Since it's release last week, Inception has kept people guessing on the true nature of the movie. For most, it's a belief that it's ALL a dream, or somehow Cobb ended up in limbo.
That's what I thought at first, until I got a closer look at the movie. After two times, I felt I was onto something, but it was only complicating my far-fetched ideas. By the third time, I had managed to overlook the complex scenery and the intimidation to be complicated that the dream levels seemed to possess on the viewer.
In fact, my belief is that Christopher Nolan was rather straightforward with the entire thing and by making something abstract, we all wanted to make ourselves sound intelligent by complicating the simplicity. Of course, this isn't to say Inception is entirely a simplistic movie. The effects, the concepts, and everything else needs a careful eye.
What follows is my take, giving clues into what I believe is the answer.
Let's get the basic out of the way.
1. Yes, there are spoilers.
2. Inception: the act of planting thoughts into people's sub-conscious to make them believe that it is their own.
3. The primary cast:
- Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is the main character who claims to be the greatest extracter working.
- Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is Cobb's right-hand man and confidant, possessing what's needed in order to make inception work.
- Ariadne (Ellen Page) is an architect who designs the dreams after a former architect fails to make convincing scenery. She also finds out deep dark secrets about Cobb.
- Emes (Tom Hardy) is a forger who can take the form of anyone in a dream state to help manipulate their minds.
- Yusuf (Dileep Rao) is a chemist who provides sedatives to create a long lasting dream state while keeping all functioning of the inner ear in tact, which can awaken the subject by startling them.
- Robert Fischer, Jr. (Cillian Murphy) is the son of a wealthy owner of a very successful business and must be incepted to believe that he needs to help the company succeed.
- Saito (Ken Watanabe) is the head of everything and assigns the team to incept the thoughts into Robert Fischer, Jr.
- Mal (Marion Cotillard) is Cob's dead wife.
4. Ariadne's name derives from greek mythology as someone who helped someone escape a maze. I believe this choice of names was intentional.
5. Totem: a device used to determine if the user is actually in reality.
The story begins on a previous mission to introduce the concepts of inception. We are introduced to Cob, who is faced down in the waters of a beach, similar to the look of limbo. After running being kidnapped, we are introduced to Saito, who first appears as an old man. Cob is only carrying a totem and a gun. Saito spins the totem and turns younger.
As it continues, Cob is seen trying to break in and steal some documents labeled CONFIDENTIAL, replacing them with blank parchments. This can be seen as trying to incept the thought that whatever event that happened didn't actually happen.
While traveling through different levels, it appears that this was all a test by Saito. He has a great self control of his sub conscious and notices small flaws in the architecture, realizing he is in a dream. After falling through the levels, the team is officially in reality on a train.
I believe this was all a test and Saito was in charge of everything.
Later on, Saito gets Cob and Arthur on a helicopter ride. Based on his experience in the opening segment, he is aware of the concept of inception and while Arthur is denying it's existence, Saito wishes to use them for a bigger task, which is to break into Fischer's mind and incept the concept that he needs to run his dying father's company.
Saito says he will drop charges if he does it for him. It is not really revealed at first, but Cob is wanted all over the world, implying that he is a fugitive, a thief, of some sort.
The story continues to assemble the team: Ariadne, Eames, and Yusuf. All of them are introduced to the concepts of the dream worlds and are told to not base the dreams on real life situations, for it may create instability.
However, as time goes on, Ariadne gets quite a bit of discovery. Cob has repressed memories of his dead wife. It's not all revealed at once, but by the end, here is the story (minus the conclusion of the movie):
Cob and Mal delved deep into the dream world because as it has been revealed by many characters, the dream world is an extraordinary experience. Cob believes he has complete control over his subconscious and can delve deep into limbo, a world where the two grow old together, forming memories and enjoying life.
However, Cob began to realize that it wasn't real and began to want to wake up. Mal hid a totem in the home she grew up in to symbolize her reality. After Cob found it, he attempted to spin it and planted a subconscious thought that this was her reality.
