Above all i like the way they has portrayed the story over screen.
I watched this last night. Very good. But I’ll have to watch it another 3 times to understand the whole thing.
you will? why? what didn’t you understand?
Just who was dreaming when and why.
as for the why, all i can say is that they were all on a mission to implant an idea deep in this guy who was the heir to a large corporation.
Yeah, I got that part. It just seemed so confusing as to who was dreaming at the time and why that person was chosen. Plus, they didn’t seem to flesh out clearly reasons why they go into limbo if they get killed in a dream within a dream within another dream. Plus, what was the confrontation about near the end between decaprio and the aged Japanese fellow on that long table?
it’s been too long since i’ve seen it.
The aged Japanese fellow was Saito who had been shot in one of the dreams and was thus wallowing in limbo (aged Saito), Cobb rescues him from said limbo so that Saito would be alive and well in the “real” world in order to satisfy his end of the deal i.e. getting Cobb back into the States.
But, to be honest, Cobb should’ve just moved his kids to France. meh.
yeah, sometimes the motives in movies are just unreasonable.
My incomplete take on this was that Saito was to Cobb as Cobb was to Robert Fischer.
I took the story to implicate that Saito was implanting the idea of Cobb’s separation from Mal by the discussion of how subtle a method must be to implant an idea into another person.
So to me, it struck me that Cobb had to implant the idea of separation and closure into Robert Fischer so that the same idea would implant into his own subconscious, so that Cobb could separate from Mal and find closure.
I understood Mal’s interwoven infestation of Cobb’s subconscious, bleeding out from the trapped confines in which he kept her, to be mirrored in the Cobol corporation’s singular grip and impending threat to the world by being the sole energy supplier unless broken up and scattered instead of retained in a singular ownership.
To me, it seemed that the entire story was about liberating Cobb from Cobb and nothing else.
There is a real needless focus on Cobb’s psychological wellbeing by most primary characters involved in the film, and Miles’ convenient requirement to be involved in the first place is littered with nothing but immediate challenges to Cobb’s character and decisions.
On the coat-tails of this, the requirement that Cobb no longer architecturally builds anything contradicts itself when constructs of only his mind start showing up in the dreams, and seems more like a justification to keep Mal locked up in his constructed memories rather than any seeming threat to other individuals.
It would be fitting that the only way to actually pull Cobb out from this self-entrapment would be to get him to think that he was rescuing another person by going deep into limbo to pull them out; only after first letting Mal kill him.
From this angle, how I understood the story to be moving, it was not odd to see Saito so personal towards the end of the show, nor odd to see everyone looking Cobb over in approval.
To me, it seemed quite probable that Cobb’s exile was psychologically self-imposed, not exactly physically self-imposed.
It seemed to me that he was only able to return home (where ever that is in his mind) after first finding his closure and separation from Mal, liberation from limbo, and redemption in self-forgiveness. Only after the Fischer event, where these things take place, is Saito willing to offer papers that will remove Cobb’s exile from home.
I don’t have it all laid out cleanly, as I’ve only just now seen the film once the other night.
But I do see Fischer as the created mirror of Cobb for Cobb to manipulate himself through manipulating Fischer.
Their relationships are very similar in their internal conflicts, and the ideas being planted are more arising of issues in Cobb than in Fischer.
The only other thing I have to add is this:
I’m not so sure that Totem’s are actually real.
Cobb doesn’t have one; he has his wife’s.
That fact alone breaks the rule of how the Totem’s work.
The audience is also not given a Totem, and Saito doesn’t appear to have a Totem (along with some of the others).
Saito, instead, seems to just figure it out in the early scene from feeling a rug that he remembers in his own life…without any Totem.
The only ones that are shown using Totem’s are Cobb, Arthur (who seemed to me like Cobb’s own “Mr. Charles”; he just struck me as an “Agent Smith” kind of character, and seemed to be more of a bodyguard for Cobb needlessly rather than just a partner in work), and Ariadne - who does so at the instruction of Cobb.
But mostly, the ending to me wasn’t really that much of a tease because even if the Totem fell over…it A) wasn’t Cobb’s, and B) it had been in the hands of Saito; but mostly A, it wasn’t Cobb’s.
If it fell, so what?
If it kept going…so what?
It wouldn’t help by the rule of the Totem that he describes because it wasn’t uniquely his; it belonged to his wife, who now is partially in control of various aspects of his subconscious.
So…how would that Totem ever help him determine if he’s in or out of a dream if Mal (in his mind) can manipulate it since she (in his mind) knows it as well as he does, if not better?
So to me; the ending was not terribly much of a tease.
We don’t ever have anything in that show that is a clear basis of reality by any guidelines listed in the movie.
