I think too much (Inception - spoilers under cut tag)

[drwex]

We saw Inception last night. I generally liked it and I thought it was quite well done. It has more depth and complexity than most movies and does a great job of getting just the right amount of hand-wavey science stuff in to let you suspend disbelief without overdoing it. Everyone turns in a fine acting job and Chris Nolan does some really nice things with the camera to stretch and compress time as well as filming action sequences in ways that manage to be tense without excessive spatter.

There's just one problem:
(I have a side issue in that I saw the ending coming. I wasn't surprised, just disappointed. I do not want my movies to disappoint me in the end, especially when they're good all the way up to that point. But leave aside my personal disappointment for now.)

I believe that the ending implies that Cobb is still in a dream. The spinning top doesn't fall over. (ETA: most of the reviews I've read since seeing the movie seem to indicate that the top wobbles but you don't see it fall with the goal of creating ambiguity. I didn't see it that way, but I'll grant that others did.) If it doesn't fall, and Cobb is stuck in a dream that's problematic on three levels.

1. On a moral level Cobb is presented as the redeemed character. He confesses to his sin (incept'ing his wife), admits the source of his guilt, rejects the illusion she offers, and then makes a heroic sacrifice by staying behind to rescue Saito. If he's truly the redeemed character then leaving him trapped in an illusion is very unsatisfying on a Jungian level. It negates the power of what he's able to do in coming to terms with himself. You can't argue that he gets what he wants - if he had wanted the illusion of being with his children then he would have taken it any of the other times it was offered.

2. On a practical level I can't work out a sequence that leads to the conclusion shown in the movie. The fundamental question is how does Cobb GET to where he ends up? The last thing we're shown is him with Saito in the deepest level. How does he get to the sequence that begins with him waking up on the plane from where we last saw him?

I think two things are possible: either he succeeds or fails. If he succeeds in freeing Saito, presumably with the gun he brought in, then he ought to be able to get out by the same means. If he's out then he ought not to end up in a dream. If he's not out then he ought to be trapped in Saito's dream, not his. You can't hand-wave a third method in which he gets Saito out and then is somehow stuck himself because Saito is the inexperienced tourist. Cobb has been here, knows what he's doing, etc. If Saito's out then you need some mechanic to get Cobb into his own dream state.

The gun is also problematic since in theory his body is still under the effect of the narcotic that doesn't release you if you die. If you believe that dying in the dream is what got Saito into this mess in the first place then Cobb bringing a gun down with him makes no sense either.

Finally, even if nothing else, if you accept that Robert Fischer, Jr. wakes up then that should end the dream. If Fischer is awake whose dream is Cobb in? Remember that when he and Mal were down there in the first place it was their shared dream. When it ended they woke up.

3. Since neither outcome fits, this leaves us with the "and then what happens?" problem. In general when a story ends the reader/viewer should be able to tell you what happens next because the writer has put together a clear trajectory. If you can't do that then either the story stopped too soon (cliffhanger endings do this on purpose) or the story ending makes no sense. Inception is a movie with an ending that makes no sense.

If Cobb really does escape then he wakes up on the plane and the ending we saw is what happens in waking reality. (An argument can be made for that, since the children never turn to face him in his dreams and they do in the final sequence.) If he doesn't escape then neither does Saito, which means that Arthur, Ariadne, etc. all wake up on the plane with two catatonic bodies. And they do... what? Freak out? Run? Get arrested? Go back under and try to rescue both of them? The point is not that they could do any of these things - the point is that the story isn't ended if you don't know.

Comments

[vibrantabyss.livejournal.com]

-0. Eh, I found the top wobble and cut out to imply ambiguity. My rant is with the fact that his kids are THE SAME AGE as in his memories, and he has been running, I believe, for years. For that alone, I condemn the picture, even though I found the rest of it perfectly put together.

0. As the Mol-memory(?) pointed out, the entire existence we have been shown is likely a dream - global scale persecution, etc. As with other "what is reality" movies (Jacob's Ladder, Total Recall, and others) I found So it is possible that at no point in the film have we seen waking life. And yes, I mean that right down to Mol committing suicide.

0. Totems were used to tell you if you were in someone else's dream - but say nothing about having your subconscious hijack your conscious dreaming...

1. I'm not sure he was willing to *let* himself accept the illusion - at any point in the past, I think the Mol-memory would have come in and disrupted his conscious attempts to create (or surrender) to a utopia - she certainly manifested elsewhere, and was damnwell trying to convince him the the deepest level was the most real, so why would she, a fragment of his subconscious, let him settle into something like that. Of course, that leave's the entire team fragments of his own mind...

2. My understanding of the dream-tech is that if you consciously drop a level, by sleeping within a dream to a deeper dream, then you have a much easier out - the kick, etc. So while Saito needs to be shot for release, RF can extract himself during (and using the mechanic of) the kick - which will still be occurring on all levels due to the time dilation.

3. So other than my -0 problem, I found it a wonderfully cohesive and ambiguous ending.

I should probably go off and see what other theories people have cooked up, but I want to stay away from that until I have had a second viewing. This will mean I stay away from the other comments here for now too...

the children

[drwex]

What I've read points to the fact that they seem to be wearing the same clothing as in his memory as evidence that they're not real. However, the age thing I'm not sure about. If he had really been gone for years then the kids would be responding to their mother's death and his absence differently. I get the feeling it's more on the order of several months.

(FYI, his wife's name is given as "Mal" which I found disconcerting.)