guy44

Whoa.

WHOA.

Whoa.

After seeing Inception, I have to say it's easily the best summer movie so far. What a mindfuck. It's brilliant and confusing and has so many good actors (Michael Caine, Marion Cotillard, Joseph Gordon-Leavitt, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Tom Berenger)...uh, and Leonardo DiCaprio, who achieved a rare half-decent performance (sub-Catch Me If You Can, better than Shutter Island).

I have no idea why this was released in the summer; summer movies are supposed to be dumb, and Inception is more confusing than Memento or The Prestige.

Let's just give Inception the Oscar for editing, shall we, and pray that the rest of the year produces movies that can live up to it.

__________________
"You have reached Ritual Sacrifice. For goats press one, or say 'goats.'"

Baraka_Guru

Damn, I didn't know this was out! I'm so looking forward to it, especially after your response. I've had a reserved hope for this film since seeing the trailer. I was hoping for "the next Matrix but better." It being without Keanu is just a bonus.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

Jove

I agree with Guy. The movie was absolutely amazing.

hunnychile

Oh Good to hear! This might be one film I'll go see in a theater, instead of waiting for ages and a decade to rent. All the reviews I've read so far say, "It's James Bond meets the Matrix" etc. Several writers from The Gate in San Francisco are touting as being "more clever than most viewers will be able to comprehend..." <- Hmmm, this could be a fine precursor!

I could really use some clever, trippy, thought provoking distraction today and I appreciate hearing more from those who have seen it already!

No spoilers, please.

__________________
"I need compassion, understanding and chocolate." - NJB

Baraka_Guru

Okay, I'm totally seeing this tonight.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

SecretMethod70

I was hoping to see the midnight release but that didn't happen. Maybe I'll join Baraka and see it tonight too

__________________
Le temps détruit tout

"Musicians are the carriers and communicators of spirit in the most immediate sense." - Kurt Elling

Baraka_Guru

Wait, you're in Chicago, Ontario?

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

SecretMethod70

I'd be joining you in spirit

__________________
Le temps détruit tout

"Musicians are the carriers and communicators of spirit in the most immediate sense." - Kurt Elling

FuglyStick

Meh. I'm sure it's a great film, but I'm not in any real rush to see it. Different strokes and all.

__________________
AZIZ! LIGHT!

Willravel

Great movie. I think I'll go see it again in a week or two. Chris Nolan is really growing as a creative force in Hollywood.

hunnychile

That does it! If Will liked it, it must be quite amazing!!
(to those of you new here at tfp, he's one of the real smart ones....with talents too.)

__________________
"I need compassion, understanding and chocolate." - NJB

ratbastid

We're probably going tomorrow.

Pearl Trade

Amazing movie. Makes you think. 9/10. Definitely worth paying the overly expensive theater prices.

__________________

Our revenge will be the laughter of our children.
Give me convenience or give me death!

Baraka_Guru

Brilliant. Fantastic. Completely engrossing.

It's been a while since I've been this satisfied by a film.

Go see it.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

Willravel

Spoiler: You're all aware that the inception was actually being done on Cobb, right? Or am I the only one?

That Chris Nolan is clever. Reminds me of Memento.

Baraka_Guru

Spoiler: I don't think it's entirely clear, and that is intentional I think. I don't think we can ever know for certain. I could be wrong. I might need a second or third viewing to be sure of that. I'm not sure if Cobb is the subject or if what happens to him is merely collateral damage. *shrug* There's a lot to keep track of the first time watching it.

Maybe you caught something I missed?

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

Willravel

Spoiler: Imagine that your best extractor, one of the only people in the world capable of inception, breaks down after the suicide of his wife. Now imagine the ultimate inception job comes your way and you find yourself in a pickle. We can't do inception without our extractor, Cobb, but he's too distracted by his wife to be an effective member of the team.

Spoiler: An idea: double-inception. If a clever enough person, Ariadne, can convince Cobb that he never stopped, and can arrange an inception for him, too, they might be able to pull it off. At the beginning of the story, they're already in a dream. Ariadne has Cobb and the rest of his old team under with the second mark, Robert Fischer, Jr. Notice how Cobb and his cohorts are being pursued by every government? It's a 'Mr. Charles' on Cobb so he can protect the rest of his team from his own dream agents. Then, inside the first dream, Ariadne convinces Cobb to take this one last job, giving him the ultimate incentive: seeing his kids again. He takes the job, verifying that his kids are the tool they need, so step one is in place.

