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nomoreuturnsSo I ended up seeing Inception three times...two Tuesdays ago, last Friday, and last Saturday. Each time I loved it a little more, and each time I noticed something new or made a new connection. Holy crap, how is this film so awesome?
This post is pretty much me just figuring everything out, because three viewings in and I'm still unclear on some points. Lots of discussion, lots of speculation, some blatant fan-girling of Eames (♥), rampant abuse of italics and capslock...also, spoilers, so if you haven't seen Inception, for gods' sakes go and see it and then come back and discuss how awesome it is!
Things I liked:
The clothes. Gods above, the suits in this movie were freaking exquisite. Everytime Ken Watanabe or Joseph Gordon-Levitt in particular were on-screen I was all ♥____♥. I loved how well Eames cleaned up, from his interesting attire in Mombasa to his stint at Fischer Morrow as a minion of Browning.
The cast. So many fantastic actors! So many of my favourite people (Marion Cotillard*; Tom Hardy^; Joseph Gordon-Levitt; Cillian Murphy) in one movie! The cast list is like a roll-call of awesome.
* I have such a massive crush on her, ngl...she was utterly fabulous in La Vie en Rose and Nine
^ Handsome Bob! ♥
Falling wakes you up. Because who hasn't woken up from a dream convinced they must have been freaking levitating or something because yeah, they fell down a staircase in their dream but the sensation was so real?
Competent characters. Competency is so freakinghot awesome hot and awesome. Eames was especially awesome, mainly because he was so consistently competent: he knew inception was possible; he knew they'd have to go after Fischer Jr's relationship with his father; he came up with the basic idea to plant in Fischer Jr's subconscious; he held his own in the taxi shoot-out in Level 1; he fought off an entire freaking army of projections in Level 3.
Ariadne. I love that she is talented and smart and level-headed, and that - although there was some flirting with Arthur - she didn't end up being a romantic attachment. I'm glad she had some flaws...she was pushy and nosy and a bit cocky and heartless (when Dom frantically told her to stop using memories because otherwise she might, you know, lose touch with reality, she said "Is that what happened to you?" and got this little smirk on her face), which made her feel real. I don't know if I like her as a person or not, but I think she had depth and purpose and that was great.
Continuity. Eames added in air-ducts > Ariadne tells Dom about the air-ducts > Mal drops out of an air-duct in the fortress to shoot Fischer. \o/ A little thing, but it made me happy...
Things I disliked:
There were three women in this movie, and two of them were actually men (unless they were in a dream or psychologically unstable or dying). Mal was a projection of Dom's subconscious, except for when she was a real lady in a dream or playing with a knife or jumping off a hotel window-ledge. Annabelle Fritton was Eames' briefly-used disguise in Level 2. NEEDS MOAR WOMEN, CHRISTOPHER.
Ariadne breaking into Dom's dream. Yeah, OK, that whole sequence had to happen so that Dom would bring her along on the job, so that she would be there to suggest they go to limbo and find Fischer and Saito and thus bring about the (happy yet ambiguous {screw you, Chris Nolan, you magnificent bastard}) ending; I accept that. And yes, the whole movie is about breaking into people's minds to either steal or plant ideas. But. I was uneasy the first time I saw it, uncomfortable the second time, and upset the third. Because that was Dom's dreams, for gods' sake...his time for his subconscious to get a chance to work shit out, and she just waltzed right in. What gave her the right to just insinuate herself into his mind? Without warning, without consent...yes, I get the hypocrisy of this statement, given that Dom (and Arthur and Eames and Nash) routinely breaks into people's minds in order to extract information, but...but. It just felt to me like there was a line there that was crossed, and it really fucking bugs me.
The Dream Team sucked at First Aid. Why did no-one think to apply pressure to Saito's wound? Or better yet, have Yusuf dream him better? OK, even if Yusuf couldn't dream him good-as-new, he could have dreamed up a First Aid kit with a clotting agent or something to prevent blood loss and some goddamn morphine for the pain. And even if any of that was not possible...what, none of them had hands? None of them could apply pressure to the wound, to slow the bleeding and buy Saito more time?*
* Ah, but he needed to die quickly so he could go into limbo and fuel the final stretch of the movie, as well as make the very first scene make sense.
