So, Inception. New film by Christopher Nolan, fantastic British film-maker who has previously made The Prestige, The Dark Knight, Batman Begins, Memento and Insomnia. Often works with his brother, Jonathan Nolan, who writes screenplays and other things. Generally all-round good egg. I’ve now seen this film twice (as well as all of the above-mentioned films) and, although I don’t consider it his best, it’s still my favourite new film of the year by a parsec or two.
But firstly,
*Spoilers*
Got that? Good.
Great film. Anyone complaining that it’s too complicated is someone who didn’t try hard enough. No, I’m kidding. But this film does require a high level of concentration. Not as much as Memento, though. At least Inception gives you a few breathers here and there where you can try and work out what’s going on without missing important plot points. Fantastic cast performances, most notably by Marion Cotillard and Leonardo DiCaprio, but also from Cillian Murphy, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Tom Hardy and Ellen Page. For those who spent a long time wondering how they knew various actors, Gordon-Levitt is the boy from Third Rock from the Sun. Ellen Page is the girl from Juno, Marion Cotillard was in Public Enemies, Cillian Murphy was in The Dark Knight and Red Eye, and Ken Watanabe was in The Last Samurai. Problems solved.
Seriously though, this is an amazing film. The effects are gorgeous, as are the sets and locations. The characters are good, wholesome fun, if not massively fleshed out (there just isn’t time amongst all the plot), and there is a lot of emotional trauma and excitement that tempts you along to end in a great catharsis. I love Nolan’s ability to tie everything up at the end of films, leaving it exactly where he wants it with no mistaking the ending. Plenty of mistaking the middle, but you kind of forget that because the ending is so beautifully fitting for the film. He has a habit of making the first scene be something that makes no sense at the time but which later becomes crucial (in The Prestige, for example), and this is exactly what he does here. The first sequence is very much a tutorial in the whole ‘Extraction’ process, but is fun enough that it doesn’t seem like a load of jargon to get you to understand the rest. In general I didn’t find that there were too many jargon-filled scenes – it was quite successfully drip-fed to the audience so they didn’t get bored of being told the details.
I believe that somewhere, probably in hundreds of pages of notes, Christopher Nolan has worked out the entire plot and system, and that it all works. However, even after the second viewing, there are some plot holes that I cannot answer. They will be discussed below. However, I do not think that, even after spotting them, they detracted from my enjoyment of the film in any way. It’s so fast-paced and exciting that I couldn’t care less. The characters are funny, and the plot is very enjoyable (let’s not bring plausibility into this review, it has no place here), although there was rather too much snowy shooting towards the last third of the film. This was the only place where I got completely lost as to what was going on, and that was because I couldn’t tell who was shooting whom!
A lot of people have speculated at great length about the ending, about whether or not Cobb’s totem was going to stop spinning, and if it was, what that means for the film: was he in a dream the whole thing? Was the whole thing a mass ‘Inception’ of an idea into the minds of the audience? Did he just never get out of Limbo? This is very similar to me to the people who claim that The Prestige is just a massive ‘Pledge, Turn, Prestige’ magic trick on the audience, and although that all sounds very nice, is not of very much interest, to me at least; it’s just a sentence of fancy words. I can honestly say that I don’t mind whether the totem would have fallen or not, or even if there was no answer at all. I just think it’s fantastic how cleverly Nolan sets up that last scene, with completely conflicting points on both sides of the argument. On the one hand, Cobb’s children have not aged at all, they are wearing the same clothes, they are living in the same house. On the other, the totem seems to be about to fall, all the preceding scenes look like they should follow on from the previous real scenes (the airport, immigration, seeing Michael Caine), and it seems highly unlikely that the entire film was a dream. Well, that’s not true. It’s not so much unlikely that the whole film was a dream of Cobb’s as simply incoherent. Then his totem would never have acted in reality and so it no longer functions to tell us whether or not he’s there, so it’s just meaningless to say that what appears to be reality to us is not, because we’ve no idea what reality is then; we’ve never seen it. On the other hand, it is more plausible to say that Cobb simply never woke up from Limbo, and remained there, but the airport scenes are newly constructed fantasies, and this is presumably the other option. Again, I don’t really mind. I don’t think there is supposed to be an answer that you can work out, but that the last scene is just supposed to keep you guessing.
A related interesting thing is the way that the apparently real scenes have lots of dreamlike qualities. The scene for example when Cobb is being chased through Mombasa and has to squeeze through the tight gap between buildings is something familiar in dreams, as is the scene where Mal kills herself by jumping off a building rather than a more traditional form of suicide. I’m not suggesting that this means anything more than that Nolan was clever, and liked to introduce a few seeds of doubt all the way through. Can’t make it too easy for people.
