this was the best film of the year so far. i loved the plot and the fighting choreography,especially with the skiing.

Arthur is easily the most badass of the group, with Eames taking second. The Zero-G fight scene was amazing.

the dreams where built ahead of time, but they knew it was a dream, except the first level, of course. It's a level of realism. If you are asleep, and realize you are dreaming, you can control your dream. you can pull things out of thin air, even if they don't really exist. you can fly, etc. I'm pretty sure that non euclidean geometry trumps lasers any day of the week in terms of 'oh ♥♥♥♥ this isn't real!' psychology. floating around in zero gravity in a hotel, is less real than having a robot.

Point is they used things that where MORE jarring to the mind, than having lasers, robots, or flight, it's like they skipped a step. No, this is not criticism of the cinematography, or what the plot needed. this is criticism of them saying one thing and doing another. mostly them saying "this is a dream", and then it isn't at all like a dream. the closest to dream-like was when there wasn't gravity, and they didn't intentionally cause that.



It's a complaint similar to one I have for sorcerer's apprentice (not even worth seeing for free IMO). They say that all the magic works with science, such as fire by vibrating molecules. but then they turn a paper dragon into a real one, that can breath fire, and even more obvious, you can turn one car into another. you can't do that by just making atoms vibrate or have an electric charge. the comparison is that they created a fictional world, explained some detail, that is what holds it all together, and then they ignored, and even conflicted with, that detail. Inception did that when they said it was dreams, but the dreams where not at all like a dream.


In inception, in peoples dreams, everyone's subconscious manifests as people, who pay attention to, and affect everything in the dream. they have the goal to kick out any outside force that is NOT you, but is affecting this dream. By that logic, if you are sleeping in room, with a creaky old fan making some rhythmic clicking sound, you will hear it in your dream. your mind will associate that sound with something else. That sound is not a part of you, but it is influencing your dream. your subconscious doesn't freak out about that, not does it? if it makes you imagine some ridiculous giant complex full of slasher-movie villains, your subconscious doesn't attack them, even though it was not your original idea, it was some sound affecting what you think of.

in that sense calling what they where entering, 'dreams' was pretty false.


odds are that they didn't do it because the budget would have been obnoxious, since if the characters are dreaming, there's pretty much no such thing as suspension of disbelief. by limiting yourself to using what the audience will believe within a dream, you are breaking SoD, and driving people like me, absolutely nuts.

There were numerous times where their own rules conflicted on each other.

For example, if the whole time they were in a van that was falling to the water, why weren't all the subsequent dream layers in 0 Gs too?

Also, poor van driver, he missed the whole thing. Also, poor asian dude.

Maybe some part if the main guy's wife imbedded itself in his own brain, and in some sense,
when they vulcan mind-melded, she left some of her own brain processes and function in her
husband, and she continued to "Live" in her husband on the 13th floor or whatever.

oh right I forgot miles is impossible to argue with

even if you write one sentence you get ten more in return

zalo: yeah the zero G sequence break was a bit jarring, but I dunno, I guess that's also why they had the independent kicks? I think it's just poorly explained, since it seems like with the fairly coherent rest of the story that would be an obvious flaw

Well, think about it, if the Van was 0g, the Hotel was 0g. Now the Hotel would affect the level below it, right?
The Independant kicks thing was just too much. The upper levels were being simulated at the same time as lower
ones, which would seem to reaffirm that the upper level is a parent level to the lower one, so it would have complete
control over the lower one.

I think this movie can be best summarized by the image of a guy falling down into a spiral forever,
with the phrase "AAAAHHHH" being scrolled along the bottom.

Also, someone may notice this later, but early in the movie before they did the fischer stuff, Main dude went into dream
state in the basement of that place, and he "woke up" very soon after that. Then he tried to spin his top, but he was
interrupted by annoying girl. We never saw anything left about that ever again.

I *think* it's because when they got farther down than the hotel, they ignored the physics of the previous dream, and took the physics of them on the plane, although I pointed this out in theaters, and noone cared.


they actually explained why in the movie. with the sedatives they where given, they would not simply wake up when the machine shut off, and they could not have a physical 'kick' in the 'real world', so they had to wake people up that way, just like the start of the movie, the ice-bath-kick was within a dream, but they where woken up when the machine shut off, because *they* hadn't been given sedatives. Every time they are not sedated, they woke up automatically when the machine shut off. It was very consistent. not to say it wasn't hard to follow though.


I mentioned that in the previous post. He spun the top in the 'real world' and was inturrupted, Dropped the top, I don't think he picked it up, but he had it the rest of the movie anyway, and, didn't spin it again 'IRL' till the last scene.

Everything else you said was good, except for the part about sedatives.
Whether or not sedatives were introduced in IRL doesn't matter.
When it's a dream within a dream, the sedatives kinda lose their efficacy
in keeping you asleepx2, unless they were re-administered at each level.
And from that logic, you can comprehend that if they died at lower levels,
they would wake up right to the level under where the sedative was administered
(But it would've ruined the sense of urgency).

Also, nobody cared when you mentioned it in the movie, because you were interrupting them while they were watching a good movie. :p

So was that ending (or lack thereof) a ham-handed way of making us question our reality or what?

yes, I think it was. that's the inception. hur dur.

Reality to us is how we have always interpreted it, our dreams are different.
We may be dreaming, but that's none of our concern really, considering we feel pain, happiness and all those other things we apparently call emotions.
Back on topic.

FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCKKKK THAT WAS AN AWESOME MOVIE AND I'D WATCH IT AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN AND YOU GET IT DON'T YOU?

Hands down best movie I've seen for a while. Went with a friend who was buzzed and he didn't get anything from it haha.

Basically we all came up with a theory. HIS FREAKING DAD DUDE!

Think about it, his kids were wearing the same clothes throughout the ENTIRE MOVIE! HOW THE FRICK LONG HAS HE BEEN GONE?? Why wouldn't they get older or wear a different set of clothes? DeCaprio has been in his own dream for the longest effin time and the entire job was to get him to accept himself again so he could take care of his kids... I think. Not sure where real life comes into play. But his "murder charges" was something he made up out of his guilt, he was probably set himself in deep limbo to escape reality and his dad hired all those people to create all these ruse jobs and wake him up again though it most likely didn't happen yet.

tl;dr version - All this crap happened cuz of dad trying to rescue his son from depression, all of it is decaprio's mind.

But enough overviews lets take sections and rip it apart, like the girl's (juno's?) behavior when looking into DeCaprio's dream. She was inordinarily curious and willing to take risks in his dreams, I want to think she was hired from the beginning since his Dad was confident in her from the very start.

I think you're pulling stuff from thin air. But hey, if that's how you wanna see it.

Well yea it's a theory. It's only one of like 6 my friends and I thought up, and the only one that makes the first dream sequence and the last make sense if they were in fact dreams. But yea the movie is pretty much open to any interpretation because of all the holes they leave, and making you doubt thinking the last scene is reality.