Inception Explained: a really cool scrolling animation of the plot | Hacker News Reader

Inception Explained: a really cool scrolling animation of the plot

inception-explained.com

378 pointspicklepete133 comments

This was really well done. I'd just like to point out a few things, as someone who's watched Inception way too many times:

1) It is never said that 3 levels is the maximum depth of a dream until Limbo occurs. My interpretation has always been that Cobb and Ariadne hooked up a shared-dream machine to Fisher's dead body, which brought them into Limbo.

2) Why are there 2 Limbos? There's the one Cobb and Ariadne follow Fisher and Mal into (which has the architecture of the Limbo that Cobb and Mal shared all those years ago). There's then the Limbo that Cobb and Saito share, where it looks like Saito architected the environment (Asian influences). And if they were the same Limbo, why was Cobb washed up on a shore with no memory of how he got there in Saito's Limbo?

3) In the Limbo that Cobb and Mal shared, all they needed to do was kill themselves to wake up. Why then was the defibrillator needed to wake Fisher up from death in Limbo to Dream 3?

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.

3) Which kind of proves that the plane was reality. If Fisher dies in limbo he'd wake up in real life (the level above the plane), not on the plane.

3) Though the plane _is_ reality (in my opinion) Fisher could only have entered a dream without realizing it if:

He was dreaming ever since Yusuf demoed the sedatives the first time, showing lots of people who dreamed all day (the "no, they come here to wake up" scene).

Fisher tries to check his totem at that time but can't do it because he's trembling so bad.

Thus, if he were under sedation, dying would not wake him, though my argument doesn't explain how he moved up multiple dream levels to the plane...

s/Fisher/Cobbs/ge

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.

2. Under heavy sedation, a single kick isn't enough - it has to be a series of synchronous kicks from the current level and the level(s) above. This is why the rest of the team doesn't wake up either when the van hits the barrier (the first kick), not just Arthur.

But Arthur's level at that point is the hotel level; he never goes any deeper. He is at the exact same level when the second kick of hitting the water occurs, and for some reason that one wakes him up. He wouldn't experience any of the deeper kicks because he is not asleep in the hotel level, he is setting up all the explosives on the elevator.

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.

The gravity/kick effect only effectively permeates the next level down. This is why they need to set up a chain of kicks to move all they back to the fist dream level. In the third level, they are only subtly aware of the kick from level one, and one of the characters mentions they "missed" it, as in they didn't coordinate kicks.

The dilution of the gravity effect seems consistent with exponential expansion of time.

One of the numerous inconsistencies of this movie. If you're floating, the expansion of time would not change the fact that would still be floating. This did not make sense at all.

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.

Good analysis.

I think though that we can go a step forward.

I agree that we all should look at it much more in a symbolic and metaphorical way than a logical way (there are several points in which the internal logic is severely weak).

And exactly because of all the reasons you mentioned above, I've always considered the whole movie being representing something related to Cobbs.

Cobbs is the one receiving the Inception.

No matter if by God or Ariadne, or God through Ariadne or viceversa. Or if this happens in the real life, afterlife, parallel life, dream levels or what. The whole movie is about Cobbs and his subconscious. It's also interesting that Nolan used the name Cobbs for one of the characters of his first movie, Following, in which Cobbs was some sort of serial burglar. Just to keep the metaphor going.

> It's interesting that Nolan used the name Cobb:

With the first name Dominick ("belonging to God") no less! Tons of this stuff in the script -- amazing that Nolan lost best original screenplay to The King's Speech. The mind boggles.

Ok officially need to re-watch this movie.

I was just talking with a friend about favorite Nolan movies. I can't decide between The Prestige, Inception, and maybe Dark Knight. Sounds like as good an excuse for a movie marathon as I've heard.

"I can't decide between The Prestige, Inception, and maybe Dark Knight."

