Inception (with implanted spoilers)

movie was cool tho

it was cooler to look at than think about tho

*SPOILER - SOME PEOPLE SHOULDN'T EVEN BE READING THIS THREAD - THERE IS BOUND TO BE SPOILERS*

Are you all assuming that the last reality was real and not a dream? That's how I took it even if there is evidence for the contrary despite the top sounding and looking like it was going to fall at the very very end. The totem isn't necessarily proof of anything and lead to false security. Also, the grampa dude saying "come back to reality" at the classroom scene from the beginning and the kids in the same position and wearing the same clothes at the end sure made it seem like Leo could be dreaming (or rather stuck in an elaborate subconscious world). I like to think of all these scenes were there to plant a seed in our mind (inception) which is a good parallel to the seed planted in Mal's mind.

I'm sure I'll hate this movie
― is breads of india still tite (admrl)

Well maybe reading a page full of spoilers would do that
This movie was a lot better than Shutter Island and it was even more stunning visually.
(I have a friend who was dead set on not seeing this movie ever since the first previews for it came out. Maybe he just can't handle Leo or is gay for him and doesn't want me to find out. He seems to not want to see any Leo movies which is odd)

I liked how this movie kept me thinking or kept my mind stimulating the whole time per se (lots to marvel at when there is so many levels and time lengths going on + artistic beauty). I know that I was in the thinker pose for ten minutes - the one where I have my fingers rolled back under my chin or pinching my goatee. I noticed this because I don't normally do that

Plus I saw most of Brazil a couple weeks ago and it was ten times better than what I remembered from when I saw it in High School

yeah DEVIL was one of the previews and when it finally mentioned 'from the mind of m. night s_____' everyone started laughing. harsh.

liked when juno said the word 'buried' like a canadian. kinda wondering how old she'll be before she doesn't seem like a teenager.

eternal sunshine handled dreams/memories way more "realistically" and interesting
― max

I hated the artistic direction in that movie so much that I couldn't watch more than half the film. It was so conveniently placed that I couldn't stop thinking of it as nothing more than a tool for "let's shove some art in these bits because it's so easy to to picture it in this scene and it will look cool"
- Lorax

spoiler
spoiler
it was definitely a dream at the end--the kids were wearing the same goddamn clothes theyd been wearing all movie
spoiler
― max,

that proves absolutely nothing.. read my take on the dream vs. reality thing 2 or 3 posts up

*It is implied multiple times that being in 'limbo' can cause great harm to one's mind. When Saito says he will honor Cobb's agreement shortly after he is shot, Cobb replies that if he goes into limbo, he won't even remember they had an agreement. Yet he goes into limbo, and does remember, in the last sequence.* -San Te

I could be wrong but I thought that Cobb was talking about "if Japanese dude goes into Limbo". Also, maybe what he meant when he said this is that if you go into limbo you might be gone for a long time or forever and therfor forget the agreement. Also, maybe he didn't remember going into Limbo - I don't see real proof of him remembering. - Lorax

*Cobb says he and Mal spent about 50 years in limbo, and there are shots of them 'growing old together', hand in hand, as elder adults. Yet when both lie on the train tracks, committing suicide and returning to reality, they are both their young selves again. - San Te

Maybe they shape-shifted - Lorax

------

A couple things:

The Japanese dude realistically wouldn't have been able to help Leo be accepted back in US. But it's not a far stretch to believe that something like that could happen in a crazy fiction movie where people go into other people's dreams.

Regarding the Press quote upthread: "None of this prattling drivel adds up to one iota of cogent or convincing logic. You never know who anyone is, what their goals are, who they work for or what they're doing." - Rex Reed
-That's not exactly true. There's people with real goals in this. Not to mention that some groups work well together solely because everyone in it is cool in their own unique way (we don't need to hear everyone's exact motive). The Inception posse was just there being cool like Buckaroo Banzai's posse or The Warriors gang
-And what "convincing logic" did this Rex Reed guy expect out of this fantasy film? Scientific explanations as to how people can go inside other people's dreams? What an idiot

I really loved this! Saw it in a packed theatre and there was a huge "AWWWHHHH!!" at the end. I definitely lost the plot some way through, with whose dream we were in and what had to happen in what order. Also the different dream layers meant the end of the film could have an action climax, an emotional climax and I guess the espionage plot climax all pretty much at the same time. Nice. It did feel a bit Shutter Islandy in places, though.

one of my friends just facebooked complaining that Mr. Nolan didn't need to make his movies "10 hours" long. Is 2 hours and 20 minutes really that long?

