Pretty sure the headline makes it clear enough, but I’m gonna go ahead and slap a big ol’ SPOILER ALERT on this one anyway, because Read the full post.
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At this point I’m convinced Mal was right when she proclaimed that they needed to kill themselves to get to reality…I just need to tie it all together. I know this because the only thing I know for sure is his kids at the end were projections..%100
If there is a sequel he is dreaming. They never mention the other totems – the loaded die or the chess piece. I can see a sequel where the die is rolled wrong and they realize they are still in a dream.
If no sequel I go with awake. They never said how long it had been, so his children could have not aged very much.
All I can say is Chris Nolan is a genius!
I thought it may have been a dream due to the exact look of the kids, just like in the dream. How is that possible, with young kids too, they change so quickly. And since he was so worried about it – that led to me thinking it’s a dream sequence. And I further thought maybe Mal and the kids are ALL a dream, Cobb’s new reality he created. They did say, when he was floating in the water in the van, he’d be “lost” – so he could have created the whole world of Mal, the kids, everything, in his limbo state, to cover some OTHER deep-seated background issue. Michael Caine was also so briefly in the film, I then thought he could be part of the dream construct and also not even real.
Plus – I now want to see it again because the very first scene is of Cobb washed ashore, and that was repeated… with Saito being old, etc. I want to see the first scene again to consider its later meaning.
GREAT FILM.
The first scene is a flash forward. This is when Cobb stayed behind to find Saito. Saito had been stuck in the dream waiting to be rescued. That’s why Saito said to Cobb “have you come to kill me?” And then Saito said something about following through on his agreement, i.e., it Cobb was successful with planting the idea in Fisher’s brain, then he would make the call the allow Cobb to return to the U.S.
Guess i am a little slow, can someone explain to me why Saito was so old in last scene and Cobb was young? Is this some kind of space time continuum thing?
I don’t think Cobb was young–I think he had aged, too. Granted, he didn’t appear to be as old as Saito, but he looked older to me.
My understanding is that since Saito died in the 3rd layer(snow) he went to limbo which also has compounded time, more than the 3rd–maybe exponential. Saito was dead for about 20-30mins? In those 20-30mins, it could have been decades.
If you recall he explained the time variation. In dream world it could seem like 50 years had passed when in actuality only 1 hour had. So if you think about all the levels of dreaming it is entirely conceivable that the entire movie viewing time was actual time elapsed. Therefore, the children would be 2 hours older and would most definitely be wearing the same clothes.
Your comment about the totem not falling and him not caring was the perspective I choose. All he wanted was to return to his children. He did that. Mission accomplished.
where are the opening credits? how did he get on the beach at the beginning? makes me think the entire movie is a dream.
That’s the point. Just like they said in the movie, we (the audience) appeared with no sense of how we arrived, or what’s going on.
All movies are like that though, you never know how you got there or whats going on until later.
Not related but definitely had to add that JGL was awesome. I choose to believe he is awake because I WANT him to be awake. The movie makes you emotionally invested in the outcome and the outcome we and Cobb want is that his children don’t grow up without a parent. So, I say he’s awake.
Agreed!
Not to ruin the debate with such a lame movie geek piece of info, but in the credits there are two actors/actresses who play Cobb’s children, and they both play the same characters but at different ages.
Claire Geare: Philipa (3years)
Taylor Geare: Pilipa (5 Years)
MAgnus Nolan: James (20months)
Johnathan Geare: (3 Years)
But it’s an effin’ lovely way to make an audience talk about the film afterwards, because I talked with my friends about the movie for a few hours, like disecting it all, it was fun. Lovely debate.
Interesting observation!!
Interesting, but if it is a dream, his mind could still compensate and make them look older so that he doesn’t know he’s sleeping.
Trully… anything is possible.
The older kids were the ones that were on the phone and we never saw. You could tell they were older by their voices and the “rudeness” of the older one. On a different note, can anyone remind me what the old man in the basement of the chemist’s place said about some people preferring the dream world to the real world? I think that’s what’s going on here and the kids and wife just want their dad/husband to want reality with them instead of his dream world.