I'm surprised that Memento didn't make your Christopher Nolan short-list. Perhaps you didn't care for it, you haven't seen it, or you simply forgot to add it.

If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it.

I love Memento, but I'm not sure it's on the same level. I haven't seen it in a while though, I might have to add it to the list.

I love dark knight, inception and memento, but found the prestige to be a little bland. Did i miss something with that one? I really didn't rate it, so to see someone put it above memento makes me wonder if i just wasn't giving it my full attention

This is post-rationalization if I've ever seen it.

Any act of film/literary analysis obviously requires thinking about something after you've seen/read it. The harder you think the better, and what you need to look for when evaluating arguments are evidence of internal consistency, plausibility and authorial design.

So where is the problem? Nolan himself has said in media interviews that the significance of the top is that Cobb walks away. He's also remarked on the centrality of creation imagery in the film and explicitly stated that "there's a relationship between the sand castle the kids are building on the beach in the beginning of the film and the buildings literally being eaten away by the subconscious and falling into the sea." Funny how he even specified the beginning of the film in that quote. No-one is post-rationalizing those words into his mouth.

Frankly, there's tremendous power to any interpretation that leads one independently to the same conclusions the director later makes, all the while explaining away what are inconsistencies under other readings (why Mal is bad, why the continual biblical references, why there is so much damn water in the dreams, etc. etc. etc.). The fact that Nolan is using fairly conventional symbolism (water = death/subconscious) is just icing on the cake.

So the importance of the top at the end - one of the most debated points - isn't whether it falls or not, but the fact that Cobb having spun it doesn't bother to check?

Exactly. The totem is "an elegant solution for keeping track of reality." And reality is the garden on the cliff, something emphasized not only by the comparison of life to a dream and dreamers to "figments" and "shades", but much more directly in such lines as Cobb's father urging his son to "come back to reality" when none of the characters are even dreaming.

We know Cobb doesn't need his totem by the end, because his rejection of Mal at the climax is an expression of faith. To understand the implicit alternative, look to the parallel heist sequence which opens the film. There we had a very different Cobb place his faith in the "reality" of Mal when he lowered himself out the window above a fatal fall. Nolan emphasizes that this is the wrong decision by showing us Cobb's immediate (biblical) fall, blasphemy and then betrayal and loss. Death destroys the world by water as foreshadowed in the parable that opens the film.

At the end of the film the logic of this sequence reverses. Cobb resists Mal's temptation to stay with her in limbo. He rejects her for the first time ever, telling Mal she is not "real" where even moments before he was expressing lingering doubts to Ariadne ("how can you know"). And whereas his lack of faith had previously led to his defeat, here his expression of it leads directly to Fischer's symbolic reconciliation with his father. And while the film presents another death sequence as required by Matthew 7.24, this is but prelude to a heaven sequence that breaks the endlessly circular logic of the dream world / penrose staircase. The rules are violated because they no longer apply: Cobb is free of the maze.

Your explanation has just made the movie more interesting to me. Until now I thought it was quite idiotic, but your revelations do make sense.

Though I still think that the ending scene is badly handled. If the point is that Cobb doesn't care any more about the outcome of the spinning top, then Nolan should have just slided from the image of the top to Cobb and his children.

By zooming in on the top and cutting the shot right before it should falls, it just adds this unneeded baggage of questioning whether all that happened is real or not. Like some sort of magic trick. "Do you doubt what you've just seen?" And I just didn't find that that was the point of the movie.

I think that's a really good comparison, because it really is a magic trick, isn't it? I think most good heist films are in the sense that the pleasure is in the misdirection: what makes them satisfying to watch is being "in on the game" -- seeing all of the clues arranged in plain sight and watching how the director pulls it off.

So Inception might not be for everyone since it's heavy on narrative and light on character development (we don't see why Cobb changes, he just does), but there's all of this wonderfully meta sleight-of-hand just below the surface as Nolan tells us how he is making the film. Even beyond the symbolism, the very rules he outlines for how to create dreams apply equally well to the film itself (make the plot a paradoxical maze, get the audience lost in it while you plant ideas in their heads, and make the message stick by forming it around a core message of positive emotional catharsis). And yet we are still surprised, or I was at least!

