Inception Explained: a really cool scrolling animation of the plot (opens in new tab)

The reason there are two passages through what seem to be limbo is that Inception is Christian allegory. If you look at the structure of the film you can see Nolan using the opening and closing heist sequences as allegorical bookends to demonstrate Cobb's character development. In the first Cobb is a faithless and money-oriented thief who embraces violence and selfishly abandons his team when this fails ("every man for himself"). At the end Cobb takes a "leap of faith" when he rejects Mal, whose seduction of him is framed as a temptation of faith ("you don't believe in one reality anymore.... so choose to be here"). Cobb reaffirms his faith in his children "up there", rejects violence even when he is attacked and then sacrifices his own life to save Saito.

So you're not supposed to worry too much about the logic of the dream levels, since all dreams are basically metaphors for life: mazes where people "get lost" and from which they need to "die to wake up". The only thing that makes limbo special is that it is particularly symbolic. Nolan is presenting a metaphor of life itself as a Penrose staircase, and portraying faith as the way out. When Ariadne shatters the mirrors that trap Cobb in a recursive chain, the image is symbolic: she is a gift from Cobb's father ("ask and ye shall receive") and her role in the film is to guide him out of the maze that is the mortal world. This is presumably why she is the character who accompanies him to immigration.

For more evidence that this is intentional, look at the overwhelming creation imagery and the narrative emphasis on father-son alienation and reconciliation (with Fischer as with Cobb). Look at the curious way Michael Caine seems to be playing God when he shows up in Paris. And then look closely at the ending, which shows us neither a dream nor reality. What Nolan presents is symbolic: we see Cobb's judgment and forgiveness of sins at immigration, and then his reunion with his family in the heavenly garden. The film closes with Cobb ignoring his totem (as a crutch of faithlessness it is no longer needed) and then his son James (who represents faith and like his sister shares an apostolic name) telling him that they are building a castle on a cliff.

A what? That last bit circles back to the opening shot of the children on the beach. It is a bookend reference to Matthew 7.24 and the parable of the wise and foolish builders. The contrast (beach -> cliff) reinforces Cobb's character journey while telling us that the ending is NOT a dream (something reinforced by the lack of the water imagery associated with the other dream levels). It also reinforces the parallels Inception creates between the buildings of limbo and the sandcastles on the beach, and explains why all are ultimately washed away by water just as death washes away life in the Christian parable.

Brilliant movie.

2) It's the same limbo. Based on Saito's look, it's been 'decades' since Cobb set out to find him, and actually found him. In that time, Cobb's memory of how he ended up there has faded. Meanwhile, Saito's been architecting his immediate environment (and that's all we see, we don't see anything else in the distance and if we did, my guess is that it would be the same 'skyline' Cobb and Mal architected).

3) The sedation is the difference. Cobb and Mal weren't sedated when they were in limbo, so killing themselves worked to wake them up. In this case, Fischer's under heavy sedation and dying wouldn't wake him up, even from limbo. Hence, the defibrillator was used to 'kick' him up from limbo to level 3.

Another issue I had is this: In the scene when they're in the hotel, they lose gravity after the van drives off the bridge. Then they go further to the winter place and gravity has been restored despite the fact they're floating around in the hotel.

I liked it as well. Some other thoughts on the film:

1. The bulk of the story is framed as Cobb & Saito's recollection in limbo. My theory is that the recollection (rather than the gun) is what wakes them up.

2. There is no explanation for why the first kick in dream level 1 (the one they miss) doesn't wake up Arthur, who is awake in dream level 2.

No, the plot of Inception really is very complicated for many people, but probably not if you're a computer programmer in which case you literally have years of formal education in the structures that this plot is built on, and even a formal vocabulary to describe it with. (e.g. "Inception is a movie that keeps pushing other movies onto the stack.")

You're suffering the mathematician's disease, ably satirized by Feynman in that quote I can't stop paraphrasing: "Mathematicians can only prove trivial theorems, because once proved any theorem is immediately seen to be trivial."

But I think Inception succeeds as a film only because following the plot thread in real time isn't of the essence, just as I was able to enjoy Beethoven's Fifth Symphony long before I was taught its formal structure. Without the education required to really dissect that structure, you nevertheless sense that it's there, and it enhances the emotional experience that the work is trying to convey – in Inception's case, the experience of being a man (well, two men, actually, and possibly also a woman) immersed in a dreamlike world full of symbols, mazes, masks, bluffs, and distractions, a world that he himself is creating to distract his own attention from the pure, simple, but unthinkably awful pain at the center of his life.

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EDIT: Fixed my prose, which got away from me. So tempted to just delete this whole thing, but I try to avoid erasing history even if it's really embarrassing and exhausting.

A couple years back one of the people on the Writing Excuses podcast described reading science fiction as a skill and used as ancedata his friend who spent the entire length of a space opera book wondering how the teleporter worked.

Similarly my mother (not a dumb woman by and large) got tripped up because there was a line in the movie that the dream machines were military technology, instead of taking this a handwave she spent the rest of the film assuming that it was a secret CIA sting operation.

Basically not recognizing which parts of a universe you're supposed to just roll with and which parts you're supposed to puzzle out yourself.

Possible side effect: you spend the whole movie/book trying to solve it through a completely broken lens and nothing ever adds up or you're too busy (mentally) to notice the real- straight forward- breadcrumb trail and you come out thinking it was much twistier than it was.

You’re not alone.

