I saw Inception on the opening weekend, and found it thoroughly engaging and intelligent. It seemed like there was an open ended ending but the rest was simple enough. It almost seemed like a film that there was no need to review, it was taut, action packed, twisted, but dreaming in a dream about a dream sort of thing is not something I thought I could write a lot about. I had been keeping my head in the sand and avoiding Inception reviews, but now as I caught them I saw furious debate. Critics loved it, hated it, loved other critics who loved it, hated other critics who loved it and so on and so forth. The theories came pouring out of the woodwork and blew my "OK I know what was going on" smugness out of the water. UNLESS one believes that the complexities are being generated by the viewers, and they do not match the maker's intentions.
These theories ranged from mapping Jungian archetypes on to each character!
And in watching Inception, I think I definitely saw something of Jungian archetypes in all of the characters who interact with Leonardo DiCaprio's, Dom Cobb, in the movie. So much so, in fact, that I actually think ::Spoiler alert:: that the entire film might actually just be Dom Cobb's dream and that all of the main characters in it were just different segments of himself that had to concoct an elaborate mission just so he could reach some level of catharsis within himself.
to using the laws of Physics to negate the entering someone's dreams premise:
Couldn't this whole thing be a dream? The entire film - from minute one to the end? Is Christopher Nolan just screwing with us?
The most obvious evidence for me is pure physics. You can't actually go into people's dreams. That's not physically possible. So aren't we already in the realm of a la la land – a dream-based fantasy concept? The kind of thing we would come up with ... in our dreams?
Cobb (diCaprio) is being pulled two ways - his now dead wife Mal (Marion Cotillard - the name Mal is never expanded for us, and Mal lingers as a malevolent force throughout the film!) wants to pull him further into their dream so they can grow old together, while Saito (Ken Watanabe) keeps reminding him that he should not become an old man, filled with regret, waiting to die alone! In the final scene Cobb is told by Saito to take a leap of faith, come back so they can be young together, and Saito reaches for the pistol. Does this signify that he kills them both and thus ends the dream? Will the slight teetering of the top in the end lead to its ultimate tipping over? We are never to find that out as the film fades to black. Is Cobb back in the real world with his children, or is he still wandering around in limbo? This is probably best summed up by Bilge Ebiri THUS:
So, is Cobb being pulled back to reality by this thought, or is he being prodded further into his dream? That depends, perhaps, on how you view the very end of the film: At this point, Cobb seems to be finally freed of his regret and of his memory of Mal, and has been reunited with his children. The final shot seems to indicate that he may be still dreaming (because his totem keeps spinning). If so, then he has either lost himself in Limbo entirely, or Mal was right all along, and his world was always a dream.
But whether he's still dreaming may ultimately be irrelevant: The important thing is that Cobb has been freed of his demons, and can now be reunited with what to him appear to be his real children — be they a projection or reality. Or, as the old man in Mombassa puts it, referring to the opium den of dreamers in Yusuf’s basement: “They come here to be woken up. Their dream has become their reality. Who are you to say otherwise?”
Just when I thought I had read all the interpretations came this doozy of a piece titled "Dissecting 'Inception': Six Interpretations and Five Plot Holes"
It went thus:
Interpretation 1: All of Inception is a dream.
Interpretation 2: Everything after Cobb's sedation test is a dream.
Interpretation 3: Saito is the architect, pulls a Mr. Charles on Cobb.
Interpretation 4: Ariadne is the architect/Cobb's therapist.
Interpretation 5: We do see reality during the film, but Cobb is still in a dream at the end of the film.
Interpretation 6: We do see reality during the film and Cobb is in reality at the end of the film.
I will leave you to seek out this piece for explanations attached to each interpretation, and the plot holes!
I saw diagrams on levels of dreams, and who was doing the dreaming - an Inception cheat sheet of sorts!
Lost in all these interpretations of the layers within layers in Inception were a few pieces on other cinematic content of the film. Are we emotionally attached to Cobb? Do we care if he gets to see his children or not? He seems to love Mal but what about Mal? Does she care for him, or is she simply some evil force that resides within Cobb? The brilliantly shot hallway fight scene had people tumbling about as they got a punch in here or there, battled to open doors, and fight off their opponents! Here is what MTV Movie blog has to say about this brilliant sequence:
"It would've been different if he had put me in front of a green screen and said, 'Pretend you're floating. Pretend you're off-balance.' Instead he put me in the middle of this set that spun around 360 degrees where he hung me on wires or put me on this see-saw contraption," Gordon-Levitt continued. "So all of those moments where it looks like I'm off-balance, that's because I was off-balance, doing my best to keep my balance and fight this guy while the floor would be becoming the wall and the wall and ceiling would be becoming the floor."
Director of Photography Wally Pfister echoed the actor's words in an interview last week. The scene demanded a 500-person crew and took three weeks to capture. A series of hallway sets were built in a World War I-era air force hangar: a horizontal one that rotated 360 degrees, a vertical one that allowed actors to wear wires and another in which the actors were strapped to trolleys, erased during the post-production process.
Read more HERE
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