It REALLY didn't feel like a long 2 hrs 20 mins to me. I was flat out exhausted yet it kept my attention the whole time.

then again this friend is a contrarian idiot

I just saw it tonight and quite liked it! I think the strongest argument for it holding up to repeat viewing is its lack of a reliance on a twist.

Nolan's non-Batman movies (Memento, The Prestige) while v. v. good are both completely different watches the first time around - they rely on the viewer to know nothing in order to surprise and manipulate them. Ironically, while Inception was shrouded in secrecy and I'm glad that I went in mostly blind to the plot, I don't think there's much here that is particularly shocking. The set pieces and the characters and the handful of emotions that there are stand on their own quite successfully.

Needless to say, stunning visually - best depiction of lucid dreaming since Waking Life and/or Eternal Sunshine. I liked how they papered over the moral implications of inception fairly quickly at the beginning - bla bla energy monopoly bla bla. If it's that risky and difficult one would think that motivations and so on mattered more, but that is the point of Leo's monomaniacal guilt about Mol.

best depiction of lucid dreaming since Waking Life and/or Eternal Sunshine

or even vanilla sky

hiyoooooo

Thought the love story side of it wasn't flawless in that mol was this total harpy in Cobb's subconscious. You never saw whatever the good side of their relationship was or had been. But perhaps it was just a story about Cobb and nobody else.

(Possible spoilers)

Just reading the Philip French review in the Observer:

But because he's suspected of killing his wife (Marion Cotillard), Cobb cannot return to America to see his children. He has, in fact, left her isolated in a distant dream limbo, which not unnaturally has left him riddled with guilt.

The second part of this isn't right is it? She's dead, so Mol is only in Cobb's subconscious?

yeah the story he tells us is that they both came back from limbo via getting run over by a train

but she couldn't deal with the idea that maybe nothing was real

so she killed herself irl

and she 'exists' in what i think is dream space designed by cobb? that elevator shaft that juno gets in on is something he's 'created' i guess, given that she is able to access it.

bothered me a bit how they played so fast and loose with the time differential between the different layers - if they were really on different clocks the gravity shifts wouldnt be so sudden, etc. but i was generally ok with it, it was for a reason.

This isn't right, though.

All of those actions are happening at the same time; the issue is that perception stretches the sensation out. You would expect the jolts in the van to affect the dreamscape in the hotel exactly when they happened, only the sensation in the hotel would last what, 12 times? as long to the people in the dream.

The part I thought was interesting was how they handwaved multiple layers of the dream away from each other; GGL's dream was directly influenced by the physics of the chemist's dream, but since he wasn't in the forger's dream the spatial weirdness didn't translate to there and being asleep in that dream buffered everyone else from it.

it's a fine movie. it was hardly the second coming of Kubrik or something that all the secrecy and advance hype would lead you to believe. I think it's a pretty good crime movie but as far as depictions of lucid dreaming, I preferred Eternal Sunshine. It's still really good.

My biggest problem was that everyone seemed too young. I know that makes me seem really old. But like, didn't we just see Ellen Page playing a high school kid a year ago, and Joseph Gorden Levitt still seems like the kid from 3rd Rock from the Sun, and I don't konw when Leo Decaprio is going to seem like an adult to me but he still looks like a kid wearing a fake beard.

JGL is a more convincing adult than Leo, I think.

didn't we just see Ellen Page playing a high school kid a year ago

And she was playing a college kid now -- not a big leap!

**spoiler**

still dont "get" the whole "limbo" thing? if you can just get out of it by killing yourself, why did leo and marion stay there for like 50 years? or did they never leave????????????

― max, Friday, July 16, 2010 1:04 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

@max -- I think the concept behind "limbo" was that it was raw mental activity, and you don't necessarily know right away that you're in it. Which makes sense as to why Leo's character had to 'plant' the thought in his wife's mind that the world wasn't real.

My interpretation is that Marion and Leo did leave. but, the Japanese guy was then in limbo since he then died before the "kick". they never showed him offing Leo, so whether they actually woke up at the end is debatable, as evidenced by them not showing whether the top stopped spinning.

Good lord I'm going crosseyed.