If you want a movie with actual complexity, watch Primer. Oh, you’ll probably think you get it the first time through, because the writing is great. Then you’ll rewatch it a couple times and see just how much you missed, because the writing is brilliant.

Inception's plot was certainly straight forward. But just about every movie that exists is packed with layers of meaning and open to wide spectrum of interpretation. Inception may seem deeper than the average movie only because talk about dreams is a fairly reliable way to trigger philosophical thought in people.

The -confusion- around Inception is probably just because the narrative is fairly dense.

You're not alone, as others have pointed out, but I'll add my name to the list. I came out of Inception with my fiance and we almost simultaneously said, in different words of course, "That seemed a fairly straight forward twist on a heist movie, to me." And every viewing after I've felt the same way. It's a very cool heist movie with very cool effects and a clever plot.

It does lend itself well to interpretation and general musing, but sometimes I feel people are reaching too far for allegory and symbolism. It's good to find those things, and to take art and run with it, to let it seed ideas and interpretation, but some are a little over zealous.

Joel Spolsky says that some individuals appear to have been born without the part of the brain that understands pointers and recursion. Maybe that's the case here?

I get it but the fact that some don't neither offends nor concerns me and I certainly don't feel the need to belittle them or bemoan their existence.

Seriously, get off your high horse.

I'll agree that the "follow-the-plot" infographics are too common (we don't need more than one), but the meta-issues are particularly interesting (and I think have all been discussed before).

At first watch it's clear (apart from the ending sequence) what parts of the movie are dreams and what parts are reality, but when you watch it again you may start to consider that it's a little more fuzzy than that.

I read a review once where someone said it was "stupid and unrealistic" citing the van "falling through the air for half the movie".

I agree that the concept of the movie is not hard to understand.

But then I read trevelyan's post above and I feel stupid.

I agree.

I recently re-watched David Lynch's Lost Highway. That is a wonderful and complex film that on the surface seems nonsensical and surreal, but - once you make certain revelations - reveals its beautiful and elegant construction.

All of Inception is a dream except the final scene. It's a movie about a father (Michael Caine) trying to rescue his son.

Here is something that most people missed: Reality was a dream the whole time. There are hints throughout the movie, but the entire thing was a dream. Most people point to the wedding ring theory as evidence that it wasn't, but that just shows the lead's state of mind, not reality.

I had the same feeling.

I actually switched over to a wheel mouse because I tried using this on an Apple touchpad and it was not a happy animation.

I'm pretty forgiving about the smoothness though. Scroll pages like this are still uncommon and it seems nontrivial to refine the scrolling to the point where it feels smooth and natural.

I would not have the same expectation for an FPS or side scrolling game put out by a studio.

I found if you use the mouse scrollwheel rather than the keyboard it was much smoother.

> Whilst falling you feel weightless - almost by definition (if you and the weighing machine are accelerating in sync, you apply no pressure to it).

Ah but how often do have a chance to feel weightless? Unless you are on a space station, bungee or parachute jumping? So the feeling of weightlessness itself is pretty startling.

Also it is the moment from when you are standing on something and get pushed over the edge and then all of the sudden you are falling that is quite startling.

Think back on a dream of you falling. Everyone has those. For me, it is always the weightlessness that is shake me up and wakes me.

Because it's not the falling, it's the jolt of landing. When in free fall, you are not actually accelerating. In terms of landing, though, it doesn't matter if you hit the ground or if, say, the bottom of an elevator hits you.

"Space" mostly works here, although the frames don't come off well aligned.

It spins the fans on my i5 2011 air like there's no tomorrow, kinda like if I open a badly programed flash file. No crash though. And the whole thing is kinda slow when you scroll.

Chrome.exe used 6% CPU while scrolling and 3% while not scrolling. This was on a 16 core machine! One of my cores hovered around 75% while scrolling and around 35% while not scrolling, which went down to zero when I closed Chrome.

No problems here but I'm on a beefy machine: FF11, 64 bit Win7, quad core i5, 8GB ram, SSD drive - frankly I'd cry if a website was able to slow/crash that.

little laggy in my firefox 11 on a 1.5G p4m with 512mb of ram. probably a just a bug.

its a little laggy on my Firefox (I am running Ubuntu 11.04). Otherwise great idea.

CoreTemp touched 90 degrees Celsius on my i7 Air.

Visuals: Cool Performance: Hot

The "Buy the DVD on Amazon" link?

My guess would be: not much.

Not enough to warrant the massive increase in page load time that all of Amazon's crappy affiliate code produces.

It's powered by John Polacek's Scrollorama (http://johnpolacek.github.com/scrollorama) jQuery plugin.

Mal either died or kicked up a level. She used the top as a totem, not Cobb, and multiple people knew the properties of it. The top could not measure dream or reality while in Cobb's possession. His own dreams would render that totem useless.

It's a red herring. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ginQNMiRu2w

Yes. The closing shot shows the top growing unstable and, in the instant before the screen cuts to black, you hear the grinding sound of the top beginning to topple. At every non-reality point in the film where the top is spinning, it does so with no destabilization. Of course, it's possible that someone replaced his top (he wasn't very careful about concealing it and, let's face it, it's not rocket science to realize that it just needs to topple to indicate reality), but that's a different story.

You've been downvoted, but personally I feel that this is why this site is interesting.

I do disagree that was a 'quick' way to make cash however.

But the idea of producing an 'explained' website with a very nice and subtle affiliate link is excellently executed. I'd have thought the HN crowd would appreciate that.