Inception

Steve M.

Steve M.

Jedi Master
Hi All,

Went and saw the movie inception with my wife the other night. I liked it, though it was violent. Then what movie these days isn't.

Couldn't quite grasp it all (hearing issue). It is said to be 007 meets the Matrix, but I found that to not be factual, since I think the Matrix referred more to thinking outside the box than going deeper into it. The clips/commercials of the movie don't do it justice I don't think.

The movie is about dreaming and levels of dreams (dreams inside of dreams, inside of dreams..) and manipulating/influencing people. There was an occasion where I think the movie is broken cause there is no way to tell if the star is awake, since his interaction with his totem* is broken.

*A totem is something that allows a person to know they are awake.

I wish I was able to hear better since there were a couple of areas where what was spoken lightly I couldn't discern and I didn't want to interrupt my wife while she was trying to watch it and say, "what'd she/he say?" So that left me without a full grasp of the movie as a whole. Outside of that, I thought it was a very original concept and was curious what others thought about it, or if anyone else had watched it?
 
I saw it yesterday and I thought it was good but not great. I didn't think that it was really all that similar to the matrix as some may say but maybe more like the Thirteenth Floor.

*Spoilers*



It is about a group of individuals that are hired to go into someone's dreams and plant an idea so deep in his mind that he doesn't even know that it is not his. They say in the movie that this is impossible because people would always know if an idea is planted in their heads and who planted it there. I thought this was pretty far from reality. Especially with all the mind control going on or if something like what is in Operators and Things is going on.

I thought it was interesting how they portrayed some of the dream sequences where the individuals could create their own reality literally and create bridges or warp the landscape but I thought that this was done too little in the movie. Most of the dream sequences were completely normal and seemed like any other movie.

An interesting concept brought up was how time is distorted in dreams. I don't remember the exact figures but I think something like 10 minutes of dreaming in the real world would equal 1 hour in the dream. And in the movie they would go into multiple layers of dreams meaning that they would go into the dreams of a person in a dream and then do it again. In these deeper layers time would be distorted in a similar fashion so that in one layer 3 seconds would pass and in the deepest layer 10 years would pass.

In the dream if someone would die then they would wake up but like in the matrix if they were hurt it would affect their mind and cause the injury in real life.

Another interesting idea was that when the dreamer was knocked out with drugs to make them sleep preventing them from waking up and they died in a dream then they would go to "limbo" which was described as the pure subconscious or unconscious of the person. There they may have the perception of having had an infinite amount of time pass before they would wake up driving them insane. This reminded me of what the C's had said about some of those that participated in the Philadelphia Experiment.

Overall I thought it was good with some interesting ideas but I thought that there could have been better utilization of the concepts in the story. I would have liked all the dreams to actually seem like dreams with a high strangeness factor.
 
I saw Inception the other day, and I was disappointed. Christopher Nolan (the writer/director) seems to have tried to make his own 'Matrix' but has ended up with 'Matrix-lite'. He said that he has been working on the idea and script for Inception for ten years. The Matrix was released in 1999 and clearly made a huge impression on Nolan, as it did on many people who saw it.

Masamune said:
I would have liked all the dreams to actually seem like dreams with a high strangeness factor.
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I agree with you, Masamune. There was really little to no strangeness in the dream sequences, just mind-numbing relentless violence. It was hard sometimes to remember whether the characters were in a dream or in reality. Or perhaps that was the point. The film as a whole lacks the kind of compelling philosophical sub-text that was present in The Matrix.

After watching about three quarters of the film, I found that I really did not care one way or the other what happened to the characters, and the ending was really rather predictable. It's a shame as good sci-fi movies are thin on the ground, but Inception is not one of them, imho.
 
I saw it last week and tend to agree. The dream sequences was too close to real life....I don't know anyone that dreams 'exactly' like real life.
I may buy it when I'm dreaming, but the content is always so fluid and removed from real life I found the portrayal of the dream states quite jarring in the end.
I don't know what most peoples level of control is over there dreams, but on the odd occasion I find myself (rarely now I stopped playing computer games all the time) in the middle of a gun battle or car chase, the laws of physics do not apply! Stopping bullets (neo style), shields, teleportation, passing through solid objects, flying, telekinesis.....changing the landscape in any big way is something I've never been able to do though? :huh:

fwiw the only time I've seen a dream portrayed anywhere near the way I understand them is in dream sequences in Babylon 5 or Buffy the Vampire Slayer.......where things are fluid/flowing, strange, the laws of physics don't quite apply and where objects can pop in and out of existence.
 
spoiler alert!!!!!!!!!!!!

The one thing that the movie seems to have down is that our own subconscious can own us, much like what happens in real life- although we don't see it consciously.

I am also curious at the ending. He spins his totem and it does not fall. It was also curious that his children did the same exact movements as they did in his dream. Also, how was his father in law ready at the airport to pick him up? That seemed a bit too convinienct. Did he not wake up in time? The idea about life being a dream also attracted me, as I have thought of this in elementary school. I learned to keep it quiet as people thought I was crazy to think that. I know it is not probably so, but seeing how people nowadays think our own media is telling the truth makes me wonder if they are the dreamers and I am not, LOL.

Having gone through a dream within a dream within a dream in childhood and being perplexed yet amazed, I can understand that reality may not be all it seems, even if we live here under a strong sedative. I have also had many dreams that linked to external events. For example, a dream of diffusing a bomb, and my alarm which runs only a minute at most going off right when the bomb hit 0:00. How is that possible? Perhaps dreams are non-linear and our perspective in this world make it linear??

I do prefer The Thirteenth Floor and Dark City over this, however this was not without its merits in challenging ideas.
 
RedFox said:
I saw it last week and tend to agree. The dream sequences was too close to real life....I don't know anyone that dreams 'exactly' like real life.
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I think this is explained in the movie by the fact that the dreams are artificial creations, i.e. the environment and people (aside from projections) are planned and stable.
 
Approaching Infinity said:
RedFox said:
I saw it last week and tend to agree. The dream sequences was too close to real life....I don't know anyone that dreams 'exactly' like real life.
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I think this is explained in the movie by the fact that the dreams are artificial creations, i.e. the environment and people (aside from projections) are planned and stable.
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Not to mention the perspective of the "viewer" portrayed in the film... in dreams things can be wild, but we believe them because they are embedded in us. I wish I had the time to explain the odd dreams I had that I thought were perfectly normal because I was in them. Without the worldly mechanical physics in the way, our brains can comprehend even the most oddest of realities. It makes me wonder about the non-linearity of dreams!
 
Divide By Zero said:
Not to mention the perspective of the "viewer" portrayed in the film... in dreams things can be wild, but we believe them because they are embedded in us. I wish I had the time to explain the odd dreams I had that I thought were perfectly normal because I was in them. Without the worldly mechanical physics in the way, our brains can comprehend even the most oddest of realities. It makes me wonder about the non-linearity of dreams!
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I've had dreams in which waterfalls flowed upwards and rivers backwards. Although I was aware it was anomalous in the dream, it still made sense according to the world I was in and it was quite beautiful to watch, despite the oddity.


Divide By Zero said:
Having gone through a dream within a dream within a dream in childhood and being perplexed yet amazed, I can understand that reality may not be all it seems, even if we live here under a strong sedative.
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I once had a dream within a dream within a dream. It was an extremely strange thing, when I finally woke up to this reality and realised what I had experienced. Each successful awakening was like waking up for real and yet it wasn't (which of course I didn't realise until I woke up into this reality). And I have dreams within dreams frequently. In some of my dreams within dreams I awaken and then tell the people in my first-level dream about the dream I had, and how strange it all was. And then I wake up for real and have to retell the real versions of those same people all over again because I never actually told them about the second-level dream!
 
