Inception (with implanted spoilers)

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 (1 year ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i thought that was because they wanted to stay there because they were enjoying it?

Because they wanted to?

like their life there was a drug or something

Because they liked it

It wasn't like they were trapped and struggling to find a way home for 50 years, it was more "WHEE FUN PLAYTIME WOO" and then Leo got bored and restless

Who would not want to spend an eternity recreating all the houses they'd ever lived in :\

... maybe he was incepted into assassinating his wife

okay but then why is it such a "big deal" to "go to limbo"

I prob mentioned this up thread but this was the dumbest part of the movie, if I lived in magic fantasy land the last thing I'd wanna do is chill in my shitty old apartment

^^^

basically everything about what people actually dream/fantasize about in this movie came across as wrong and stupid to me

Ya but since it's not actually about dreaming who cares really

Basically every dream sequence should star Fernando Rey and Stephane Audran discussing the perfect dry martini.

That might just be me, cuz when I was a kid I loved the character creation process of D&D but always got bored playing the actual game

word.

basically my favorite thing about Nolan, and really the only thing about his work that really "stands out" to me, is that he injects humorless po-faced philosophy into his movies. no, it's not terribly profound and it is terribly rote sometimes, but it's like the explicit purpose of his films to be brain teasers.

― ryan, Monday, October 24, 2011 12:25 PM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

he likes puzzles and paradox, and those have a sort of aesthetic value on their own.

― ryan, Monday, October 24, 2011 12:26 PM (7 hours ago) Bookmark

i totally agree w/ this but i feel like brain teaser movies are so much better when there's a bit more of a playfulness on the surface that let's you forget you're supposed to be *thinking hard* about this stuff. when a movie wears its complexity on its sleeve as much as Inception it kind of loses most of the points it would otherwise score for complexity imo.

Ya but since it's not actually about dreaming who cares really

but they kept trying to make me care by blabbing on about it endlessly! OH NOES DON'T DO THAT YOU'LL BE STUCK IN LIMBO wait waht

i think limbo was a metaphor for heroin or movies or interior decoration or

ilx

i am posting from L2 ilx

it goes twice as fucking slow in here, but brodie is way funnier. whoa.

look at alfred bustin out soupçon! im always hittin dictionary.com when i read that n*gg*'s posts

is there a "definitive" take on Inception? I remember some pretty wild theories about it circulating. (like it's really Leo being incepted, etc.)

xp: ha!

― ryan, Monday, October 24, 2011 12:38 PM (9 hours ago) Bookmark

i think the one about it really being ~about filmmaking~ is pretty good

great tweet from earlier in the year: "It's official: INCEPTION has replaced THE MATRIX as the annoying film that all my philosophy students bring up, regardless of relevance."

also:

speculation as to which movie Tape Store will endorse to hate in 2011?

― Bitch, it cold outside!!! BURR (San Te), Monday, 27 December 2010 19:05 (9 months ago)

MIDNIGHT IN PARIS, tho I w/o fifty minutes in...

The limbo level is totally like my dreams.

do you love buildings of that type?

Ha! My wife and I have had similar conversations, yeah.

Surprised there wasn't more nudity in this.

I wonder where you got the idea there would be more nudity...?

INCEPTED

sincepted

^^^ "Inception" done in the style of "Sin City"

These dream movies where the hallways are bouncing around or we're painting with flowers now or Eddie Albert's the president on a subway car… seems like there should be somebody naked, if not the lady in some ticket window, then the protagonist himself locked in a conference room.

You need to watch Paprika.

I had a dream the other night where I was assembling a flashlight. That was it.

Did it turn on? Usually batteries are pretty sluggish in dreams.

No! All I did was struggle to put it together.

And then people shot at me with machine guns for 45 minutes.

/scene

I totally get Max's confusion, because the movie was kinda unclear about the Limbo thing. IIRC the level Leo and Marion wasn't Limbo, it was just a deep level of dreaming where time moved really slow (since time moves slower the lower the level you are on is). They spent so much time there because the wanted to, but also because they couldn't get out (there was no outsider to wake them up, they relied on some automatic waking mechanism, so they had to stay there until that kicked in).

Limbo, on the other hand, is a place where you end up if you die while inside the dream. When you're in Limbo, you forget that you are inside a dream, so you're lost there. The only way to get out of Limbo is to kill yourself, but since you don't know that you're dreaming, you're not likely to do that. This is why they are so upset when the Japanese guy dies inside the dream. The reason Marion killed herself was because she thought she was in Limbo, and wanted to "wake up".

However, the movie itself confuses the two in the finale. Leo is clearly shown to be entering the fourth level on dreaming, the one she and Marion spent 50 years in, yet somehow he finds the Japanese guy there, even though he's supposed to be in Limbo, and Limbo is supposed to be an altogether different place. (I guess they did this because otherwise there'd be no explanation why Leo didn't forget he was dreaming, even though the Japanese guy did).

I thought this was one of the biggest flaws in the movie: it spent so much time explaining the mechanistic rules of inception, yet in the end didn't follow those rules itself. Paradoxically, if it hadn't been some damn logical about the dreamworld and opted for a more surreal approach, the finale would've made more sense.

"the level where Leo and Marion were wasn't Limbo"

They should have had someone come in at the end and explain it some more for 15 minutes.

Like the end of "Psycho.

A late-period Orson Welles, preferably.

Aren't there some clues that Marion was right? At the very least, this is an open possibility, and I guess that's why I'm hesitant to really say I've understood what's actually happening in the movie.

lars von trier in a tux

"Ladies and gentleman, what you have seen today has been very confusing ..."

when I first saw it I had the idea that maybe it was constructed like the Escher stairs it depicts at one point, that it leads back into itself at some point. but that's probably wrong and im too lazy to put all that effort into finding out if that's true.

A lot of hand-waving with the limbo thing, but what I got was that you have to somewhat trick your mind into getting you out of there. It's just kind of glaring in a movie where things are spelled out, Ellen Page and Cillian Murphy's characters were able to just get knocked out of there. I assumed it was because it was lining up with the "kicks" in the other dream levels?

Cobb was able to get out because he'd done it before, and he confronts the fact that his version of the dead wife wasn't real and that somehow freed him. The "ah hah" moment of the film was when Cobb quotes Saito's line about being an old man, and turning it around was kind of the "I tricked Saito into incepting himself" moment to me.

So I guess that kind of covers how all four characters get out of there? Really, the limbo bit read to me as if you had to come level of self-consciousness in order to make it away.

http://i40.tinypic.com/148n88x.jpg

http://inception.davepedu.com/

all that use of the word "Architect" reminded me too much of the Matrix sequels. why couldn't they just say "designey people"?

― latebloomer, Wednesday, July 21, 2010 10:43 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink