Inception

I thought it was ok, I would give it 3/5 stars. Not great, but if you are going to watch a movie anyway, watching Inception wouldn't be a waste of money IMO. I liked the idea of multi-tiered dream states, totems, how the subconscious thought-fragments would become violent towards the dreamer (dream engineer) and how his ex-wife (emotional baggage) would always show up and "ruin" things for him. On those last two points, I liked that they depicted subconscious thoughts being embedded within a person's psyche and haunting/hunting them. Hopefully that lights a bulb for some people, but I'm not going to hold my breath. I also thought the special effects were well done, and enjoyed many of the visual elements like when the apprentice folds the city on itself.

The worst part about the movie, hands down, is Leonardo's acting. Instead of his acting pulling me into the movie, I felt constantly reminded that it is Leonardo I am watching. It's like he is so self-absorbed that I get drawn to him. For comparison, it's the same thing for me with Tom Cruise (Valkyrie anyone?) but I do find Brad Pitt to be a peg or above them, at least in that regards - I really liked Pitt in 12 Monkey's.
 
svjetlonosa said:
One thing, the way I see it, is for sure: it is a cultic movie! But not in the same line of thinking with you. There were not many movies preparing audience for the Harvest, or were not so obvious.
.............. Can you imagine how many millions of viewers worldwide received these messages?
How many of them are aware of the hidden agenda implanted in their minds which will probably result like in the movie: inception of an idea.
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Nice point svjetlonosa. I'm always on the look out for propaganda that is preparing us for Harvest, I sense it, and feel it a lot of the time, but often find it difficult to pull it apart, as the camouflage used can be quite sophisticated. That's why this forum is good.
 
I just watched this movie, finally and I have to say I was abit disappointed especially given all the recommendations and hype it got.

The most significant part of it in my opinion is when they got Fischer to attack his own sub-conscious aka how they got the person to fight against himself. Interesting given the fact that, that is what the lizzies have done to us and what alot of people do to themselves regularly. Deception upon deception, layer upon layer it's mind-shattering. How does one begin to uncover the truth when faced with such odds. How could fischer have discovered the truth? If this is somehow meant to show 4th to 3rd density dynamics fischer being a 3rd density guy in his dreamworld whilst leornado and his team 4th density guys because of the knowledge and awareness they had, then it kind of accurately portrays what humanity is up against because, as clearly demonstrated in the movie, it's hard to know what is real and what is not, who is who when it comes to a dream as depicted in this movie.

This movie was also weird in that, technically leornado and his team were bad guys and it made them out to be good guys. The basic plotline is they get this guy, Fischer to break up his father's company into many pieces essentially against will. There was absolutely no sense of right or wrong. Also, another interesting part about it, is how emotions were the key to locking him in. That is essentially why they had to construct such an elaborate dream-construct for fischer for inception to work, they had to get to his emotions, rational explanations or words werent enough. Echoes of reality maybe....
 
I enjoyed it for what it was, a well constructed movie about a Heist in the mind.
As I did not watch any trailer the surprise factor was almost total for me.

Even if it wasn't that deep I enjoyed the multiple layers in the dream and how the narration was constructed and how it was filmed.
I liked the part where Di Caprio explains that he and his wife were caught in a dream for years and lived there but that an implanted idea turned tragically for them.
 
luke wilson said:
SNIP

This movie was also weird in that, technically leornado and his team were bad guys and it made them out to be good guys. The basic plotline is they get this guy, Fischer to break up his father's company into many pieces essentially against will. There was absolutely no sense of right or wrong. Also, another interesting part about it, is how emotions were the key to locking him in. That is essentially why they had to construct such an elaborate dream-construct for fischer for inception to work, they had to get to his emotions, rational explanations or words werent enough. Echoes of reality maybe....
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Yes, it was very interesting that emotions were the key to implanting the idea. Leonardo's char even stated that the best way to plant the idea would be to use positive emotions rather than negative emotions, so he would achieve a catharsis. I suppose it explains why our world doesn't go into pure suffering, because those positive things in the negative sandwich make it tasty, LOL.

I didn't really see much of a big deal about right and wrong in their job. The son was inheriting a company that was going to be so big that the Japanese man wouldn't even be able to compete. In a way they did a service by not allowing for this mega super-duper "Koch industries" to grow, LOL.


FYI, at the end of the movie you see him spin the top and it still doesn't fall even after the screen goes black. People wondered if he was still in dreamland. However, I heard from a friend that you hear the top during the credits.
 
This is at least for me, one of the best movies ever of this year, just because the way they use the topic about dreams.
The movie is about some kind of agents that use some kind of tecnology to use the dreams to work in some people and get some information, and change aspects about the person. It sounds simple, but what about if some of this agents have a severe trauma that can't just pass over it? and this trauma begin to make the work a little hard?, that's what aout Inception with Leonardo Dicaprio as the prota, directed by Christopher Nolan, the director from Batman The dark Knight.

If you want to know more here it is:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1375666/

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What I like most of this movie is the big lesson, and climax within the characters, how the seven guy of the group, the guy that have what this people wants, leave a lesson about something with is father, and how Cobb ( the leader of the group) learn in the end and with one that was his enemy at the beginin, Saito, have a chat that is just too epic and about two guys lost in the ilusion of an eternal dream.

What is most interesting is that if a simple movie can show you all this sort of thing, and a way to imagine how a dream could be used to manipulate a person, what an alligator could to to us? with all that capacity and all that tech, etc, etc, how profound they could get or how difficult could be to manipulate a being if human have just imagine a way to do it in this movie???
 
osher said:
(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.).
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What is that suggestion? Is it like: "look, we have some theory on reality and we are going to show you in our movie" or is it like reflection of director's/producer's own mind without intention to convince anyone to anything. Who would benefit from conviction that committing suicide will set somebody free?
It may be that it is just producer of the movie will to realise his/her idea. When pleasent idea is coming to my mind I want to have it realised because I feel desire to do so. Like painter, musician, writer... to transfer idea into work of art.
The movie is touching subject of "having and idea" and where such an idea may come from. Is that possible? That one person may enter into ones another mind and plant a seed of any idea? What about inspiration? Isn't that similar subject like inception? Who inspired me to do something recently? Who have I inspired and why? Am I able to trace my inspirations, where do they come from? Some of them are like being curious. I am checking where it can take me and than it is possible to assess the result of idea. In the movie rational mind was somehow negated. After inception son of the businessman was like "finished" which in my opinion is not necessary when I rethink idea or consider all aspects or possibilities which may result from such and if any output is the one which I want in my life than I may change mind.
 
I just watched this, as I got it as a Christmas present. I thought it was very good, and it did remind me of the Matrix in that it made you think of reality.

I haven't had any lucid or dreams within a dream in a long time. But I have been keeping a dream journal for a while, since it was mentioned in a session to be beneficial. But I never look at my journal to review anything and I don't think of any problems to work out in my dreams.

Isn't reality just a dream anyways? We're all just a creation of the Divine Cosmic Mind playing out a grand play of sorts. I was thinking about that after I finished watching the movie, the deeper esoteric meaning. The whole idea of questioning reality, as with the Matrix movie, is what really turned me on to alternative thinking, leading me to here. So I think I will always like movies that challenge reality.

And well, if all lives are one, when you die in this "dream", you continue in the next. The whole 3D control system is a bunch of dreams though, constructed to keep us stuck in this one without thinking about the higher ones. The real Self or Soul, is the part that is doing the dreaming.

But it definitely raises the question of what 3D and 4D can do to us concerning planting ideas in us. Our whole reality is filled with ideas. I guess those that are "real" would be the "B" influences leading to consciousness. Surely, knowledge protects, and working on oneself will help to cut through the illusions and any false ideas that may have been planted.

EDIT:

***Spoiler***

At the ending I was like, "Aww man, no way!" Because it seemed like it he could still be in a dream, having fought so hard to get back to his reality. But I like what lsjarvi says:

lsjarvi said:
He abandons the spinning top at the end because he no longer needs to be limited by his conscious mind. It doesn't matter any longer whether the top falls or not.
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Since he had resolved his inner marriage conflict and got what he wanted I guess it didn't matter if it was a dream. But then again, it was also mentioned that the top was heard falling over in the credits and I watched them again and you can still hear it spinning. I guess it was like an opened thing that keeps you wondering. I also really like the main theme during the credits, it's cool and epic sounding.
 
I like this interpretation: [spoiler alert]

_http://www.chud.com/articles/articles/24477/1/NEVER-WAKE-UP-THE-MEANING-AND-SECRET-OF-INCEPTION/Page1.html

This entire article is a major spoiler for Inception. Please do not read it until you've experienced Christopher Nolan's film for yourself.

Every single moment of Inception is a dream. I think that in a couple of years this will become the accepted reading of the film, and differing interpretations will have to be skillfully argued to be even remotely considered. The film makes this clear, and it never holds back the truth from audiences. Some find this idea to be narratively repugnant, since they think that a movie where everything is a dream is a movie without stakes, a movie where the audience is wasting their time.

Except that this is exactly what Nolan is arguing against. The film is a metaphor for the way that Nolan as a director works, and what he's ultimately saying is that the catharsis found in a dream is as real as the catharsis found in a movie is as real as the catharsis found in life. Inception is about making movies, and cinema is the shared dream that truly interests the director.

I believe that Inception is a dream to the point where even the dream-sharing stuff is a dream. Dom Cobb isn't an extractor. He can't go into other people's dreams. He isn't on the run from the Cobol Corporation. At one point he tells himself this, through the voice of Mal, who is a projection of his own subconscious. She asks him how real he thinks his world is, where he's being chased across the globe by faceless corporate goons.

She asks him that in a scene that we all know is a dream, but Inception lets us in on this elsewhere. Michael Caine's character implores Cobb to return to reality, to wake up. During the chase in Mombasa, Cobb tries to escape down an alleyway, and the two buildings between which he's running begin closing in on him - a classic anxiety dream moment. When he finally pulls himself free he finds Ken Watanabe's character waiting for him, against all logic. Except dream logic.

Much is made in the film about totems, items unique to dreamers that can be used to tell when someone is actually awake or asleep. Cobb's totem is a top, which spins endlessly when he's asleep, and the fact that the top stops spinning at many points in the film is claimed by some to be evidence that Cobb is awake during those scenes. The problem here is that the top wasn't always Cobb's totem - he got it from his wife, who killed herself because she believed that they were still living in a dream. There's more than a slim chance that she's right - note that when Cobb remembers her suicide she is, bizarrely, sitting on a ledge opposite the room they rented. You could do the logical gymnastics required to claim that Mal simply rented another room across the alleyway, but the more realistic notion here is that it's a dream, with the gap between the two lovers being a metaphorical one made literal. When Mal jumps she leaves behind the top, and if she was right about the world being a dream, the fact that it spins or doesn't spin is meaningless. It's a dream construct anyway. There's no way to use the top as a proof of reality.

Watching the film with this eye you can see the dream logic unfolding. As is said in the movie, dreams seem real in the moment and it's only when you've woken up that things seem strange. The film's 'reality' sequences are filled with moments that, on retrospect, seem strange or unlikely or unexplained. Even the basics of the dream sharing technology is unbelievably vague, and I don't think that's just because Nolan wants to keep things streamlined. It's because Cobb's unconscious mind is filling it in as he goes along.

There's more, but I would have to watch the film again with a notebook to get all the evidence (all of it in plain sight). The end seems without a doubt to be a dream - from the dreamy way the film is shot and edited once Cobb wakes up on the plane all the way through to him coming home to find his two kids in the exact position and in the exact same clothes that he kept remembering them, it doesn't matter if the top falls, Cobb is dreaming.

That Cobb is dreaming and still finds his catharsis (that he can now look at the face of his kids) is the point. It's important to realize that Inception is a not very thinly-veiled autobiographical look at how Nolan works. In a recent red carpet interview, Leonardo DiCaprio - who was important in helping Nolan get the script to the final stages - compares the movie not to The Matrix or some other mindfuck movie but Fellini's 8 1/2. This is probably the second most telling thing DiCaprio said during the publicity tour for the film, with the first being that he based Cobb on Nolan. 8 1/2 is totally autobiographical for Fellini, and it's all about an Italian director trying to overcome his block and make a movie (a science fiction movie, even). It's a film about filmmaking, and so is Inception.

The heist team quite neatly maps to major players in a film production. Cobb is the director while Arthur, the guy who does the research and who sets up the places to sleep, is the producer. Ariadne, the dream architect, is the screenwriter - she creates the world that will be entered. Eames is the actor (this is so obvious that the character sits at an old fashioned mirrored vanity, the type which stage actors would use). Yusuf is the technical guy; remember, the Oscar come from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and it requires a good number of technically minded people to get a movie off the ground. Nolan himself more or less explains this in the latest issue of Film Comment, saying 'There are a lot of striking similarities [between what the team does and the putting on of a major Hollywood movie]. When for instance the team is out on the street they've created, surveying it, that's really identical with what we do on tech scouts before we shoot.'

That leaves two key figures. Saito is the money guy, the big corporate suit who fancies himself a part of the game. And Fischer, the mark, is the audience. Cobb, as a director, takes Fischer through an engaging, stimulating and exciting journey, one that leads him to an understanding about himself. Cobb is the big time movie director (or rather the best version of that - certainly not a Michael Bay) who brings the action, who brings the spectacle, but who also brings the meaning and the humanity and the emotion.

The movies-as-dreams aspect is part of why Inception keeps the dreams so grounded. In the film it's explained that playing with the dream too much alerts the dreamer to the falseness around him; this is just another version of the suspension of disbelief upon which all films hinge. As soon as the audience is pulled out of the movie by some element - an implausible scene, a ludicrous line, a poor performance - it's possible that the cinematic dream spell is broken completely, and they're lost.

As a great director, Cobb is also a great artist, which means that even when he's creating a dream about snowmobile chases, he's bringing something of himself into it. That's Mal. It's the auterist impulse, the need to bring your own interests, obsessions and issues into a movie. It's what the best directors do. It's very telling that Nolan sees this as kind of a problem; I suspect another filmmaker might have cast Mal as the special element that makes Cobb so successful.

Inception is such a big deal because it's what great movies strive to do. You walk out of a great film changed, with new ideas planted in your head, with your neural networks subtly rewired by what you've just seen. On a meta level Inception itself does this, with audiences leaving the theater buzzing about the way it made them feel and perceive. New ideas, new thoughts, new points of view are more lasting a souvenir of a great movie than a ticket stub.

It's possible to view Fischer, the mark, as not the audience but just as the character that is being put through the movie that is the dream. To be honest, I haven't quite solidified my thought on Fischer's place in the allegorical web, but what's important is that the breakthrough that Fischer has in the ski fortress is real. Despite the fact that his father is not there, despite the fact that the pinwheel was never by his father's bedside, the emotions that Fischer experiences are 100 percent genuine. It doesn't matter that the movie you're watching isn't a real story, that it's just highly paid people putting on a show - when a movie moves you, it truly moves you. The tears you cry during Up are totally real, even if absolutely nothing that you see on screen has ever existed in the physical world.

