Inception

(Disclaimer: Potential spoiler alerts below! You’ve been warned.)

Went to watch Inception on IMAX the other day. Overall, thought it was a good movie. I generally like movies about dreams vs. reality, or any movie that gets me thinking about it days after watching it. Some of the main concepts: Dream vs. Reality, “Leap of Faith”, dreams being multi-directional (dreams are based on reality, but can also serve as inspirations for new realities), and operates upon many layers of conscious and subsconscious thoughts, to name a few.

The “Leap of Faith” concept is probably the most interesting idea in the movie, at least for me. At the same time though, the movie seems to beg the audience to take a ‘leap of faith’ too. Here are a few things in the story that seemed to suggest this:

1. I couldn’t understand why Cobb’s wife was on a ledge of a building across from the one that their hotel room was in. How did she get there and why wasn’t she on the ledge of the same building?

If being able to see his kids was that important to Cobb, why couldn’t the grandparents arrange to take the kids abroad to meet their dad again or live there? Why was Cobb so pessimistic about the likelihood of his wife’s death being ruled a suicide, that he had to flee the country and never come back to see his kids? Her DNA is on the other building and his aren’t I presume, and I’m not so sure that what the movie suggests as evidence/motive is enough to convict him of murder.

2. Fischer pointing a gun to his head in the bathroom, as if about to commit suicide, to test Cobb’s theory. Why would anyone do that? So if his hypothesis is wrong, he’s dead. If he’s right, he wakes up. What a great deal! Fischer wasn’t depressed or deranged; in fact, he was extremely wealthy and stood to inherit his father’s empire. Not believable, unless i missed something here.

3. I guess the leap of faith is also reflected in the other team members’ instantly believing what Cobb said about if anyone died in a dream on their mission, they would forever
be in a state of limbo. Might Cobb have made this up to get them to stay onboard and finish the job?

4. The old man at the long table in the beginning and end of the movie, is supposed to be Saito, the character played by Ken Watanabe. The young Saito’s eyes were brown. The old Saito had green eyes. How does that work?

Maybe I have to watch the movie again to make sense of these things. One thing’s for sure, this post is suffering from severe overanalysis and is time to drift off to sleep.