Not enough physics-bending, reality-defying dream weirdness! I'm a little bummed that all the really awesome dream-bending stuff happened in the first third of the film, and that most of it was simply Ariadne flexing her new-found dream-architectural skills. I would've liked to have seen more insane stuff in the later parts, because the shifting/zero gravity sequence and Arthur's Penrose Stair gambit were pretty nifty and I wish there'd been more stuff like that. I guess it could be argued that they were trying to skate under the projections' radar, but the projections already knew they were there, and surely a few added bizarre details would have lended credence to the "it was all just a dream" thing they were trying to leave with Fischer Jr.
Dom taking out Fischer's projections and saying "oh, it's OK, they're just projections", then forgetting his own advice when it came to shooting Mal. *headdesk* Contrived and clunky plot point is contrived and clunky. It threw me, because Dom was being all bad-ass and competent, killing projections left and right, and then...what? A single solitary moment of cognitive dissonance that threw him so completely he just couldn't shoot his magically-appeared-from-an-air-duct-to-kill-the-mark projection!wife until after she'd scuppered his mission? I will submit that such a moment is possible, but...but... *headdesk* Yes, I know, necessary for the plot to progress, but...nyah nyah bitchcakes.
Dream vs. Reality
Okay, so although I am a firm believer in the Happily Ever After, and thus really really really want that top to have fallen over after the fade-to-black...I just don't know. Here's a couple of things that don't add up, for me.
The kids' ages. According to the credits, James and Phillipa are 20 months and three years old respectively when Dom goes on the run, and are three and five years old when he returns. After Dom checks reality after the failed extraction from Saito, he gets a phone call from James and Phillipa: according to my mum, James sounds about three, and Phillipa sounds about 10, although apparently a really mature-sounding seven is not out of the question. So James' age fits, but not Phillipa's. And then when we finally get to see James and Phillipa, James looks about the right age, while Phillipa looks to be about six...which sort of fits with the credits since she could be a tall five-year-old, but doesn't fit with the phone call. So. Either this is Chris Nolan's way of saying "reality is not to be trusted", or he didn't catch the inconsistency during the editing process, or he thought she sounded five and not 10...or right now he's rubbing his hands together and cackling, thinking about all the poor schmucks who are so overinvested in his film that they are thinking about the ages of two characters who got maybe 10 cumulative minutes of screentime. *facepalm*
All the scenes that don't involve Dom. Why bother to shoot any of the scenes that don't feature Dom? Why show us Arthur teaching Ariadne; that could've been shoe-horned into an earlier or later scene with Arthur and Dom showing Ariadne how to construct dreams.
The top wobbled. I think it all comes down to whether or not it is possible to fuck with the physics of totems within a dream without messing with the rest of it or the owner of the totem noticing. Because the whole point of a totem is that it is in some way different in a dream-state to how it is in reality, so the the dream-sharer can differentiate between the two states; the idea is that it is impossible for these items to behave in any other fashion in a dream. For Arthur, his die is presumably random in a dream but consistently one number in reality; for Dom (and Mal before him), the top spins unceasingly in a dream but eventually falls over in reality. We've seen that it's possible for fixed architecture to be manipulated by the dreamer (Arthur changing the normal stairs in Level 2 into Penrose stairs); presumably, if the dreamer knows the secret of somebody's totem they can manipulate it in the dream (as Cobb does to Mal in Limbo: setting her top spinning in her subconscious so she believed everything was a dream). The only person (besides
Oh motherfucker. I just...um. Realised that the latter half of the movie, from Ariadne going into Cobb's dream on, could definitely be a dream. Because as far as we know, the only person besides Dom and Mal who knows how the top works is Ariadne; Dom tells her when she interrupts his "experiment" to show him her totem. And then a few days later Ariadne breaks into Dom's dream, and then...what. Presumably, the PASIV device shuts off like it's supposed to, and they wake up...just in time for Arthur and Saito to come in and tell them that the game is on. Dom said he'd "never seen anyone pick [architecture] up so quickly"...if she was already fully trained, and had been hired to extract something from Dom's mind...
O.O
OK, moving on...
When did the "final dream" begin? When it comes down to it, the only thing that's been keeping me from accepting that the final scene is happening within a dream - apart from optimism - is that I couldn't figure out from which point that dream began.* Because I refuse to believe the entire film was a dream; otherwise, what was the point? But Ariadne slipping into Dom's dream and making him fake!wake-up from that...I could see that happening. And it...well, it doesn't excuse it, but if Ariadne broke into Dom's dream as an extractor and not just on a what is apparently a whim, then I can live with that. It also explains a couple of points that have bugged me:
1) Although Arthur is "the best" at what he does, he's human, so he's probably not infallible...but missing somebody's anti-extraction training is a pretty big deal. Fischer Jr wasn't supposed to have had any subconscious security...everyone was surprised at this. But if this is Dom's dream, then the presence of trained projections makes sense: they're Dom's. And if they're Dom's, then Ariadne successfully pulled a Mr Charles (without specifically using Mr Charles) and turned Dom against his own subconscious. Also explains the freight train; a freight train set Dom free from a dream before, and it could be his subconscious recognising that he's in a dream and trying to set him free again.