― San Te, Friday, July 16, 2010 3:09 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

did anyone have a better answer for this?

nope.

i think they stayed because they liked it there and created a big imaginary city together. but mol liked it more than cobb.

or, yeah, maybe they never left. it's totally possible. but that would be kind of unsatisfying, because it would mean everything in the film was just happening in cobb's imaginaish.

ok but--if you can just get out of limbo by killing yourself, why is it such a big scary deal to be in it??

as to whether they looked like old people at the end or not... im pretty sure that question is left 'ambiguous' i.e. fudged

ok but--if you can just get out of limbo by killing yourself, why is it such a big scary deal to be in it??

― max, Sunday, July 18, 2010 3:46 PM (10 seconds ago) Bookmark

well indeed. and also there's no 'kick' from train death whereas juno and cillian murphbro both need that falling sensation to get out

The issue was that when you go that deep, you can't tell whether you are awake or dreaming. Cobb and Mal went there intentionally and Mal still got confused as to what was real, leading to the original inception and the movie's central tragedy. The issue they were having on the caper is that, due to the sedation, dying in the dream would send you to this place that you assume is reality but actually isn't, leaving you as this total world-shaping god in your mind as you actual body deteriorates. The bit that is unclear which I am extrapolating is that since time is so elongated at that level, your psyche may die of perceived old age, leaving your body a vegetable.

yah the problems w/limbo is being that deep in yr minds eye fucks w/yr head and one year there is like one minute irl so if youre getting headfucked for hundreds of limbo years and you wake up an irl lil while longer youre gonna be all WHAT BRO WHAT I JUST HAD THE CRAZIEST DREAM

btw agree w/whoever said leos limbo suckd balls juno was all 'omg u maade this' but compared w/like everything else in the move it was pretty dull

Leo's world was Vogsphere from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie crossed with Wall-E's opening sequence = Cobb was just an sf nerd.

All of those actions are happening at the same time; the issue is that perception stretches the sensation out. You would expect the jolts in the van to affect the dreamscape in the hotel exactly when they happened, only the sensation in the hotel would last what, 12 times? as long to the people in the dream.

yes but in the hotel the gravity was shifting as fast as the car was spinning out in rainy city dream. if it was 12 times faster they wouldn't have been flung around like that, it would have been more like the hallway was slowly rotating

or ~would it~

also, those who said it was hard to hear the dialoge were right; it was really hard to understand anything Saito said, and not just because of his accent; the volume just wasn't loud enough (compared to how fucking loud everything else was, including the score). maybe it was the theater I was in.

it was not my man

Mal is so unpleasant in Cobb's subconscious because she's an embodiment of his feelings of guilt.

Nolan does like to use fucking mad big dynamic range between dialogue and BOOMS; the DVD of Dark Knight is nightmarishly loud for the explosions and gunshots and very very quiet for the hushed spoken wordy bits.

i loved this and the more i think abt it the more it seems that it would take enormous self-belief to conceive of this story and then not immediately scrap as waaaay too convoluted and silly. to actually pull it off is pretty amazing imo.

I didn't have any trouble hearing the dialogue.

I didn't have any trouble hearing dialogue either, but the francophone couple sitting next to us got up and walked out 20 min into the film. I figure it was because they couldn't follow the dialogue.

or didn't like the 'mad french broad' stereotype

yes but in the hotel the gravity was shifting as fast as the car was spinning out in rainy city dream. if it was 12 times faster they wouldn't have been flung around like that, it would have been more like the hallway was slowly rotating

Well no, not really. Think about how fast that spinning would have been in the rainy city dream; maybe that car would have rolled 5 - 10 seconds? The speed at which gravity was shifting in the hotel was a good bit slower and not directly synchronized with the rolling van, although it appeared that way due to editing since they kept jumping out to the higher level to show the dream van rolling, then back into the hotel to show how it was fucking with gravity, then back, with both events stopping when the van righted itself.

you may be right but i still think they cheated it a bit... which is fine, movies cheat with space and time all the time

Oh yeah, I don't think it was a perfect ration or anything, but they made enough of a nod to the time dilation for it to make sense, kind of like how dude got a faceful of water in the van and rain pelted the window of the hotel for several seconds, or how he slumped over in the van on a hard turn and hotel trembled for several seconds and the water in all of the glasses tilted for a good bit longer than the turn actually was.

yeah i think the hotel was rocking more slowly than the car was rocking. it didn't matter too much to me really: i thought the interaction between the two was great. but the snow fortress stuff, partly because there was no correspondence, was less interesting. they spent less time there so it wasn't a big deal.

the raining/peeing thing was funny esepcially because i really had to pee at the time

marion cotillard looked less fishlike and way hotter in this than she sometimes does which I attribute to good angles.

one of my friends just facebooked complaining that Mr. Nolan didn't need to make his movies "10 hours" long. Is 2 hours and 20 minutes really that long?