Anyway, hopefully if you see it again you'll like it better next time. I personally think it's hands-down one of the best films in the last decade, and it's a real pity it got shunted off at the Oscars when it should have swept the field.

'Mal' means 'bad' in latin, btw.

... and "evil" in spanish, as a noun

Am I the only one who gets annoyed when people think inception was some stupid-deep, hard-to-understand movie?

It was (I thought) very straight-forward. The bigger problems with the movie come from the plot holes pointed out by Pewpewarrows. Do those holes perhaps contribute to the confusion?

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.

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?

Joel Spolsky is as fallible as the rest of us. It’s very dangerous to mistakenly consider a skill an aptitude.

Maybe. It might just be that some people tune out when the rules are explained. Sci-fi geeks won't (because we know they are important). If you expected Inception to be an action flick, you might tune out during the techo-babble (since it's often just an excuse for blowing stuff up) and not be able to unravel it.

I haven't seen the movie, but reading this reminded me more of a state machine. It seems like it would be tough to keep track of 4 states at once and jump back and forth between them. (though it might be easier for engineers since we have been training these mental faculties more than most others)

Dunno about "without", but certainly not well used. Once explained recursion to someone using a simple programming example; we stepped thru it for two hours before he got it.

I would have thought everyone learned that concept in grade school. Is it legal to graduate someone before they understand mathematical induction?

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.

> Then you’ll rewatch it a couple times and see just how much you missed, because the writing is brilliant.

...and the audio is pretty inconsistent :P

But seriously, seconded. One of my absolute favorite films of all time, and made on a budget in the thousands. Completely stunning.

I would go so far as to say it’s my favourite film bar none, and I don’t say such a thing lightly. It has its flaws, but it speaks to me.

What’s more stunning still is that most of the $7,000 budget was film stock. Because it was filmed. On film. Ain’t nothing like the 16mm look, truly.

> What’s more stunning still is that most of the $7,000 budget was film stock. Because it was filmed. On film. Ain’t nothing like the 16mm look, truly.

And what's even more stunning is that most of it was done in one take because, well, they only had $7,000 to budget on film stock.

Shane Caruth also starred in the movie, wrote it, directed it, edited, and wrote the soundtrack all on his own dime.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primer_(film)

Thanks much, I'll check it out. I'm a huge sucker for movies like that.

Completely relevant https://xkcd.com/657/ Edit: This is completely on-topic, why the downvotes?

Edit2: originally said "obligatory" but maybe that's too meme-ish for HN.

Didn't downvote you, but generally speaking people on HN prefer comments which are insightful and implicitly constructive, and not well-known links reposted out of some weird sense of non-existent internet obligation.

Maybe you should have linked to an actually useful attempt at breaking down the very complex timeline of primer:

http://www.screened.com/primer/16-61068/all-images/132-63755...

I sort of disagree. I've seen Primer several times, and am a fan of the movie, but I get the feeling that the writers purposefully made the movie confusing just for the sake of being confusing.

The complexity doesn't seem to arise organically out of the plotline. A lot of the confusion is generated out of not hearing the one time in the movie someone explained something, or from the movie not explaining something that is easily explainable. It's almost as if the writers could have made the plotline easier to follow while keeping the plot the same, but at times purposefully chose to obfuscate it solely for the purpose of making a "complex" movie.

That is a good point.

One of the things I loved, though, is that the characters don’t bother to mention things they already know, or explain things they already understand. They say real things like “um” and “y’know” and “could you hand me the…no, the other—yeah, thanks”. This is undoubtedly a major source of confusion, but it serves less to increase complexity than to convey a sense of the characters’ relationship.