2 nights ago I dreamed I was in an elevator.
It started to fall and then "rotate" which felt like I was in an airplane doing loops.
Then I see this movie with a "rotating hallway" + an elevator!

I thought it was a great movie but I am obsessed with dreams.
 
I liked the movie well enough but I was also disappointed in it not being philosophical enough. I guess I figured it was going to be a dream movie more like the above-mentioned ones or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. And aside from the whole idea about the dreams being too realistic, I don't really agree with the way the dreams are "nested" in the film. If anyone experiences it differently I'd love to hear about it, but when I have dreams-within-dreams-within-dreams, or "false awakenings" as they're often called in lucid dreaming parlance, I'm pretty sure I didn't dream about going to sleep and then start another dream. The whole thing is pretty fluid. You're doing something, usually something weird, then you have this feeling of waking up and realizing it was a dream but you're actually still dreaming. You don't go to sleep again in each dream and literally nest your dreams that way, one just turns into another. I guess it could happen that way occasionally but to use that trick over and over to deceive people like in the movie? It seems unlikely.

Also the way they use the drugs within each dream to start another dream, and if you die within that dream you still go into limbo despite that it's a made up drug in the dream, seemed overly literal to me. Couldn't limbo just be reserved for the top level of not waking up? Or maybe that's what it was supposed to mean anyway. So there is a lot to pick apart and sometimes it's confusing. But if this thread hasn't ruined it through spoilers and nit-picking and you have the time and money, I would still recommend seeing it in theaters for the visuals and a few of the ideas at least.
 
Haven't seen the movie yet but I was just reading an article here which seems to suggest that this movie is not entirely fiction and that there are;

Scientific American said:
"...emerging technologies raise the prospect that, at the very least, we'll get an idea of what others are dreaming about in real time".
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:scared:
 
3D Resident said:
I once had a dream within a dream within a dream. It was an extremely strange thing, when I finally woke up to this reality and realised what I had experienced. Each successful awakening was like waking up for real and yet it wasn't (which of course I didn't realise until I woke up into this reality). And I have dreams within dreams frequently. In some of my dreams within dreams I awaken and then tell the people in my first-level dream about the dream I had, and how strange it all was. And then I wake up for real and have to retell the real versions of those same people all over again because I never actually told them about the second-level dream!
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!

Have not seen the movie yet, but now after reading some of the reviews I will give it a look....but I wanted to say to 3D Resident: Me too! I've had a dream within a dream within a dream and waking up to the same people I was explaining it all to in the dream, and man it's the strangest thing! Took me a while to close my mouth that day :O
 
I saw it the other day. I thought it was all right, but it doesn't even touch "The Matrix", imo, as I heard some people comparing it to. Great concept and ideas, but for my taste there was way too much violence.

Divide By Zero said:
I do prefer The Thirteenth Floor and Dark City over this, however this was not without its merits in challenging ideas.
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Same here.
 
I've watched it second time today and i have to watch it several more times to understand more. Is it a very good movie or a very bad one? It sure can either open one's eyes to subject of "time perspective" (How "deep" can we go? Levels of time - are there any?) or manipulate somebody (disordered) to even kill themselves (Your world isn't real and the only way out is death - actually that is not the point in the movie, although it suggests it can be solution in the very rare cause of having no other choice to free one self.). It is true on many levels - reality is where you are least creative, but when you REALLY take the creative part, your life becomes more like a dream and "they" (in the movie if you are in other's people's dreams - their subconsciousness' projections) want to supress it (to liquidate you) as if it was NOT YOUR reality/dream. There is a lot to analyse for people more intelligent that i and i'm looking forward to this subject. :) At this moment i think "Incepction" is great, and despite few stupidities i very much appreciate it. For sure it is already a cultic movie.
 
I found the movie to be mildly entertaining, although I left the threatre feeling dishevelled. It's the 2nd time this has happened in as many months. Who know's what kind of signals are being beamed to us through movies.

But just like the Dark Knight, the overall feel of the movie was captivating but a bit disturbing.
 
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