However, when they both woke up, Mal wasn't entirely convinced that this was reality. On her honeymoon, she stood outside of her hotel window and decided to jump, not knowing it was reality. Cob was exceptionally hurt and feels he is to blame for her suicide.
The reason that Mal is a central character in the dreams is because Cob carries guilt that he convinced Mal to kill herself. This guilt is also the reason he is unable to look at his children. She lives in his self conscious and attacks anything that interferes with their solitude.
Cob tried bringing her back to life by taking memories he had and pulling her likeness into reality. It fails every time and instead her presence gets more massive and haunts his brain.
So basically, the charges that the movie refers to are Cob killing his wife. Saito blackmails Cob into incepting Fischer. By doing this, Saito can benefit from Fischer's success and drop the charges. I am unsure as to what title Saito holds, but it sounds pretty legal. Whether he is the head of inception and Cob is just a really good employee is unsure as it is never stated.
However, Saito has some control over the legal system. Before Cob can return to his home in Los Angeles, he has to have his name cleared. By completing the task, Saito makes it happen.
When incepting Fischer, there are numerous dream states. They are:
Level 1: Airplane, reality
Level 2: City, Yusuf's dream
Level 3: Hotel, Arthur's dream
Level 4: Mountain, Fischer's dream
Level 5: Limbo, general dream
It should be noted that the dreams are according to who ends up being left to supervise the actions in that dream level.
In level 2, Saito manages to get shot. While under heavy sedation, the act of being shot will only send him into limbo until the sedative wears off. In order to properly wake up, he needs a kick to wake him up, which never happens.
Saito is still alive through the levels, but appears to be constantly bleeding. He eventually falls into limbo while on the mission, despite being on every level. He's mostly on every level because of time's extension and his ability to drag his wounds (despite the growing of pain on each level) out. However, by Level 2 standards, he was already in limbo.
The team goes through each level and on level 4, Fischer enters the fortress where the set up for his inception is to occur. However, by Ariadne being convinced to alter the architecture by Cob, Mal is able to get within shooting range of Fischer and take him down to limbo.
On level 5, Ariadne and Cob quickly find where Mal is hiding. Mal is believed to be hiding Fischer. After Mal tries to convince Cob to stay in the world with her because he doesn't know fact from fiction, he slowly is coaxed into believing the reality Mal speaks of is a lie.
Ariadne, as she has done the whole movie, tries to convince Cob to let her go. Cob is so attached to Mal that he can't shoot her.
So, Ariadne shoots Mal, freeing Cob of any guilt that her death was provoked by his inception on her. As limbo deteriorates, Cob has an intimate conversation with the Mal likeness and tells her that he knows she isn't real and must move on. The guilt is lifted and Cob is free to resume life without her haunting him.
However, remember that Saito is still in limbo. Because of his extended time, he is much older. If Cob were to leave limbo without Saito, Saito wouldn't have been able to clear Cob's name and make him a free man. Thus, their arrangement was that they both complete the mission successfully.
They shoot themselves out of limbo and wake up on the plane. Cob passes through security without any issues and meets up with his father, another person who has been trying to convince him to come back to reality.
Once at his home, he sees his children's faces for the first time. There is no Mal lurking anywhere and guilt seems to have been lifted. However, his lack of belief in reality causes him to spin the totem one last time.
Yes he is in reality, though the quick cutaway of the spinning totem was Nolan's last trick on the audience to confuse them. It was making noises of falling over.
So yes, Nolan was straightforward with the movie.
The other point I wanted to bring up was Ariadne's involvement. She worked as a therapeutic tool. For anyone that's had trauma, you'll know that ventilating will help solve the problems. However, a dead wife you think you provoked to suicide is a tough grief. Can't look at your children and face the facts.
Ariadne's character was made to analyze Cob's history and try to convince him that it wasn't his fault. However, the only way for the thought to stick was for her to follow him into a vulnerable level of subconscious and eliminate Mal herself, which if anything incepted the thought that Mal was killed by some other way.
So, the movie's general plot?
Cob is trying to get over the grief of his dead wife while incepting dreams and running from the law. Saito gives him a job to help Cob clear his name for good and get back home to his children.
That's what I thought at first, until I got a closer look at the movie. After two times, I felt I was onto something, but it was only complicating my far-fetched ideas. By the third time, I had managed to overlook the complex scenery and the intimidation to be complicated that the dream levels seemed to possess on the viewer.
In fact, my belief is that Christopher Nolan was rather straightforward with the entire thing and by making something abstract, we all wanted to make ourselves sound intelligent by complicating the simplicity. Of course, this isn't to say Inception is entirely a simplistic movie. The effects, the concepts, and everything else needs a careful eye.
What follows is my take, giving clues into what I believe is the answer.
Let's get the basic out of the way.
1. Yes, there are spoilers.
2. Inception: the act of planting thoughts into people's sub-conscious to make them believe that it is their own.
3. The primary cast:
- Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is the main character who claims to be the greatest extracter working.
- Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is Cobb's right-hand man and confidant, possessing what's needed in order to make inception work.
- Ariadne (Ellen Page) is an architect who designs the dreams after a former architect fails to make convincing scenery. She also finds out deep dark secrets about Cobb.
- Emes (Tom Hardy) is a forger who can take the form of anyone in a dream state to help manipulate their minds.
- Yusuf (Dileep Rao) is a chemist who provides sedatives to create a long lasting dream state while keeping all functioning of the inner ear in tact, which can awaken the subject by startling them.
- Robert Fischer, Jr. (Cillian Murphy) is the son of a wealthy owner of a very successful business and must be incepted to believe that he needs to help the company succeed.
- Saito (Ken Watanabe) is the head of everything and assigns the team to incept the thoughts into Robert Fischer, Jr.
- Mal (Marion Cotillard) is Cob's dead wife.
4. Ariadne's name derives from greek mythology as someone who helped someone escape a maze. I believe this choice of names was intentional.
5. Totem: a device used to determine if the user is actually in reality.
The story begins on a previous mission to introduce the concepts of inception. We are introduced to Cob, who is faced down in the waters of a beach, similar to the look of limbo. After running being kidnapped, we are introduced to Saito, who first appears as an old man. Cob is only carrying a totem and a gun. Saito spins the totem and turns younger.
As it continues, Cob is seen trying to break in and steal some documents labeled CONFIDENTIAL, replacing them with blank parchments. This can be seen as trying to incept the thought that whatever event that happened didn't actually happen.
While traveling through different levels, it appears that this was all a test by Saito. He has a great self control of his sub conscious and notices small flaws in the architecture, realizing he is in a dream. After falling through the levels, the team is officially in reality on a train.
I believe this was all a test and Saito was in charge of everything.
Later on, Saito gets Cob and Arthur on a helicopter ride. Based on his experience in the opening segment, he is aware of the concept of inception and while Arthur is denying it's existence, Saito wishes to use them for a bigger task, which is to break into Fischer's mind and incept the concept that he needs to run his dying father's company.
Saito says he will drop charges if he does it for him. It is not really revealed at first, but Cob is wanted all over the world, implying that he is a fugitive, a thief, of some sort.
The story continues to assemble the team: Ariadne, Eames, and Yusuf. All of them are introduced to the concepts of the dream worlds and are told to not base the dreams on real life situations, for it may create instability.
However, as time goes on, Ariadne gets quite a bit of discovery. Cob has repressed memories of his dead wife. It's not all revealed at once, but by the end, here is the story (minus the conclusion of the movie):
Cob and Mal delved deep into the dream world because as it has been revealed by many characters, the dream world is an extraordinary experience. Cob believes he has complete control over his subconscious and can delve deep into limbo, a world where the two grow old together, forming memories and enjoying life.
However, Cob began to realize that it wasn't real and began to want to wake up. Mal hid a totem in the home she grew up in to symbolize her reality. After Cob found it, he attempted to spin it and planted a subconscious thought that this was her reality.
However, when they both woke up, Mal wasn't entirely convinced that this was reality. On her honeymoon, she stood outside of her hotel window and decided to jump, not knowing it was reality. Cob was exceptionally hurt and feels he is to blame for her suicide.
