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I'm in ur dreams, inceptin' ur ideas

2010-08-06 21:51:17

Intrigued
Tags: 38, 15

I went to see Inception last night and liked it. However, it left me thinking. There were a lot of errors in continuity, though they might be hard to notice if you didn't pay attention. I have the IMBD spoof page open and I'm keen to know what others noticed, but first I'll write down the things I and my boyfriend discussed last night :)

- When people die, they wake up. Extrapolating from the other multi-level effects (a dream within a dream has the same cumulating effects as the first one), when one dies on a deeper level, to that logic they should wake up one level upwards. So when a person dies in 3rd level, aren't they supposed to wake up in level 2? Instead, Fischer went to "limbo". On the other hand, it's completely believable that Saito went to limbo, because his body died in level 1 while he himself was in level 3. So practically his conciousness lost its connection to the real world.

- The limbo, in general, was an interesting concept and I'm not sure if all of it was intended or not. When Fischer and Saito died, Cobb and Ariadne went looking for them in the 4th level. Which means the 4th level equals limbo, or getting lost into limbo equals getting lost in 4th level. Furthermore, the only people linked in the 4th level dream were Cobb and Ariadne, which means that they should've been the only real people in their dream - but Saito and Fischer crossed into the same place, into Cobb and Mal's self-created world. This provides for interesting hive mind theories.

- As for the concept of time: Cobb and Ariadne went to look for the dead Fischer into the 4th level. Saito defended them on the 3rd level until he died a while later. So, why was he old when Cobb found him, and Cobb hadn't changed? Is the age of the body in a dream relative, or did the screenwriters just ignore the details to have more impact by making Saito unrecognisable, while Cobb stayed unchanged?

- Continuing on the same notion, at some point Cobb said they'd be in the first level for days (and would have to fight the security for that long). I don't remember the exact ratio for how the time multiplies, and I'm prone to think this particular quote was wrong or exaggerated, but whether I remember it right or wrong doesn't matter for my point: they left the 1st level early, and yet, there were only 20 minutes of the flight left. Of course, again, this makes more impact storytelling-wise, so it might've been a concious choice. And these two were the only striking temporal problems during the movie. There were a lot more moments when I thought something about the time felt wrong, but couldn't point it out.

- There were also problems with the cumulating effects of a dream within a dream. Particularly striking was the absense of zero gravity in 3rd level. The freefall from 1st level cascaded 100 % into the 2nd level, but none of it affected the 3rd level. In complete contradiction to this, the music passed all three levels at ease, not even changing in tempo. Even the characters themselves estimated from the force of a gravity effect that they came from one level above, which means a force loses a certain amount of its impact when passing a level. Personally, I would've made the gravity loss 50 % on the 2nd level, which would've made it unnoticeable on the 3rd and in line with the other echoes.

Disregarding these, the movie was really good. It had some very clever ideas and they were skillfully illustrated. That'd make some kick-ass fanfiction in good hands.

EDIT: The IMDB spoofs note that when there's only 20 minutes of the flight left, only Cobb is shown waking up. So the others could've woken up earlier. A good point. And haha, yes, I was also amused by "I'm leaving in Kyoto" and a shot of Tokyo Tower right after that :P