2) Ariadne said to Dom in the warehouse "...while we're going deeper into Fischer, we're also going deeper into you". It just struck me as sort of an odd thing to say.
Of course, the argument against this is the same point above about showing scenes that don't involve Dom. Why shoot Yusuf driving off the bridge, or Arthur doing the zero G scene and blowing the elevator, if all of this is Dom's dream? It could be that it's Dom's subconscious acting it all out on purpose, because he knows that things like that would have to happen
* The "he was in the real world when he got on the plane and just didn't wake up from that dream" scenario just...doesn't feel right, to me. Weird, yes? *is weird*
Random thoughts and observations (about the movie and about fandom):
Military backgrounds. Cobb adhered to noise-discipline when taking out Saito's projections in the second level of the Cobol job, Eames had a textbook point-shooting grip on his sidearm during the cab shoot-out on Level 1, Cobb's disarm of the projection in the hotel bathroom in Level 2 was very similar to a disarm I use in krav maga, Arthur's fighting style wth the projections in Level 2 was very Semper Fu/krav maga-esque, and Eames' taking-out of the projections in Level 3 was very effective and very professional. I can't remember where I saw it, but Tom Hardy said in an interview that Nolan had said something about Eames (definitely) and Arthur (possibly) having military backgrounds. So Eames and probably Arthur are former military, and I'm guessing either Dom was one of the civilian contractors that designed the dreams for the soldiers, or was military himself...or heck, maybe he was a soldier who'd studied structural engineering at university. *hands*
Dream manipulation. I wonder how much people-not-the-dreamer can manipulate any particular dream, and how much the dreamers themselves can manipulate. When Saito said "when you're in my dream, you play by my rules", he seemed to think he'd be able to seriously screw with Dom and Nash; instead, Dom and Nash tell him they're in Nash's dream, implying only Nash can manipulate it. Ariadne was the dreamer in the workshops she and Dom did, and she was the only one who manipulated anything (exploding the shops and the streets and freaking everything; folding the city in half; building herself stairs and a bridge; extending the walkway with the mirrors); presumably, if Dom could have manipulated the dream, he would've done something to protect them from the projections because hey, in a lynch mob vs. safety kinda deal, I'd pick safety every time*. Yusuf was the dreamer of Level 1, but he didn't dream up anything to help Saito; conversely, Eames got his hands on a grenade launcher at a moment's notice, presumably because he dreamed it up himself (see: the infamous "You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling."). Arthur was the dreamer of Level 2, and he created the Penrose Stairs, but he couldn't restore gravity...you'd think it'd be as simple as thinking OK, gravity means we stick to the floor, but apparently the actual falling sensation trumps dream-manipulation.
* Although it's possible he figured hey, she needs to learn she can die in a dream sometime and decided to just let it happen.
Yusuf flipping off the projections as he drove off the bridge. Yusuf is made of win and awesome, and his little "haha, up your's" *flips the bird* as he backed off the bridge was priceless.
A week in Level 1. I guess once Yusuf and Ariadne and Arthur and Eames stopped acting weird, the projections calmed down? Otherwise, that would've been one hell of a week, and Dom probably would've ended up having to find all of them in Limbo. I wonder what they did? They must have just laid low in a hotel or something...they wouldn't have been able to mess with the dream, though, otherwise roomservice would've killed them with the silverware. So, they would've spent a week holed up in a room, watching TV? What would they have watched? It probably would've given them some insight into Fischer Jr's mind...*muses*
Darling, darling, darling, pet, love, honey, darling. There's a lot of pet-names in fic. A lot. Part of being slashers is that we take the hints the writers/directors give us and just freaking run with them. But the sheer amount of pet-names in a lot of Arthur/Eames fic is pretty staggering, considering I'm pretty sure Eames only calls Arthur "darling" (and only "darling") once in the movie. OK, he also calls him stick-in-the-mud, but he calls him by his name...what, two or three times? Maybe a ratio of 2 : 1 : 1 should be utilised in fic...two instances of Eames saying Arthur's name to one instance of Eames calling Arthur a pet-name to one instance of Eames insulting Arthur.