We don’t have any guarantee that the movie even started in reality to begin with.
Alright, I’m tangenting all over the place.
I’ll just cut it off there.
I look forward to watching the show again.
Oh…one last thought about the show…
The name is really appropriate.
The film tells you jack shit directly.
Instead, it merely suggests concepts that form into ideas in your own mind.
The idea of what that movie is, is something that was subtly suggested into your mind by the film.
The fun part is…no one really must walk away with the same Inception.
I was just thinking about this some more and realized that this interpretation would then present Mal as not really dead, but still quite alive.
The projections of her would, instead, not be projections at all; that would be what Cobb believes they are only, blinding the obvious pieces of information to the opposite from his view.
For instance, it would explain the comings and goings of Mal; how she is not always there; as being places where Cobb has locked her away in memory.
These memories would then be places where his defenses would not infiltrate.
If they won’t infiltrate, then these are the only safe places that a real and living Mal could insert into Cobb’s dreams from.
Thereby, Cobb would think that he has a projected Mal trapped inside of his mind deeply, and away from the rest of his mind; deep in his subconscious.
It would then mean that she isn’t really killing anyone; that when she shot Fischer, it was to further her plot - not destroy and foil Cobb’s.
She was actually trying to still wake him up.
When he shot her, he really shot her.
It’s possible that she went to Limbo, but it’s also possible (if the dreamworld represents any reality that Mal lives in societally) that Mal’s sedatives would be low enough to allow her back out when being shot. shrug
In either case, it would primarily mean that she hired Saito to help her rescue her husband after she actually made it back out and not him.
That when she lept off of the building she was right.
That when he hears his children through the phone saying, “When are you coming back Daddy?”, he’s hearing some remnant of them asking him that at some point in reality while visiting him in his coma.
This would also explain why Totem’s seem to not really be needed, but as far as Cobb is concerned; they are absolutely required.
He believes that his Totem’s tell him which reality is the right reality, but doesn’t know what anyone else’s Totems should do and therefore cannot verify if there is an inconsistency of the opinion.
He just assumes that everyone else’s Totems are saying that this is reality just because his does.
And it would reinforce that Totems aren’t really needed, thereby explaining Saito’s lack of one, and require that Totems only needed to determine when Cobb is right; safe.
The spinning Totem at the end; it wobbles, and this would make the question, “Is he going to find out that he’s not in his reality, or still continue on in his delusion?”
What it would require is to think that, though they did not succeed in pulling him back to reality; Mall and Saito were able to pull him to a layer much more closer to reality than his previous reality.
I mean, really…the guy thinks super secret corporate assassin organizations are after him.
And yet he kicks their ass everywhere.
He’s a James Bond in a Mission Impossible dream to continuously go deeper into his own psyche, and hopefully back - he tells himself at least.
For all we know he just continues to dig deeper and deeper into his subconscious by telling himself a new layer is the actual and real layer of reality.
Moving down like a tide leaving a beach; one part up, two parts down.
So why, at the end of the movie, do Cobb’s kids appear exactly as his subconscious projections of them? That’s suspicious. Wouldn’t they be older, dressed differently, not in the exact same positions as they were in his subconscious?
…unless it IS a dream, as the ending of the movie leaves possible.
Exactly, but every other clue tends to point in the direction that he chose reality over the dream world. For instance the last conversation he had with Mal, where he seemed to make peace with her and decide to move on.
dun dun dun…
he chose what he THOUGHT was reality over the dream world. but, we know that people can get confused about what is and isn’t reality (in the context of that movie), by example of his wife getting confused about that very thing.
and what about his totem? or was he wrong about how totems could verify reality from dream? or didn’t he care.
perhaps he got confused about what his totem was
yeah. it’s the fact that his kids were exactly like his projections of his kids that definitely struck me as odd. it must have been intentional.
I didn’t take them to be real at the end.
Like I said, his Totem is not a really good indicator.
The better indicator is the illogic of the situation at hand, to me.
I saw Miles being there in America when he’s based in France himself, just to show Cobb the kids, as something lacking sound reason or logic.
Miles was in France, teaching; suddenly he was in America at Cobb and Mal’s house where the kids are?
And who’s taking care of the kids?
They just seem to be hanging around in…limbo…waiting for Cobb.
I don’t think he ever hit reality; he’s just closer than he started to getting back out to reality because now he has closure and separation from his guilt over Mal (which was false guilt…he believed that she died, but she didn’t die).
That closure and separation are better than the shutdown and denial he had before regarding Mal.
Now, at least he accepts the vision of her positively.
That, I think, was the entire endeavor of the Inception of Cobb.
Ambitious movie. Points for that. Bordering on silly at times, though. And yet it seemed to take itself very seriously. Too seriously, I think.
7/10