All in all, I thought this was a brilliant film, and that everyone should see it, but that they should be prepared to concentrate. And I can honestly say that it was better on the second watching.
Plot-Holes
So, on the first watching I thought I found some plot-holes, and I’ve heard a few others since then. I thought I’d outline them, and my possible resolutions of them, and encourage comments. I really do think that somehow Chris Nolan has the answers to these, but that doesn’t mean that he necessarily gave enough information away in the final cut of the film for audience to work them out. This may have been intentional, or it may simply have happened on revisions and edits to get the film down to its runtime. Who knows?
1) Firstly, there’s one that my friend pointed out to me, and it’s not a massive one. Why does Cobb, when he’s on the plane with Fischer, go to all the trouble of stealing his passport and talking to him, and ordering water to spike his drink, when he’s bought out the airhostess? He could quite easily just have got her to drug Fischer and we wouldn’t have needed all the fuss
– Personally, I think this was just a liberty to make that scene of the film more exciting and interesting, nothing more. He could clearly have done that with the airhostess, but it wouldn’t have been as fun to watch or as cleverly worked out. What can you do?
2) Kicks. Kicks confuse the hell out of me. In a normal dream situation, like the first sequence, the dreamer is given the sensation of falling in reality, and this wakes them up. It can take a few seconds, especially if they are under sedation, and can also be made sure by dropping the dreamer in water. This is what happens to Cobb in the first sequence, and it takes him a few seconds to snap out of it.
In the last sequence, because the dreamers will be several dream layers down, they need to synchronise kicks to bring them up through all the layers at once. Why? What is wrong with just kicking up a layer at a time? So Arthur kicks Eames, Ariadne, Cobb, Saito, Fischer and possibly Browning, and they wake up in the Hotel level. Then Yusuf drives the van off and wakes all the rest up. I don’t remember this being explained.
Nevertheless, let’s accept that they all need to happen close to simultaneously. When they miss the first kick, the Hotel level loses gravity because the guys in the car are falling. I can understand that this wouldn’t wake up all the people in the Snow level, because they are not being kicked themselves. But why doesn’t it wake up Arthur? He’s only one level deeper than the van, on the Hotel level. Surely the kick should work as per usual for him and he should wake up. But he doesn’t. Funny.
– Ok, tricky one. There’s a certain amount of guesswork going into this, but my explanation is that for some unexplained reason, you have to either die, or at the very least fall, in the deepest level, as well as on all the levels above, to get a kick. This is backed up by the fact that Eames is prepared to blow up the Snow level for the kick. Normally, nothing has to happen within the dream, it’s only in reality or the next level up that the dreamer has to fall. So why prepare him to blow them up? That would also explain why Arthur needed to fall with the dreamers in the Hotel level so that he can wake up with them in the Van level. And why Ariadne had to jump off the building in Limbo so that she could wake up in the Snow level. I’m not sure whether you have to die or just fall, though. We know that if you die in Limbo you wake up, but I’m not sure where. Probably just the next level up, so in Ariadne and Fischer’s cases the Snow level. That’s why Fischer woke up when Ariadne threw him off the building, and Eames shocked his body. But it isn’t clear if it was the falling as the building collapsed at the Snow level, and the falling in the lift at the Hotel level, that woke the dreamers, or if it was dying on impact. I think it was just falling, and that Limbo is a special case where you have to die to wake up, since we were told that if you die on any of the three levels you go to Limbo. So much for that, then.
3) We’re told that if you die on any of the three levels, you go straight to Limbo, because of the sedation. So when Fischer is shot on the Snow Level, his mind is sent down to Limbo, as expected. So how do Ariadne and Cobb reach him by going into Cobb’s subconscious? Surely that’s just another level of dream, not Limbo. You have to die to go to Limbo. But when they get there it’s clearly Limbo because Fischer is there, and it looks just like the Limbo that Cobb and Mal built when they were there before.
– I don’t have much on this one. I have a vague theory that, since Ariadne only designed three levels, when they go to Cobb’s subconscious, he somehow chooses to take them to Limbo. Limbo is unconstructed dream space, so perhaps if you purposefully don’t construct anything when you dream, you go there automatically. But I don’t know to be honest. It seems that Ariadne and Cobb both believe themselves to be in Limbo, and it seems the only way that they could find Fischer.
4) When Yusuf drives the van off the road and it rolls, what happens in the Hotel level? We know that the gravity gets messed up, because that’s what happens to Arthur, but what about the dreamers? Surely they should get all jangled about as well, and this should mess up the Snow level because they’ll be falling just like in the car. Maybe the Snow level should become weightless. At any rate, something should happen.
– I got nothing on this. Artistic license, in my opinion, because having Arthur fight baddies in crazy-gravity situations is cool.
