I don’t know if this is a common theory for Inception, or just something I thought about, but I think everyone missed a major plot point in inception.
Cobb, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, makes a big deal about telling people not to tell people what your totem is, not to let them touch it, etc. since that’s the only way you can determine if you’re still dreaming or not, and you don’t want to give other people that power.
At the same time though, everyone seems to know what his totem is, and he actually uses his wife’s totem as his own. Additionally, there’s the one scene showing an aged Ken Watanabe where Cobb’s top is spinning in front of him.
So here’s my crazy idea…
What if the top is not actually Cobb’s totem and is just a red herring? What if, in actuality, his totem are his children’s faces?
Throughout the entire movie, the camera cuts away or obscures his children’s faces. The audience never sees them until the very end of the movie. While the top may still be spinning when the movie ends, Cobb goes outside to join his children and the audience can clearly see their faces.
To me, that means that Cobb was intentionally misleading everyone as to what his totem was, and he knows he wakes up at the end when he joins them outside.
The face theory doesn’t fit either. They’re not a thing you can take with you (modulo Hannibal Lecter), and everyone else who’s ever seen his kids IRL (Mal) would also break the totem.
His left hand (and presumably, wedding ring) is always hidden when they’re in dreams, too. If you’re looking for alternate totems, that’s a much more compelling hypothesis.
I’ll have to watch the video when I get home from work tonight, thanks for sharing it, but Mal is dead when the movie takes place, so no one besides Cobb would know what their faces look like, other than him, and after every job, he makes a point of going “home” to see them, so that could be a way for him to keep checking his totem.
[quote=“SkeleRym, post:61, topic:73, full:true”]
Damn. The last movie I considered walking out on was that Avatar movie.
[/quote]I walked out of “Despicable me”, during a double date. Without my date. Played a few arcade games in the lobby and took a nap instead.
[quote=“jabrams007, post:63, topic:73, full:true”]
Cobb, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, makes a big deal about telling people not to tell people what your totem is, not to let them touch it, etc. [/quote]
Not only Cobb but Arthur and Mal.
[quote=“jabrams007, post:63, topic:73, full:true”]
At the same time though, everyone seems to know what his totem is, and he actually uses his wife’s totem as his own.[/quote]
They see it but the don’t know what it feels like so they can’t recreate it perfectly when constructing a dream. Dreams feel realistic to us because they draw on our memories of the environment, beings and objects within it. Like you could do a blind test of me picking up my phone or mouse or keyboard and compare it to another of the same model and I could determine which is mine either immediately or within seconds. Cobb and Ariadne have seen Arthur’s totem. Similarly Cobb has seen Ariadne’s totem.
However the salient point you make is that Cobb never actually has his own Totem, he has Mal’s so this links to the final scene, and actually every time he constantly needs to fiddle with it, it’s not his. He could also be in someone else’s dream, hence at the end when the audience determines that there is an opening into whether Cobb is still in a dream.
That is indeed a theory but I read it more as Cobb being hazy on the memory of his children, we don’t know how old they are or how long he’s been kept away but we can guess a substantial amount of time from the events of the film.
The audience visualises his children’s faces for the first time in the film but there is no growth or change from his memory, like when you remember a detail of a dream, further enhancing the aspect of Cobb accepting this dream / simulation as a settling point for him as he turns his back on Mal’s spinning top.
I lean towards him settling to be content in this simulation / dream as it forces the 3rd and final plot which is the inception of the lack of reality in the minds of the audience, as for a person in the real world heists do not end up with happy endings, just delusions and dreams.
My review: look at all the oscar nominations. I have major issues with all of these areas of the movie. It was so dull I even found myself noticing the bad sound design. They didn’t even get the sound of a car door closing right!
A movie about the plucky politicians in control of the sprawling burocracy needed to defend Japan.
The names of all the characters are on screen, but I don’t know how to read that. So there’s something like 20 main characters, 100 supporting characters, and another 200 characters who pop up in a single 30 second scene, say five words, and are then never featured again. Holy shit, a lot of actors.
@Heidi Shin Godzilla is definitely Anno’s most Eva thing since actual Eva. Pacing-wise, plot-wise, weird monster design-wise – heck, even some of the same music cues are used.
Got taken out to see Manchester by the Sea the other night. It was good, though not my favourite kind of movie (not usually into simple character dramas, especially not about genero white dudes). The acting is as good as everyone says, and the editing is interesting in that you can’t always tell where a flashback begins and ends right away. That helps get across how present the past is for Casey Affleck’s character. Kudos, editors.
Though, speaking of the past, I will say: Affleck’s tragic backstory is so ludicrously tragic as to feel constructed by a committee for maximum dramatic impact. So that took me out of the movie a bit when the explanation of all that stuff came to light. Still, it does also lead to some really effective scenes in the aftermath, so at least it doesn’t ruin the movie.
Anyway, last night I saw a much better movie: Wild Tales. This was recommended to me by a co-worker some time ago but I didn’t see it listed on Netflix until recently, so I finally sat down to watch it. Didn’t know anything about it and was super pleased with what I got. It’s just deliciously dark – not a horror film, but it’s an anthology piece with a lot of dark comedy and violence in it, so it’s kind of got that Tales from the Crypt vibe all the same. It’s also Argentinian, which was awesome for me because I really feel like I don’t watch enough Spanish-language cinema.
I highly recommend checking it out if it’s on Netflix in your region. Now that I check, looks like it was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film in 2015, which it totally deserved. Such a, well, wild ride!
The direct of that Godzilla movie you just watched became famous because he was the director of Neon Genesis Evangelion, one of the greatest anime ever created. I would have assumed you would hate it, but if you liked Shin Godzilla, I don’t know if that’s necessarily true.
I can tell you that Shin Godzilla follows basically the same exact structure as most of the episodes of Evangelion. It even has the exact same soundtrack. The difference is that in Eva, they have giant robots to fight the monsters. They have to fight Godzilla with humans alone.
OK but Decisive Battle from Eva is got all the orchestral elements and melodies which are what I remember as much as the pounding repetitive rhythm. The Godzilla song is the same rhythm but all it gets are some like, what, bongos?
Either way, definitely related songs. It’s like a hearing a theme from a movie and then in the sequel they inject a new variation on that same theme. The only difference here being they aren’t true sequels.
Also, wouldn’t there in fact be different versions of Decisive Battle depending on which of the many versions or re-tellings of Eva you are watching? I only ever did watch the original series.