The plot could absolutely have been told simplier without changing it, but the feel would have been very different. I know the movie isn’t perfect, but I like it for what it is.

I too very much like the dialogue in Primer for that 'eavesdropping on people who know each other well' feeling it has.

They're not up to Primer's level of complexity, but for bending your brain a little, try:

eXistenZ (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120907/)

Naked Lunch (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102511/)

(And other David Cronenberg movies. While I'm at it, although it's completely linear, I'm going to plug: "Crash" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115964/).)

Jacob's Ladder (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099871/) is almost a great brain-bending movie, but for some damn reason at the very end there's a, "Let's explain what really happened!" scene. F'idiots. (I recommend stopping the movie when you get to the scene where the Jacob and his son (played by Macaulay Culkin) dreamily walk up a back-lit stairway together. Let the movie percolate in your brain for a while. Then, start the movie up again and see how they ruined it.)

All great movies. Some others (with varying degrees of sophistication):

The 13th Floor (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139809/)

A Scanner Darkly (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405296/)

Brazil (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/)

Time Bandits (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081633/)

Dark City (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118929/) - A little disappointing at the end though =/

I really enjoyed Dark City. The directors cut is best, though, because it doesn’t give away the twist at the beginning like the theatrical cut did.

> A Scanner Darkly (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405296/)

It's worth watching for many reasons, but it'd be worth watching for this scene alone:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2HP25bKztE

No Pi? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138704/

One more is Timecrimes (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0480669/)

Talk about timing. I just wrote up a list for a friend that includes a bunch of weird movies (most of them being head trips). My list includes two Cronenberg movies as well! Though, to be honest, I'm not really a fan of either. Heh, I know this is a little off topic but for those that dove this deep into the thread, maybe you would like to expand your weird movie viewing experience.

01. Eraserhead-- This feature film was the debut for Writer/Director David Lynch. The film is noted for its usage of sound as a theatrical device and "the baby" which is rumored to be created from an embalmed cow fetus. The films script is a scant 21 pages despite a running time of 85 minutes (script pages typically match runtimes).

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074486/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eraserhead

02. Dead Leaves-- Produced in 2004, this Japanese animated film clocks in at 55 minutes long. The films (thin) plot is composed almost entirely of a chase/fight scene that begins on earth and ends on a space station. The movie's weirdness climaxes when when the mutant baby of the the film's protagonists is born and proceeds to kill a giant space catepillar which is attempting to eat the earth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Leaves http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0439533/

03. House -- This 1977 Japanese film certainly ranks as one of the weirdest (if not the weirdest) movies of all time. It was unreleased in the U.S. until after a screening at the 2009 New York Asian Film Festival. In an iconic scene, a Japanese girl is consumed by piano monster as a green eyed catch watches.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_(1977_film)

04. Jacob's Ladder- Fans of the game Silent Hill should well be aware of this movie from 1990 that inspired many of its elements. Tim Robbins stars as a vietnam war vet suffering from demonic images increasingly polluting his fragile reality. One paticularly gruesome scene includes Robbins being wheeled through a bloody hospital corrirodor filled with limbs and mutating torsos.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobs_Ladder_(film) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099871/

05. Barton Fink- This Cohen Brothers film stars John Turturro as a novelist. The 1991 film closes with a set of iconic scenes including John Goodman exiting a burning hallway (like a badass).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barton_Fink http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101410/

06. Naked Lunch- The first of two Cronenberg films in this category. This 1991 film adaptation of a William S. Burroughs novel features a protagonist who uses bug spray as a chemical escape from reality. Talking insects and failed "William Tell Routines" are just some of the madness this movie contains.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102511/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_Lunch

07. Videodrome- David Cronenberg wrote and directed this movie staring James Woods. The movie centers around Wood's character, a sleazy TV exec, who inreasingly loses touch with reality after he comes across a station which airs extreme violence and torture. Key scenes include his merger with a TV set and a VHS tape being thrust into his stomach.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086541/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videodrome