Arthur is all three-piece suits, all the time. We only get to see Arthur when he's working, in a world of corporate espionage; I'd wear a suit, too, if I were him. Soldiers don't wear their uniforms every day of their lives, just when they're on-base or in-theatre; when they're off the clock and at home, they wear civvies. Proof: in the hotel after the failed extraction on Saito, Arthur isn't wearing a tie; I would submit this is because the job is over and he's heading home. When he's off the clock, I'm guessing he probably wears similar stuff to what he wore in Level 1.
Kick. As far as I can tell, the playing of Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien is not the kick. The music is a countdown, to either signify that the PASIV device is winding down naturally, or to signify that a kick is imminent and to brace yourself. A kick is only necessary if a person is still hooked up to the PASIV and needs to be woken up before the Somnacin runs out.
Somnacin. And while we're on the subject: Somnacin seems to be pretty...I don't know. Intuitive? I don't know if that word can be attributed to a drug, but considering how Ariadne and Dom wake up within moments of each other from Dom's dream, despite Ariadne entering the dream later than Dom and despite their physiological differences (and apparently without them killing themselves), it seems appropriate. (This, of course, could be attributed to the fact that Ariadne and Dom were still in a dream; a dream of Ariadne's design, so she could extract something from Dom.)
The idea that the more you dream-share, the less able you are to dream naturally. This is something I find quite scary, actually. Dreams are necessary; even if you don't remember them the next day, they are where your subconscious works out any issues or problems you have. How many times have you gone to bed worried or agitated or all-out freaking out and then woken up the next morning knowing exactly what you need to do?* Now imagine not having that anymore. How much would that suck? Imagine how much less sane people would be? The road rage alone would probably doom us all...
* It happened to me a couple of weekends ago, actually...I was stressing about whether or not to drop one of my uni courses, and woke up the next day just knowing that I should stick with it.
Eames' totem. To be honest, I'm not sure Eames actually has a totem. I know it's generally accepted that his totem is a poker chip...I assume because he's messing with two of them when Dom finds him, and then because Dom picks one up when Eames is cashing them in and asks him about his spelling? But I think the former is just a nervous tic one develops when one is stressed in a casino with chips on hand, and the latter is Dom ribbing Eames over his great-except-you-spelled-the-name-of-the-casino-wrong forgery of the chips he was cashing in.* Eames has probably never needed a totem; the fact that he can't actually turn into different people in the real world is probably enough for him.
* He'd apparently lost all his chips at the roulette table (his "You're buying" to Dom implies those two chips he lost were his last), but then he magically had a stack to cash in as he left. TRICKY EAMES IS TRICKY.
Forgery. Forgery is the ability to not only change your appearance, but to impersonate a person's personality and mannerisms so well that you can fool someone who knows them. I suspect anyone can change their appearance in a dream, but only a forger can all-but become another person entirely; it'd be the difference between copying the way a friend says something, and turning into your friend and saying it exactly as they would. Psychologists, con artists, natural mimics, and actors would all be good candidates for forgers.
Architecture. If you need an architect to design your dream so that it has a logical layout, that may explain why my dreams are always lop-sided. :\ ...I kid, I kid. But architecture must be a two-fold job...you'd design the layout in the real world, and then you'd go into the dreamer's head and build it. That way, the dreamer has the layout set built in their subconscious, and just calls that location up for the job at hand. The scenes we see of Ariadne hooked up with Arthur by himself and then with Eames by himself must have been when she was taking them through their respective layers of the dream...that's when Eames would have added the airduct system.
Nash is a terrible architect. I didn't really get enough of a vibe to swing either way on this one, but I think he's probably a decent architect, if not particularly strong in the morals and ethics department. In the grand scheme of things, Nash messing up the carpet in Saito's love nest (which wouldn't have been noticed if Dom hadn't thrown Saito on the floor) pales in comparison to Arthur missing Fischer Jr's anti-extraction training (which nearly scuppered the whole operation, could have driven Saito insane, and might have ended up with Dom in jail for a crime he sort-of(-but-only-because-he-didn't-understand-the-repercussions-of-his-actions) committed).