It REALLY didn't feel like a long 2 hrs 20 mins to me..

Felt completely opposite there for me, I honestly thought we'd only hit the two hour mark when the film ended! And I knew it was two and a half hours long so I was expecting more. (I try not to look at the time when watching a movie first time through; even if you know how long the movie is that way you can let it hopefully unfold at its own pace.)

i don't suppose it pays to inspect the internal logic of a summer blockbuster too closely (friend of mine used to call this "james bonding" a film) but i feel like either it's all leo's dream or things are awfully ham-handed. i choose the former.

premises are too simplistic -- fuel monopoly superpower! one call from saito fixes all troubles! if i just accomplish this one task everything will be fine!

hey juno's name is ariadne wot a coincidence.

i guess those bad guys in mombasa were agents of leo's former employer (who set him on saito)? the whole sequence was awfully dream-like with dudes coming after him and then look! saito is here, in a car, protecting his investment!

who was michael caine? was he a professor in paris or was he looking after the kids in the usa, as at the end? why couldn't he just take the kids outside the country to where cobb could see them? (was he mal's dad? and if so, why wasn't he pissed at cobb for "killing" her?)

dude like cobb flits around the globe like bond but is compelled to enter the usa through an airport on his own real passport? he couldn't just steal the kids away?

was there any explanation for why the top had to fall over if things were real? like, why couldn't you just dream it falling over?

anyway, i liked it a lot and yeah you don't want to make the movie five hours long trying to explain every detail. and there are limits to how crazy you want to get in the movie. pretty sure if those were my dreams, in some level i (and/or everyone else) would be naked, wandering around my college campus trying to find the class i've skipped all semester so i can take the final i need to graduate. (tmi?)

the great pete postlethwaite was sadly underused imo. dude should have been 50 feet tall tearing shit up in cillian's dreams.

i feel like either it's all leo's dream or things are awfully ham-handed. i choose the former.

There've been very few movies I've seen where I wonder what happened both before the very first frame and after the very last one, so I really have to give the movie that.

premises are too simplistic -- fuel monopoly superpower! one call from saito fixes all troubles! if i just accomplish this one task everything will be fine!

this doesn't matter, and tonnes of "more serious" films have things like it. who gd cares.

i guess those bad guys in mombasa were agents of leo's former employer (who set him on saito)? the whole sequence was awfully dream-like with dudes coming after him and then look! saito is here, in a car, protecting his investment!

it is indeed dreamlike... as mol says in the film! this is part of its ambiguity/have cake and eat it license.

*spoilers everywhere in this thread*

XPs: The dudes weren't getting thrown around all quick-like in the spinning hallway. It was more like they kept losing their balance and fell over a few times.

I'm still taking the end of the movie as reality restored and the stuff like the kids wearing the same clothes are merely coincidences there to make you believe the contrary (and be planted with the same type of seed Mal was planted with). It's a hedge war but I'm on the right side this time. Saito's awesome power of Cobb's passport has no sway in the pro-dreaming argument for me. Dude's got connections. I was thinking that everything could be a dream throughout the whole movie (or just post waking up on the plane) - did anyone else forsee that the ending would ultimately reveal that it was all a dream or leave it questionable? I mean the dream within a dream idea was planted as a possibility right from the get go

The totem idea was a cool concept but you have to take it for fact because the logic behind it is weird

Also, I couldn't help but wonder why the snow world wasn't in Zero gravity

Those are just minor grievances and maybe there's a good explanation I don't remember hearing

Saw it last night. Bear in mind I was asleep for most of the second half, but I thought it was loud and kind of unrelenting and strangely dull. Also pretty much everyone seemed totally miscast. But I freely admit this type of movie is not my cup of borscht and I wouldn't normally even go to see such a thing, but it was hot and wifey dragged me.

the moombassa scene was so weird... what was with the whole "let's meet back here, they'll never guess" thing? seemed totes unness.