5) Ok, somehow the kicks work for Fischer, Ariadne, Eames and Arthur, and they all end up back in Yusuf’s van in the water. They get out, leaving Saito, who’s already dead, and Cobb. Cobb then presumably drowns, asleep, in the van. He then wakes up in Limbo. But wasn’t he already in Limbo with Mal?
– Aha, this is the clever bit, in my opinion. Saito dies a few seconds before the van hits the water, on the Van level. His mind is sent to Limbo. Cobb is already in Limbo, talking to Mal, but then the kick happens, and the van hits the water, and he drowns. I don’t know how long he is in Limbo (presumable quite a while, with all the time distortion etc), but eventually he drowns in the van. Now, presumably, when you die on a higher dream level, you just vanish wherever you are in the lower ones. You’re dead, right? And your mind gets sent to Limbo. So Cobb vanished out of the Limbo he was just in with Mal, and gets resent to Limbo because he’s just died on the Van level. But a few seconds have passed since Saito died, and a few seconds on the Van level is a long, long time in Limbo, and that’s why Saito has aged and Cobb hasn’t. He’s just arrived. It also explains why he gets washed up and doesn’t just find Saito by walking around the buildings. So then Cobb finds him and they kill themselves and they wake up. They wake up for real, on the plane. Maybe. Ariadne and Fischer, of course, wake up on the Snow level after dying in Limbo, but Saito and Cobb are dead everywhere else so I can only think they must wake up in reality. Fischer wasn’t really dead on the Snow level because Eames resuscitated him. But just my thoughts.
6) Ok, so everyone except Cobb and Saito wake up successfully on the Van level (with Eames disguised as Browning again). What do they do then? They can’t wake up until the timer finishes, that that’s a week on the Van level. They can’t kill themselves because they’ll go to Limbo. The subconscious military were trying to kill them before, why would they stop?
– I don’t know. This confuses the hell out of me. Cobb says when they are first going down to the Hotel level that they should try to do it as fast as possible, but I don’t see how that can help. They can’t wake themselves up from the Van level whatever they do – there is no way to tell the airhostess to bring them out early, and there is no way to wake themselves up from within the dream with a Kick as that’s not how Kicks work. Linking in with 5), it also seems likely that Cobb and Saito would wake up before the others, since they should be completely woken by dying in Limbo, being dead everywhere else. Weird.
7) And finally totems. What the hell? Let’s start from the beginning. Arthur explains the totem principle using his own loaded die. No one else is allowed to touch it because only he should know how it should behave. This allows him to tell when he’s in someone else’s dream. This means that they are able to design his die in the dream. But they don’t know that it should, say, always land on a six. So when he throws it in the dream, it’ll land on a five, for example, and he’ll know ‘hey, this can’t be real, because my die always lands on a six in reality. I’m in a dream’. It won’t, however, tell him if he’s in his own dream, because he would create the die as it really is, so it would always land on a six. But hopefully he’d know if he was in his own dream, because he’d have power over it. All good. Ariadne’s hollowed-out chess piece works in the same way, presumably. In someone else’s dream it’ll fall harder than it would in reality, because they would expect it to be heavier than it is.
So what about Cobb’s/Mal’s totem? This isn’t the same at all. In reality the top will fall, because that’s what tops do. In a dream, Cobb says that the top will keep spinning forever. But why? If someone else is creating the dream, then they won’t know that that’s what the totem should do in a dream, so presumably it’ll fall over like in reality. Only people who know what the top is supposed to do in a dream would be able to make it keep spinning, and even then they could choose to make it fall over and fool Cobb into thinking it’s reality. Similarly, in his own dreams, Cobb could subconsciously fool himself by making the top fall over. So it doesn’t seem like Cobb’s totem is any use.
– Totally stumped on this one. The important difference is that Arthur’s and Ariadne’s totems are manufactured so that they look normal but in reality do something weird (always land on a six, fall much more easily). So architects/dreamers make them act the way normal objects do, and this alerts them that they are dreaming, since this is not, in fact, what the totem does in reality. In Cobb’s case, the top acts totally normally in reality, only acting weirdly in dreams. But the architect/dreamer would not know this, and so would make the top act normally in a dream as well, not weirdly as is suggested. Cobb’s totem could only tell him if he was in a dream where the dreamer knew how the top should work in a dream, and then only if the dreamer chose to do this to the top. So, not very helpful, really. Of course, if the top kept spinning forever, he would know for sure that he was in a dream, which is what he did to Mal in Limbo, but unlike with the others, the reverse is not true. If the top fell, he wouldn’t know he was in reality.
I hope that might clear up a little of the issues I found with Inception. I repeat, however, that I don’t think these spoiled my enjoyment of the film at all. I’d appreciate any alternate theories/comments of course. I’m sure the answer is out there to be found, somewhere. You just have to watch closely.
Sherlockiana and other Victorian Musings 