The reason that Mal is a central character in the dreams is because Cob carries guilt that he convinced Mal to kill herself. This guilt is also the reason he is unable to look at his children. She lives in his self conscious and attacks anything that interferes with their solitude.
Cob tried bringing her back to life by taking memories he had and pulling her likeness into reality. It fails every time and instead her presence gets more massive and haunts his brain.
So basically, the charges that the movie refers to are Cob killing his wife. Saito blackmails Cob into incepting Fischer. By doing this, Saito can benefit from Fischer's success and drop the charges. I am unsure as to what title Saito holds, but it sounds pretty legal. Whether he is the head of inception and Cob is just a really good employee is unsure as it is never stated.
However, Saito has some control over the legal system. Before Cob can return to his home in Los Angeles, he has to have his name cleared. By completing the task, Saito makes it happen.
When incepting Fischer, there are numerous dream states. They are:
Level 1: Airplane, reality
Level 2: City, Yusuf's dream
Level 3: Hotel, Arthur's dream
Level 4: Mountain, Fischer's dream
Level 5: Limbo, general dream
It should be noted that the dreams are according to who ends up being left to supervise the actions in that dream level.
In level 2, Saito manages to get shot. While under heavy sedation, the act of being shot will only send him into limbo until the sedative wears off. In order to properly wake up, he needs a kick to wake him up, which never happens.
Saito is still alive through the levels, but appears to be constantly bleeding. He eventually falls into limbo while on the mission, despite being on every level. He's mostly on every level because of time's extension and his ability to drag his wounds (despite the growing of pain on each level) out. However, by Level 2 standards, he was already in limbo.
The team goes through each level and on level 4, Fischer enters the fortress where the set up for his inception is to occur. However, by Ariadne being convinced to alter the architecture by Cob, Mal is able to get within shooting range of Fischer and take him down to limbo.
On level 5, Ariadne and Cob quickly find where Mal is hiding. Mal is believed to be hiding Fischer. After Mal tries to convince Cob to stay in the world with her because he doesn't know fact from fiction, he slowly is coaxed into believing the reality Mal speaks of is a lie.
Ariadne, as she has done the whole movie, tries to convince Cob to let her go. Cob is so attached to Mal that he can't shoot her.
So, Ariadne shoots Mal, freeing Cob of any guilt that her death was provoked by his inception on her. As limbo deteriorates, Cob has an intimate conversation with the Mal likeness and tells her that he knows she isn't real and must move on. The guilt is lifted and Cob is free to resume life without her haunting him.
However, remember that Saito is still in limbo. Because of his extended time, he is much older. If Cob were to leave limbo without Saito, Saito wouldn't have been able to clear Cob's name and make him a free man. Thus, their arrangement was that they both complete the mission successfully.
They shoot themselves out of limbo and wake up on the plane. Cob passes through security without any issues and meets up with his father, another person who has been trying to convince him to come back to reality.
Once at his home, he sees his children's faces for the first time. There is no Mal lurking anywhere and guilt seems to have been lifted. However, his lack of belief in reality causes him to spin the totem one last time.
Yes he is in reality, though the quick cutaway of the spinning totem was Nolan's last trick on the audience to confuse them. It was making noises of falling over.
So yes, Nolan was straightforward with the movie.
The other point I wanted to bring up was Ariadne's involvement. She worked as a therapeutic tool. For anyone that's had trauma, you'll know that ventilating will help solve the problems. However, a dead wife you think you provoked to suicide is a tough grief. Can't look at your children and face the facts.
Ariadne's character was made to analyze Cob's history and try to convince him that it wasn't his fault. However, the only way for the thought to stick was for her to follow him into a vulnerable level of subconscious and eliminate Mal herself, which if anything incepted the thought that Mal was killed by some other way.
So, the movie's general plot?
Cob is trying to get over the grief of his dead wife while incepting dreams and running from the law. Saito gives him a job to help Cob clear his name for good and get back home to his children.
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