Right, and when he talks to his children on the phone in the very beginning of the movie, Philipa sounds like she is at least 8 and James about 6. Something I just thought of. The scene where is looking at the kids and doesnt say goodbye, the Colbalt guy gives him an air ticket and says, we must go right now. Maybe that is the airplane trip he goes on. The more I think about this movie, the more I think the sequences are very much out of order–just like in Nolan’s first movie Memento, where everything sequences backwards.
Can’t understand why anyone would like this movie. It was confusing and a waste of time and money. Really horrible.
you are just wasting precious oxygen by staying on this planet. Your mother should be slapped for having you. You and all you Emo retard buddies need to go ahead and commit seppu ku as this is the only a genetically malformed and unstable butt face like yourself can hope to not offend the rest of existance. Please die.
I might be gay for Mike Smith now
You are awesome!
yaay troll
He was still in a dream state. As he planted an idea/thought in Mal’s mind that spread like a virus, he had managed to plant the idea/thought that he was meant to be with his children and would see them again.
I believe that Leonardo was being incepted. Think about. He had to get this idea of Mal out of his subconscious. When he was extracting she would always show up. I believe that during the inception of Fischer, Cobb was being incepted by Ariadne as well as everyone else. It is weird, there are some many different ways to interpret this film. I just hope Nolan does a BD live event when this things gets released on Blu-Ray in December.
I agree! I think they whole movie was a dream up to maybe the end…I am still not sure whether he was in reality or still dreaming. My thought is that Mal went back to reality when she jumped from the building. To me,that scene was a dream, because why was she sitting across from him and not in the same room? Also, I think Saito was working for Mal and he performed inception on Cobb. The idea he planted was that he could get back to his kids. He said the same thing Mal said when she jumped from the window…take a leap of faith. Also, everyone always stared at Mal and tried to attack her when she showed up. I think Michael Caine’s character (Mal’s dad) was working with Mal and gave him Ariadne because he knew she was better than Cobb at architecture. She could have created the dream world where Cobb was searching for the chemist and running throught he narrowing alley. Michael Caine’s character told Cobb to wake up and come back to reality. I don’t remember what Cobb’s response was to that statement, though. I think it was something along the lines of this was his reality now because he couldn’t go home. Probably a lot of holes in my ideas. Just a thought, and it sounds like you are somewhat thinking along the same lines.
Here’s a thought for fun, the top did not actually belong to Copp. The top was Copp’s wife’s totem meaning if the top kept spinning or stopped it did not matter he could have been in a dream. More evidence is the kids continue to stay the same age and wear the same clothes (too much of a coincidence for me). Here is a question I had. If Copp spent so much time in his own mind, dream, or reality 50 years as he said, wouldn’t Copp have a lot more wisdom than we were led to believe?
He never was awake! From the very beginning, he was in a dream. It’s all fake. His wife woke up from the dream, but he never did. No way that the final scene with his kids reflects his memories perfectly — same clothes, same age, etc. No way a Japanese guy calls anyone and gets him a presidential pardon for murder. Let’s be somewhat realistic!
To further your idea, did anyone notice that in both scenes (at least, i think there were two) where they show mal waking up from their shared dream, dom is still asleep?
There is also no machine connected to them After they kill themselves on the train track!
The top was wobbling. Within the dream-world, the top was unable to wobble. I like to say that he was still awake and the top was just a way to make the crowd go: whaaat?
If he wasn’t awake, then who’s dream was he in? Either way, I think Mal got it in his brain enough that reality is relative. If he is somehow technically in limbo then that means that he created his capture by the old Saito’s guards and then went from an odd drop off point in that meeting back to what most of us think is reality. But he created every moment of the rest of the movie without even knowing it.
He is in Saito’s dream. And Mal, back in reality, is trying to use Saito to incept Cobb. That is why Saito said in the first dream sequence, it was an audition. But it wasnt Cobb’s audition for him, as you naturally think, it was Mal’s audition for Saito (to incept Cobb, to get him to go back up a level to reality). But Saito fails. Cobb never makes it back up a level, is convinced he is back in reality so he can now allow himself to see the faces of his children. The top will never fall because he is still in limbo.
What if they had children in Limbo?
Why’d you have to say that?
now i have more to think about lol
Or if they created them there is my point
I agree. Remember Mal kept saying the kids weren’t real. What if he created them.