would allow them to wake up from a kick, but not from death. Death would simply throw them into limbo.

When Fischer is killed, they needed to retrieve his subconscious from limbo. But even by killing him in limbo, he still wouldn't be revived in the third level (which is where they needed him). They only freed his mind, allowing him to wake up in the second level when he got the kick (since he was already dead in the third level). So they had to shock him back to life so that he could open the safe.

Now. When Saito dies in the third level, he is also sent to limbo. Cobb goes to retrieve him, resulting in Saito killing both Cobb and himself - freeing them from limbo. And I'm guessing that this happened just as the van hit the water, allowing the two of them to pass through all three levels insantaneously.

Is that about right?