Spoiler: Still, they need to set up inception for Cobb to get over his wife, so they arrange for, during his inception mission, a situation in which Cobb must decide between holding on to his dead wife or seeing his kids again. This is the sniper situation in the ice base. Cobb, seeing his phantasm wife about to kill his chances of being with his kids again, makes the choice to let her go. Then, they have Cobb join her in the place where she's been holding on to, their shared limbo. Once Cobb is able to finally let go of his dead wife in their limbo, his own inception is complete and they're able to pull out. Simultaneously, the inception created by Cobb for Robert Fischer, Jr. plays out, so they're able to finish both missions successfully.

The only question mark I had left at the end was this: Spoiler: Could Ariadne be Cobb's daughter? How long was Cobb separated from his kids? It's quite a trip.

StellaLuna

Referencing Will's spoiley-ass post:
THANK YOU. That all makes sense and I'm happy now. And ready to go again. We left that theatre and my poor brain was buzzing.

__________________
Screw tradition!

Willravel

I could be wrong. It might all just be what you see. Spoiler: I'm having trouble reconciling the totem.

StellaLuna

Here's my question: Spoiler: Did he actually ever wake up? Those kids were exactly the same the whole time, clothes and all, and that totem never stopped.
This is why I need to go again. This and Joseph Gordon-Leavitt. He's delicious and that whole hotel scene just twisted my head.

__________________
Screw tradition!

hunnychile

Spoilers suck. Thank Gawd someone blanked 'em.

(What it's too complex to figure out???? Oh c'mon)

__________________
"I need compassion, understanding and chocolate." - NJB

Willravel

Honestly, Spoiler: I'm not sure it matters whether or not he was awake in the last moment. It was just more of a jab at the audience, one more little mindfuck just to give you a superficial twist to distract you from the big one. I think we're supposed to assume in the end, things turned out okay for Cobb. I kinda like that.

StellaLuna

See-- I like it too, but I like it because Spoiler: it did all turn out happily in the end for Cobb, but I think he was too broken to wake and leave his own head. His wife is dead and he knows that all too well, so at least now he has his dream children back. Unfortunately, that leaves me back at the beginning- who is real? At what point do we descend completely into his head and where did the dreams splinter?

---------- Post added at 06:11 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:09 PM ----------

Que pasa, baby? Did I forget somewhere? It's impossible, I think, to talk about this movie at all without spoiler tags, unless all you say is, "Oooh, fun and shiny!"

__________________
Screw tradition!

hunnychile

Sorry I was pms-ing.

__________________
"I need compassion, understanding and chocolate." - NJB

StellaLuna

Spoiler tags!

__________________
Screw tradition!

hunnychile

Today I need a gigantic "Spoiler Alert" to wear on my tee shirt!!! Ha!

__________________
"I need compassion, understanding and chocolate." - NJB

guy44

I gotta say Will, I don't think that's right.

Spoiler: If the first thing you need to do is perform inception on Cobb, why do it during a difficult and dangerous mission to perform inception on Fischer? If you do it on Cobb first, the whole point is that he will have the idea that he's capable of being a successful extractor again, AND he will think it came from inside himself. He'll have no clue that his team members went into his subconscious to plant the idea. Then, at a later date, you could perform inception on Fischer at their leisure.

Also, as to the ending, I'm pretty sure that there is no right answer. It's left deliberately open so you can pick whichever ending you would prefer.

That said, I'm hardly confident about anything and I'm going to see it again I think...

__________________
"You have reached Ritual Sacrifice. For goats press one, or say 'goats.'"

ratbastid

It's also entirely possible that Spoiler: the whole thing happened entirely inside Cobb's limbo. If you can build a whole world in Limbo, then presumably you could fabricate a job, a three-level matrioshka of dreams inside that job, etc. In the end, we could have never once ascended above the lowest level of limbo.

StellaLuna

(We had this discussion earlier, I will reiterate my point for the TFPers who aren't lucky enough to live in our house...) If that's the case Spoiler: I wanna know how we saw everything that happened in the hotel, including the conversations between characters that were nowhere near Cobb. He wasn't there, so how was that part of the dream taking place outside his perception?

__________________
Screw tradition!

oliver9184

Spoiler: "The whole thing happened entirely inside Cobb's limbo" is the same as "the whole thing was just a dream": it's a glib interpretation that implies laziness and/or unreasonable cynicism. Saying it suggests that the whole two and a half hours is nothing but a huge, hollow confidence trick; an elaborate and ultimately pointless bit of flimflammery. NO! All those people did NOT go to all that trouble for the sake of tricking you! Who do you think you are?!