Short version? Inception is a pretty awesome movie. Like all movies, it has its flaws and its triumphs, but I think it came out on top, although some aspects frankly worried me. But I can't wait 'til the DVD comes out...yay special features! \o/
p.s. Have now seen Mysterious Skin and can actually see it working as Arthur's backstory. Am also now really, really creeped out.
p.p.s. Just did a spell-check of my post in preparation for the actual posting bit...I'm amused that the spell-checker highlighted my "nyah nyah bitchcakes".
This post is pretty much me just figuring everything out, because three viewings in and I'm still unclear on some points. Lots of discussion, lots of speculation, some blatant fan-girling of Eames (♥), rampant abuse of italics and capslock...also, spoilers, so if you haven't seen Inception, for gods' sakes go and see it and then come back and discuss how awesome it is!
Things I liked:
The clothes. Gods above, the suits in this movie were freaking exquisite. Everytime Ken Watanabe or Joseph Gordon-Levitt in particular were on-screen I was all ♥____♥. I loved how well Eames cleaned up, from his interesting attire in Mombasa to his stint at Fischer Morrow as a minion of Browning.
The cast. So many fantastic actors! So many of my favourite people (Marion Cotillard*; Tom Hardy^; Joseph Gordon-Levitt; Cillian Murphy) in one movie! The cast list is like a roll-call of awesome.
* I have such a massive crush on her, ngl...she was utterly fabulous in La Vie en Rose and Nine
^ Handsome Bob! ♥
Falling wakes you up. Because who hasn't woken up from a dream convinced they must have been freaking levitating or something because yeah, they fell down a staircase in their dream but the sensation was so real?
Competent characters. Competency is so freaking
Ariadne. I love that she is talented and smart and level-headed, and that - although there was some flirting with Arthur - she didn't end up being a romantic attachment. I'm glad she had some flaws...she was pushy and nosy and a bit cocky and heartless (when Dom frantically told her to stop using memories because otherwise she might, you know, lose touch with reality, she said "Is that what happened to you?" and got this little smirk on her face), which made her feel real. I don't know if I like her as a person or not, but I think she had depth and purpose and that was great.
Continuity. Eames added in air-ducts > Ariadne tells Dom about the air-ducts > Mal drops out of an air-duct in the fortress to shoot Fischer. \o/ A little thing, but it made me happy...
Things I disliked:
There were three women in this movie, and two of them were actually men (unless they were in a dream or psychologically unstable or dying). Mal was a projection of Dom's subconscious, except for when she was a real lady in a dream or playing with a knife or jumping off a hotel window-ledge. Annabelle Fritton was Eames' briefly-used disguise in Level 2. NEEDS MOAR WOMEN, CHRISTOPHER.
Ariadne breaking into Dom's dream. Yeah, OK, that whole sequence had to happen so that Dom would bring her along on the job, so that she would be there to suggest they go to limbo and find Fischer and Saito and thus bring about the (happy yet ambiguous {screw you, Chris Nolan, you magnificent bastard}) ending; I accept that. And yes, the whole movie is about breaking into people's minds to either steal or plant ideas. But. I was uneasy the first time I saw it, uncomfortable the second time, and upset the third. Because that was Dom's dreams, for gods' sake...his time for his subconscious to get a chance to work shit out, and she just waltzed right in. What gave her the right to just insinuate herself into his mind? Without warning, without consent...yes, I get the hypocrisy of this statement, given that Dom (and Arthur and Eames and Nash) routinely breaks into people's minds in order to extract information, but...but. It just felt to me like there was a line there that was crossed, and it really fucking bugs me.
The Dream Team sucked at First Aid. Why did no-one think to apply pressure to Saito's wound? Or better yet, have Yusuf dream him better? OK, even if Yusuf couldn't dream him good-as-new, he could have dreamed up a First Aid kit with a clotting agent or something to prevent blood loss and some goddamn morphine for the pain. And even if any of that was not possible...what, none of them had hands? None of them could apply pressure to the wound, to slow the bleeding and buy Saito more time?*
* Ah, but he needed to die quickly so he could go into limbo and fuel the final stretch of the movie, as well as make the very first scene make sense.
Not enough physics-bending, reality-defying dream weirdness! I'm a little bummed that all the really awesome dream-bending stuff happened in the first third of the film, and that most of it was simply Ariadne flexing her new-found dream-architectural skills. I would've liked to have seen more insane stuff in the later parts, because the shifting/zero gravity sequence and Arthur's Penrose Stair gambit were pretty nifty and I wish there'd been more stuff like that. I guess it could be argued that they were trying to skate under the projections' radar, but the projections already knew they were there, and surely a few added bizarre details would have lended credence to the "it was all just a dream" thing they were trying to leave with Fischer Jr.