08. Donnie Darko (Jake and Maggie Gyllenhall sp?)- Donnie Darko served as philosophical fodder for a whole generation of "Emos". Written and directed by Richard Kelly. The movie stars this brother-sister hollywood team. The movie covers a wealth of ideas including fatalism and time travel. Movie goers will inevitably remember the creepy bunny head that pervades entirety of the film.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0246578/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donnie_Darko

09. Human Centipede- This 2010 dutch horror film quickly became a meme rivaling Two Girls One Cup for gross-out factor. The film features a mad doctor who connects three unfortunate souls in the most unfortunate way possible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_centipede http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1467304/

10. Brazil- The second installment of Terry Gilliam's "Imagination Trilogy". This 1985 film represents the dreams of adults including navigating beurocracy and chasing true love. Robert DeNiro also provides a notable role as a rebel repairman in the film.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(film) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/

11. Black Swan 12. Paprika 13. Being John Malkovich 05. Teeth

Congratulations, you're smart. Do you want a cookie?

I watched only once, will rewatch now!

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 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.

Am I the only one who gets annoyed when people get annoyed at my annoyances?

Edit:

Am I the only one who sees the irony of the annoyed pot calling the annoyed kettle black?

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.

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.

Word of God is that this is not true and that the top level of reality was indeed reality. The camera panning away from the spinning top before it fell down was supposed to represent that Cobb is now dedicated to his children and no longer worried about whether it's reality, not a low-class cheap mindscrew about whether it's all a dream or not.

Note that having the whole thing be a dream completely drains it of all interesting dramatic tension, turning an interesting movie into one in which nothing (or very little) is at stake and nothing really happens for any particular reason. (Remember, if the whole movie is a dream there's no longer any reason to believe his wife is waiting one level up.) It's an awfully stiff price to pay for a painfully dull, obvious twist.

The cut away from the totem was simply the film's final inception: a seed of doubt in the viewer's mind.

IMHO the whole film IS an inception: it's planting the "wait what if MY LIFE is all a dream" idea in the viewer's mind.

I agree - kind of a cheap magic trick if you ask me...

This seems to be an overly simplified take. If Nolan had intended to make it clear that the final scene was indeed reality then he could have just as well shown the totem falling while Cobb walked away. It seems pretty clear that Nolan explicitly intended to leave it up to the viewer to decide what was "real" and what as not. This ambiguity between dream and reality is one of the most important themes in the film - Cobb spends the entire movie preoccupied with keeping track of reality, to the point that one could argue that Cobb's had been incepted to remain obsessed with identifying reality to the same degree that Mal had been incepted to perpetually believe that she was dreaming. When Cobb sees Mal in limbo at the end, she also makes point explicit - pointing out that Cobb has simply chosen to believe that his children "up there" are what is real and that Mal "down there" is not.

The final scene preserves this ambiguity, while underscoring the fact that the obsession with reality is no longer important to Cobb - he is finally at peace with where he is - real or not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inception#Ending - Nolan himself noted that "I choose to believe that Cobb gets back to his kids, because I have young kids. People who have kids definitely read it differently than those who don't". Good enough for me.

You're still right he meant to leave it up to the viewer, but it completely destroys the rest of the movie if everything is a dream. People want to play games with the rules the movie presented and hypothesize about the whether Mal is in the "level above"... but everything we think we know about the rules comes from that level. We learn about the multi-layer inception, the wife, the concept of limbo, everything in the movie, on that level. If it's all a dream, then there's no target to the obsession in the first place, no children, no wife, nothing.

Incidentally, note I'm sort of making a metapoint... if Nolan came out and said "Yes, it was all a dream" I would accept it. But it would still dramatically destroy the movie.

