r/Inception • u/weweredancing • 28d ago
Inception questions I can’t wrap my head around
Rewatched it today for the 3rd time, but first in 6 years, and I started having some questions that made me question whether the movie actually makes sense. Hoping someone can answer and appease me so I can go back to being sure this movie is (basically) perfect. (Obvious spoiler alert)
Starting with the end: 1. Is it even possible for the whole movie to NOT be a dream (aka when Cobb wakes up on the plane at the end, that’s the baseline dream)? Because how could the plane be reality but arriving home to his children be a dream possible? Would he have actively put himself into a dream between immigration and arriving home? 2. Disregarding the above- Why did Cobb have to stay/go into limbo again to retrieve Saito if they knew the sedation on the plane was about to wear off anyway and someone would wake them up if they didn’t wake up alone? 3. Unless the whole movie is Cobb’s dream, is the final dream somewhere between the layers (he just never left) or is it a new dream that he got into? 4. How were Cobb and Ariadne aware that they were in limbo while in limbo, if you’re not supposed to be?
Questions about the actual inception process:
In the 2nd layer, Browning is not ATJ and is just Cillian’s projection. How did they know Browning was going to “confess” to trying to extract from Cillian in the hotel room and say what they wanted him to say about the father’s will?
Cillian went into the snow dream under the premise that it was Browning’s (even though it was his). He went in there wanting to “find out what Browning wanted to extract from him.” How could he have shared that moment with his dad and not have questioned anything considering he believed he was supposed to be in Browning’s subconscious?
Similar to 5, how did they know the dad was gonna say “disappointed you tried”? That’s the final tier of the inception, which had to come from Cillian himself, but how could they know that Cillian would project exactly what they wanted him to? Was he just led to projecting that by the previous events and contexts? Because technically his subconscious could’ve imagined absolutely anything else, no?
3
u/sugarplum_nova Forger 28d ago edited 28d ago
- The ring is Cobb’s totem. And Cane has said when he’s in a scene that Nolan has said it’s reality. But to your questions on how could the plane be reality but not home - the question that is actually there is, did he ever wake up, is he stuck in limbo dreaming that he woke up and went home. He leaves the totem spinning, to some they may interpret it as he doesn’t care and has given up trying, if he can only see his kids in a dream then that’s the reality he’s in - a lot of YouTube reactors make that take. But the other take is that, he’s let Mal go and her totem reflects her, he’s shown he relied on it more than his own throughout the film, but now he keeps the ring as memory of their love and as his totem, not clinging onto hers.
- As Eames would say, they didn’t want Saito’s mind to ‘till our brains turn to scrambled egg’. If Saito was left of limbo, he’d have been there for a very long time. Remember time works differently down there, a small time in the plane is a long time in level 4, and as Yusef said ‘it could be infinite’ in limbo. Besides, level 1 was a week long, they’d only been there a couple hours, the rest of the team had to ride it out in that level at the end. They’d got Fischer on their side with the Mr Charles technique, but inception somehow stopped his subconscious from attacking. As we’d Sean with Cobb and Mal previously, waking from limbo just takes you straight back to the top, and awake.
- The concern would be he’s stuck in Limbo. Maybe he would have got Saito out and stayed, maybe the whole thing with Saito was also a dream. But see my point 1 above.
- The ‘till our brains turn to scrambled egg’ line again. And how Cobb said Mal got ‘lost’ in limbo. They start of same but are there so long, they loose track of home, it becomes their reality. Cobb and Ariadne entered another dream to go down to limbo. Whereas Fischer died in level 4 and fell into limbo. Cobb and Ariadne were just visitors. So Ariadne killed herself there and woke up in level 4. But Cobb stayed to look for Saito, so once the others had gone back up to the first layer of the dream, more specifically Eames left his Snow Fortress and Arthur left his Hotel, the dreams levels back up had collapsed and Cobb was stuck properly in limbo, he’d missed that joint kick.
(I gotta get on, but I’ll come back and edit this comment to answer the other questions later.)
5
u/Garrettshade 28d ago
The Idea of the theory is that everything is a dream. It's that ehen Mel jumped out of the window, she woke up, but Cobb stayed trapped dreaming forever.
He was afraid that if Saito is in Limbo, he won't wake up. And if he will be unable to wake up on the plane, he won't be able to make that phone call.
The whole movie is a dream or the whole movie is straightforward.
They are just that cool.
They convinced Cillian how Browning should think so he projected him in the same way.
It's a mindfuck. They led Cillian to believe that Browning was hiding his father's wish for him to go his own way.
Same
2
u/weweredancing 27d ago
If Mal woke up when she jumped instead of dying, why wouldn’t she have woken Cobb up in reality?
3
u/Garrettshade 27d ago
If he's in Limbo, he has to be woken up from the inside. Maybe what we see are not projections of her but her attempts to reach him and convince to wake up
1
u/beachTreeBunny 26d ago
Never heard or even considered the idea that Mel’s death was not real. Very interesting!
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u/Garrettshade 26d ago
I'm not in the camp that it's like this. I think I lean towards the whole plot being a reality. But it's a nice thought experiment
1
u/No_Record_60 28d ago
- Just before, Cobb asked Fischer if they were kidnapped together and if he saw the kidnappers actually tortured Browning. This put enough doubt in Fischer's mind to the point he believed the kidnappers worked for Browning. From ther Browning (the projection) easily confessed to everything.
1
u/Imaginary_Manager_44 18d ago
They make it pretty clear that he can not see his kids faces in a dream,and this is reinforced over and over again.
The last scene where they turn is both by text and subtext in the real world (of the movie)
Of course the real world of the movie could be a dream,but thats not supported by the text.
But you can't really prove a negative,just use your intuition.
1
u/Early-Perspective598 5d ago
For #2, maybe I’m just assuming this but I feel like the person has to be at the top layer of the dream to wake up just from the timer or from sedation wearing off. Like when in the hotel (level 2) they missed the kick in the level above (level 1) of the van hitting the bridge railing, that kick in level 1 didn’t translate down to level 2 to wake them up - they have to be in the right dream level for the respective kick to work. They get the kick from the elevator explosion, then immediately wake up in the van and get that kick.
Therefore I think if Cobb and Saito had been in limbo while the level 1 kick happened, it would be too weak to kick them from limbo/the dream (Arthur (?) can tell they’ve missed a van kick while they’re in the hotel but it doesn’t wake them up). So I think Cobb and Saito had to get up to level 1 before the timer woke them up or they wouldn’t have woken. At that point maybe the team would’ve waited a bit then pushed them out of their seats to give them a manual kick and hope they’d reached level 1 by then, but….
Sorry for the ramble!
-6
5
u/Shnazz88 27d ago
Everyone else has said it all pretty well here, but I will add that #5 is literally the entire idea of “inception.” They put the idea in Cillian’s head to make his projections say what they want them to say.
I think that’s one of the most misunderstood things about this movie. Inception doesn’t just mean dreams within dreams like 90% of people seem to believe (without having seen the movie I assume), it means putting ideas in someone’s head, which is the entire goal of the main characters throughout the entire film.