Dom taking out Fischer's projections and saying "oh, it's OK, they're just projections", then forgetting his own advice when it came to shooting Mal. *headdesk* Contrived and clunky plot point is contrived and clunky. It threw me, because Dom was being all bad-ass and competent, killing projections left and right, and then...what? A single solitary moment of cognitive dissonance that threw him so completely he just couldn't shoot his magically-appeared-from-an-air-duct-to-kill-the-mark projection!wife until after she'd scuppered his mission? I will submit that such a moment is possible, but...but... *headdesk* Yes, I know, necessary for the plot to progress, but...nyah nyah bitchcakes.
Dream vs. Reality
Okay, so although I am a firm believer in the Happily Ever After, and thus really really really want that top to have fallen over after the fade-to-black...I just don't know. Here's a couple of things that don't add up, for me.
The kids' ages. According to the credits, James and Phillipa are 20 months and three years old respectively when Dom goes on the run, and are three and five years old when he returns. After Dom checks reality after the failed extraction from Saito, he gets a phone call from James and Phillipa: according to my mum, James sounds about three, and Phillipa sounds about 10, although apparently a really mature-sounding seven is not out of the question. So James' age fits, but not Phillipa's. And then when we finally get to see James and Phillipa, James looks about the right age, while Phillipa looks to be about six...which sort of fits with the credits since she could be a tall five-year-old, but doesn't fit with the phone call. So. Either this is Chris Nolan's way of saying "reality is not to be trusted", or he didn't catch the inconsistency during the editing process, or he thought she sounded five and not 10...or right now he's rubbing his hands together and cackling, thinking about all the poor schmucks who are so overinvested in his film that they are thinking about the ages of two characters who got maybe 10 cumulative minutes of screentime. *facepalm*
All the scenes that don't involve Dom. Why bother to shoot any of the scenes that don't feature Dom? Why show us Arthur teaching Ariadne; that could've been shoe-horned into an earlier or later scene with Arthur and Dom showing Ariadne how to construct dreams.
The top wobbled. I think it all comes down to whether or not it is possible to fuck with the physics of totems within a dream without messing with the rest of it or the owner of the totem noticing. Because the whole point of a totem is that it is in some way different in a dream-state to how it is in reality, so the the dream-sharer can differentiate between the two states; the idea is that it is impossible for these items to behave in any other fashion in a dream. For Arthur, his die is presumably random in a dream but consistently one number in reality; for Dom (and Mal before him), the top spins unceasingly in a dream but eventually falls over in reality. We've seen that it's possible for fixed architecture to be manipulated by the dreamer (Arthur changing the normal stairs in Level 2 into Penrose stairs); presumably, if the dreamer knows the secret of somebody's totem they can manipulate it in the dream (as Cobb does to Mal in Limbo: setting her top spinning in her subconscious so she believed everything was a dream). The only person (besides
Oh motherfucker. I just...um. Realised that the latter half of the movie, from Ariadne going into Cobb's dream on, could definitely be a dream. Because as far as we know, the only person besides Dom and Mal who knows how the top works is Ariadne; Dom tells her when she interrupts his "experiment" to show him her totem. And then a few days later Ariadne breaks into Dom's dream, and then...what. Presumably, the PASIV device shuts off like it's supposed to, and they wake up...just in time for Arthur and Saito to come in and tell them that the game is on. Dom said he'd "never seen anyone pick [architecture] up so quickly"...if she was already fully trained, and had been hired to extract something from Dom's mind...
O.O
OK, moving on...
When did the "final dream" begin? When it comes down to it, the only thing that's been keeping me from accepting that the final scene is happening within a dream - apart from optimism - is that I couldn't figure out from which point that dream began.* Because I refuse to believe the entire film was a dream; otherwise, what was the point? But Ariadne slipping into Dom's dream and making him fake!wake-up from that...I could see that happening. And it...well, it doesn't excuse it, but if Ariadne broke into Dom's dream as an extractor and not just on a what is apparently a whim, then I can live with that. It also explains a couple of points that have bugged me:
1) Although Arthur is "the best" at what he does, he's human, so he's probably not infallible...but missing somebody's anti-extraction training is a pretty big deal. Fischer Jr wasn't supposed to have had any subconscious security...everyone was surprised at this. But if this is Dom's dream, then the presence of trained projections makes sense: they're Dom's. And if they're Dom's, then Ariadne successfully pulled a Mr Charles (without specifically using Mr Charles) and turned Dom against his own subconscious. Also explains the freight train; a freight train set Dom free from a dream before, and it could be his subconscious recognising that he's in a dream and trying to set him free again.