Inception is a house of cards with dependable structural integrity that will never fall down no matter what shit it gets bombarded with.

Baraka_Guru

I'm not wholly convinced of anyone's theories. We have all of us been mindfucked. We have all been compromised.

Nolan is laughing at us all.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

Willravel

Spoiler: There was a time-crunch because Robert Fischer Sr. was about to die. Inception needed to happen asap or the window would close and the company would be an international monopoly.

imho.

dlish

if you havent seen this movie, and plan on seeing it, this thread is useless!

SPOIL MY ASS!

__________________
An injustice anywhere, is an injustice everywhere

I always sign my facebook comments with ()()===========(}. Does that make me gay?
- Filthy

YaWhateva

I loved the movie!

There is also this to consider Spoiler: In every scene that wasn't a dream, Cobb didn't have a wedding ring. In every scene that was in a dream, he did. SO I don't see how the whole thing could be in his mind.

Also, Spoiler: to those people saying the kids didnt age, yes they did. In the dream sequences they were younger than the final scene. If you don't believe me, look at imdb.com. They have two actors listed for the children, separated by two years. You can also tell that they sound older in the scene where Cobb is on the phone with them.

Spoiler: I believe people are reading too far into it. At the end it doesn't show you that the top falls over but it is very obvious that it does. Mal and Cobb grew old together in limbo and the top locked away in her safe still spinning and it doesn't so much as wobble for all of those long years but it starts wobbling right away when he spins it? I do see that they are trying to leave it open to interpretation but still. And saying that inception had to happen quickly because of a time crunch? That doesn't jive real well with the exponential time difference in each level. They trained for weeks and weeks but couldn't afford 10 or so hours to plant a seed in Cobb? I don't buy it. Besides that is way too huge of a risk. What if it doesn't work?

Spoiler: Stella, I might be misinterpreting your comment about things happening outside of Cobb's presence in the levels of the dream but since they're shared dreams lots of things happen outside of his perception. Anyway, Cobb isn't the dreamer making the world in any of the levels. They made it clear that they absolutely could not have Cobb as a dreamer because of the influence Mal would have.

__________________
“If the Americans go in and overthrow Saddam Hussein and it's clean, he has nothing, I will apologize to the nation, and I will not trust the Bush administration again.” - Bill O'Reilly

"This is my United States of Whateva!"

ratbastid

If it WAS Spoiler: an inception on Cobb, then the Spoiler: thought they were trying to implant was obviously: Spoiler: Do you want to be an old man, full of regret, waiting to die alone?

Somebody report me for spoiler tag abuse!

Lasereth

I saw it last night in IMAX. Great movie. What is it about Nolan movies and people making up crazy ways to explain the plot? Spoiler: The whole movie wasn't a dream or an inception on Cobb. The only thing somewhat up for interpretation is the spinning totem at the end but I think it's reasonable to say it falls over.

When I got done watching The Prestige a couple years ago I couldn't believe the explanations I read on the Internet. People take Nolan movies waaay too far ha ha ha ha

__________________
"A Darwinian attacks his theory, seeking to find flaws. An ID believer defends his theory, seeking to conceal flaws." -Roger Ebert

dlish

dont tempt me...punk!

but seeing all these white lines make me go crazy!

im going to have to watch it i think..even though i rarely go to the movies.

__________________
An injustice anywhere, is an injustice everywhere

I always sign my facebook comments with ()()===========(}. Does that make me gay?
- Filthy

Lasereth

Why are there spoiler tags in this thread? It makes no sense. You don't come into a movie thread to not read about the movie.

__________________
"A Darwinian attacks his theory, seeking to find flaws. An ID believer defends his theory, seeking to conceal flaws." -Roger Ebert

Baraka_Guru

Spoiler tags will make less sense perhaps a week after opening night. In the meantime, the thread is a mixture of "this is how much I liked it" and "this is what I think happened in it." There are people who might wander in here to find out how much people liked it and would rather avoid the spoilers for now.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

YaWhateva

hear hear! This movie was basically Spoiler: a heist movie but with them implanting an idea in someone rather than stealing a bunch of diamonds. And it was great at what it did.

__________________
“If the Americans go in and overthrow Saddam Hussein and it's clean, he has nothing, I will apologize to the nation, and I will not trust the Bush administration again.” - Bill O'Reilly

"This is my United States of Whateva!"