For Cobb there's a deeper meaning to it all. While Cobb doesn't have daddy issues (that we know of), he, like Fischer, is dealing with a loss. He's trying to come to grips with the death of his wife*; Fischer's journey reflects Cobb's while not being a complete point for point reflection. That's important for Nolan, who is making films that have personal components - that talk about things that obviously interest or concern him - but that aren't actually about him. Other filmmakers (Fellini) may make movies that are thinly veiled autobiography, but that's not what Nolan or Cobb are doing. The movies (or dreams) they're putting together reflect what they're going through but aren't easily mapped on to them. Talking to Film Comment, Nolan says he has never been to psychoanalysis. 'I think I use filmmaking for that purpose. I have a passionate relationship to what I do.'

In a lot of ways Inception is a bookend to last summer's Inglorious Basterds. In that film Quentin Tarantino celebrated the ways that cinema could change the world, while in Inception Nolan is examining the ways that cinema, the ultimate shared dream, can change an individual. The entire film is a dream, within the confines of the movie itself, but in a more meta sense it's Nolan's dream. He's dreaming Cobb, and finding his own moments of revelation and resolution, just as Cobb is dreaming Fischer and finding his own catharsis and change.

The whole film being a dream isn't a cop out or a waste of time, but an ultimate expression of the film's themes and meaning. It's all fake. But it's all very, very real. And that's something every single movie lover understands implicitly and completely.

* it's really worth noting that if you accept that the whole movie is a dream that Mal may not be dead. She could have just left Cobb. The mourning that he is experiencing deep inside his mind is no less real if she's alive or dead - he has still lost her.
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Thanks AI,

Very nice interpretation !

Maybe it is has more layers than it looked at first after all :)
 
Saw it yesterday.

As an action/adventure/psychological drama, I enjoyed it. I like the visual effects, too. (How did they do the zero gravity stuff?! :P)

For me, the most allegorical thing about the movie, was that the dreams within dreams seemed to me to be a helpful way to understand densities - not as levels on top of one another, but as realities embedded inside each other: the way that in the first dream level, the jolt of the van was interpreted in the second level as a change in gravity, and in the next level, an avalanche. Or how the use of the resuscitation device at the third level, was seen as a bolt of lightning at the lowest level.

And ultimately, that the 'kick' which was relative to each level and was their way out, could be like The Wave.
 
I watched Inception again yesterday and enjoyed it more on DVD than I did in the cinema. I agree with the assessment posted by AI – it is all a dream. Cobb's wife's suicide is the scene that gives Nolan's game away. Her jump from the ledge is in fact her giving herself an almighty 'kick' so as to wake herself up into the real world, but Cobb can't follow because he firmly believes that he is already awake. He is under the evil magician's hypnotic spell. In fact, Mal is the only character in the film who really understands what's going on, and who knows how to wake up – the old self has to die. And this is why she becomes such a threatening figure in Cobb's subconscious. It is because waking up is threatening to those who are asleep, and thus his subconscious has transformed her from his beloved into his enemy. By framing Cobb for her murder she hoped to give him a compelling motive to jump. Instead he runs deeper into dreamland, just as some people who are asleep retreat further into sleep when faced with reality.
 
I don't know. I don't think I'm in the "it was all a dream" camp. The Chud article AI posted makes some interesting points, especially about the film being an allegory to moviemaking and it being semi-autobiographical in regards to Chris Nolan. I know I really enjoy movies that are ambiguous and leave a lot to interpretation for the viewer. One point that was made by Michael Caine I believe was that it didn't really matter if Cobb was dreaming or not, that he had his children and that's all that mattered to him anymore. That was why we never saw whether the top kept spinning or not at the end. Of course, that doesn't answer the question - Is Cobb still dreaming? That's kinda how I prefer it though.
 
Heimdallr said:
I don't know. I don't think I'm in the "it was all a dream" camp. ...

That was why we never saw whether the top kept spinning or not at the end. Of course, that doesn't answer the question - Is Cobb still dreaming? That's kinda how I prefer it though.
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I'm not so sure I'm in the 'it was all a dream' camp either. Of course, it's all left to our interpretation. I have my own opinion re: the acting, etc. of the movie itself. Overall, the most interesting aspect it provided was 'is this reality we see really real, or we all just dreaming'? :lol:
 
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