2) Ariadne said to Dom in the warehouse "...while we're going deeper into Fischer, we're also going deeper into you". It just struck me as sort of an odd thing to say.
Of course, the argument against this is the same point above about showing scenes that don't involve Dom. Why shoot Yusuf driving off the bridge, or Arthur doing the zero G scene and blowing the elevator, if all of this is Dom's dream? It could be that it's Dom's subconscious acting it all out on purpose, because he knows that things like that would have to happen
* The "he was in the real world when he got on the plane and just didn't wake up from that dream" scenario just...doesn't feel right, to me. Weird, yes? *is weird*
Random thoughts and observations (about the movie and about fandom):
Military backgrounds. Cobb adhered to noise-discipline when taking out Saito's projections in the second level of the Cobol job, Eames had a textbook point-shooting grip on his sidearm during the cab shoot-out on Level 1, Cobb's disarm of the projection in the hotel bathroom in Level 2 was very similar to a disarm I use in krav maga, Arthur's fighting style wth the projections in Level 2 was very Semper Fu/krav maga-esque, and Eames' taking-out of the projections in Level 3 was very effective and very professional. I can't remember where I saw it, but Tom Hardy said in an interview that Nolan had said something about Eames (definitely) and Arthur (possibly) having military backgrounds. So Eames and probably Arthur are former military, and I'm guessing either Dom was one of the civilian contractors that designed the dreams for the soldiers, or was military himself...or heck, maybe he was a soldier who'd studied structural engineering at university. *hands*
Dream manipulation. I wonder how much people-not-the-dreamer can manipulate any particular dream, and how much the dreamers themselves can manipulate. When Saito said "when you're in my dream, you play by my rules", he seemed to think he'd be able to seriously screw with Dom and Nash; instead, Dom and Nash tell him they're in Nash's dream, implying only Nash can manipulate it. Ariadne was the dreamer in the workshops she and Dom did, and she was the only one who manipulated anything (exploding the shops and the streets and freaking everything; folding the city in half; building herself stairs and a bridge; extending the walkway with the mirrors); presumably, if Dom could have manipulated the dream, he would've done something to protect them from the projections because hey, in a lynch mob vs. safety kinda deal, I'd pick safety every time*. Yusuf was the dreamer of Level 1, but he didn't dream up anything to help Saito; conversely, Eames got his hands on a grenade launcher at a moment's notice, presumably because he dreamed it up himself (see: the infamous "You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling."). Arthur was the dreamer of Level 2, and he created the Penrose Stairs, but he couldn't restore gravity...you'd think it'd be as simple as thinking OK, gravity means we stick to the floor, but apparently the actual falling sensation trumps dream-manipulation.
* Although it's possible he figured hey, she needs to learn she can die in a dream sometime and decided to just let it happen.
Yusuf flipping off the projections as he drove off the bridge. Yusuf is made of win and awesome, and his little "haha, up your's" *flips the bird* as he backed off the bridge was priceless.
A week in Level 1. I guess once Yusuf and Ariadne and Arthur and Eames stopped acting weird, the projections calmed down? Otherwise, that would've been one hell of a week, and Dom probably would've ended up having to find all of them in Limbo. I wonder what they did? They must have just laid low in a hotel or something...they wouldn't have been able to mess with the dream, though, otherwise roomservice would've killed them with the silverware. So, they would've spent a week holed up in a room, watching TV? What would they have watched? It probably would've given them some insight into Fischer Jr's mind...*muses*
Darling, darling, darling, pet, love, honey, darling. There's a lot of pet-names in fic. A lot. Part of being slashers is that we take the hints the writers/directors give us and just freaking run with them. But the sheer amount of pet-names in a lot of Arthur/Eames fic is pretty staggering, considering I'm pretty sure Eames only calls Arthur "darling" (and only "darling") once in the movie. OK, he also calls him stick-in-the-mud, but he calls him by his name...what, two or three times? Maybe a ratio of 2 : 1 : 1 should be utilised in fic...two instances of Eames saying Arthur's name to one instance of Eames calling Arthur a pet-name to one instance of Eames insulting Arthur.
Arthur is all three-piece suits, all the time. We only get to see Arthur when he's working, in a world of corporate espionage; I'd wear a suit, too, if I were him. Soldiers don't wear their uniforms every day of their lives, just when they're on-base or in-theatre; when they're off the clock and at home, they wear civvies. Proof: in the hotel after the failed extraction on Saito, Arthur isn't wearing a tie; I would submit this is because the job is over and he's heading home. When he's off the clock, I'm guessing he probably wears similar stuff to what he wore in Level 1.
Kick. As far as I can tell, the playing of Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien is not the kick. The music is a countdown, to either signify that the PASIV device is winding down naturally, or to signify that a kick is imminent and to brace yourself. A kick is only necessary if a person is still hooked up to the PASIV and needs to be woken up before the Somnacin runs out.
Somnacin. And while we're on the subject: Somnacin seems to be pretty...I don't know. Intuitive? I don't know if that word can be attributed to a drug, but considering how Ariadne and Dom wake up within moments of each other from Dom's dream, despite Ariadne entering the dream later than Dom and despite their physiological differences (and apparently without them killing themselves), it seems appropriate. (This, of course, could be attributed to the fact that Ariadne and Dom were still in a dream; a dream of Ariadne's design, so she could extract something from Dom.)
The idea that the more you dream-share, the less able you are to dream naturally. This is something I find quite scary, actually. Dreams are necessary; even if you don't remember them the next day, they are where your subconscious works out any issues or problems you have. How many times have you gone to bed worried or agitated or all-out freaking out and then woken up the next morning knowing exactly what you need to do?* Now imagine not having that anymore. How much would that suck? Imagine how much less sane people would be? The road rage alone would probably doom us all...
* It happened to me a couple of weekends ago, actually...I was stressing about whether or not to drop one of my uni courses, and woke up the next day just knowing that I should stick with it.
Eames' totem. To be honest, I'm not sure Eames actually has a totem. I know it's generally accepted that his totem is a poker chip...I assume because he's messing with two of them when Dom finds him, and then because Dom picks one up when Eames is cashing them in and asks him about his spelling? But I think the former is just a nervous tic one develops when one is stressed in a casino with chips on hand, and the latter is Dom ribbing Eames over his great-except-you-spelled-the-name-of-the-casino-wrong forgery of the chips he was cashing in.* Eames has probably never needed a totem; the fact that he can't actually turn into different people in the real world is probably enough for him.
* He'd apparently lost all his chips at the roulette table (his "You're buying" to Dom implies those two chips he lost were his last), but then he magically had a stack to cash in as he left. TRICKY EAMES IS TRICKY.
Forgery. Forgery is the ability to not only change your appearance, but to impersonate a person's personality and mannerisms so well that you can fool someone who knows them. I suspect anyone can change their appearance in a dream, but only a forger can all-but become another person entirely; it'd be the difference between copying the way a friend says something, and turning into your friend and saying it exactly as they would. Psychologists, con artists, natural mimics, and actors would all be good candidates for forgers.
Architecture. If you need an architect to design your dream so that it has a logical layout, that may explain why my dreams are always lop-sided. :\ ...I kid, I kid. But architecture must be a two-fold job...you'd design the layout in the real world, and then you'd go into the dreamer's head and build it. That way, the dreamer has the layout set built in their subconscious, and just calls that location up for the job at hand. The scenes we see of Ariadne hooked up with Arthur by himself and then with Eames by himself must have been when she was taking them through their respective layers of the dream...that's when Eames would have added the airduct system.
Nash is a terrible architect. I didn't really get enough of a vibe to swing either way on this one, but I think he's probably a decent architect, if not particularly strong in the morals and ethics department. In the grand scheme of things, Nash messing up the carpet in Saito's love nest (which wouldn't have been noticed if Dom hadn't thrown Saito on the floor) pales in comparison to Arthur missing Fischer Jr's anti-extraction training (which nearly scuppered the whole operation, could have driven Saito insane, and might have ended up with Dom in jail for a crime he sort-of(-but-only-because-he-didn't-understand-the-repercussions-of-his-actions) committed).
Short version? Inception is a pretty awesome movie. Like all movies, it has its flaws and its triumphs, but I think it came out on top, although some aspects frankly worried me. But I can't wait 'til the DVD comes out...yay special features! \o/
p.s. Have now seen Mysterious Skin and can actually see it working as Arthur's backstory. Am also now really, really creeped out.
p.p.s. Just did a spell-check of my post in preparation for the actual posting bit...I'm amused that the spell-checker highlighted my "nyah nyah bitchcakes".