I'm also sort of hostile to the "all just a dream" idea, whereever it appears in fiction, because it's redundant. It's already just a dream, a movie, a book, a TV show, whatever. It's already not real. Saying that in the context of the not-real work of fiction the entire story was also not-real is silly. (Note the word "entire".) It started at the maximum level of not-realness from the very first word or frame. And it's a short trip from there to the Bergman/Braga incoherent style of ass-pull storytelling. (Or Tennant-era Doctor Who.)

How would it dramatically destroy the movie? The term is existentialism. It may all be a dream, but that doesn't mean that you can't give your life (or the movie for that matter) its own meaning. I personally find this more liberating, than the idea that life is a game to played.

>It's already not real. Dreams are real while we are in them.

Well... just off the top of my head, it would make the film insensible for a variety of reasons:

(1) It would make a mockery of what Nolan seems very clearly to intend as a positive ending. In the script he actually tells us he is centering the film on a simple, positive emotional message. So what is that message?

(2) It would create a glaring inconsistency with the symbolic landscape of the rest of the film. Case in point, the dream worlds are strongly associated with water symbolism, which even creeps into the real world when the dream world intrudes: it is a glass of water that sends Fischer to sleep on the plane, while Cobb's waking hallucination occurs while he is washing his face. And yet... unlike any other dream... there is no water at the end of the film. In fact, we have the exact opposite, since we are told the events take place in a garden on a cliff.

(3) An aside, but anytime you have people who are named after apostles frolicking in a garden with Dad, you should jump to asking yourself if there might be Christian imagery lurking there. So what's with all the biblical imagery, or the constant references to "leaps of faith"? Is it really accidental when characters blaspheme, or invoke religious imagery?

(4) the visuals of the children building castles on the beach would suddenly serve no purpose. There would also be no explanation for why Mal is supposed to be bad, when her name clearly suggests she is a malevolent character. Likewise, the names of James, Philippa and Ariadne would be meaningless. Ariadne's mythological role is helping Theseus out of a maze, so what is Cobb still doing stuck in one at the end?

(5) Cobb clearly develops as a person. Why does Nolan go to such pains to show this, and what does it matter if these changes accomplish nothing of significance? Which brings us back to point one, why doesn't Cobb just stay in limbo with his wife?

(6) This is a bit esoteric, but you'll get stuck arguing that Saito's palace is destroyed by water because Cobb was pushed into a bathtub rather than the opposite: that Nolan engineered the bathtub scene in order to find a way to destroy Saito's palace in a storm. This requires a violation of the principle of Occam's razor unless you're prepared to argue that there isn't really any water symbolism in the film, in which case you would be wrong. :)

You seemed to have skipped right over the first few sentences from the section you cited: "Nolan confirmed that the ambiguity was deliberate, saying "I've been asked the question more times than I've ever been asked any other question about any other film I've made... What's funny to me is that people really do expect me to answer it....I put that cut there at the end, imposing an ambiguity from outside the film."

I agree that resolving the entire film as simply a dream would be a huge let down. If it were another film, would be content to stop there. For my money though, resolving that the ending puts Cobb firmly back into reality is also highly unsatisfactory. The more interesting (and I believe) intended result is force the viewer to question their own sense of reality. Haven't you ever had a dream that was so realistic that you were certain it was real - until you woke up? How do know for sure that we are not simply living a dream that we will one day wake up from?

There is a book by Stanislaw Lem that beautifully explores this sort of idea. In the story, there is mad scientist fellow that has a room full of electronic brains, each being slowly fed a life story via a series of slowly rotating magnetic drums. To the individual brains, the story that they are being told IS their life - they have no idea that they are simply boxes in some mad scientist's laboratory. The book goes onto suggest that our own lives may simply be programmed by a mad scientist who exists a level up from us.

I believe this it is this sort questioning of reality that Nolan is trying to impress upon the viewer. Reducing the whole thing to just a sci-fi film about a couple of dreamwalkers makes it seem frankly one-dimensional and uninteresting.

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.

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.

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.

---

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.

Just to be sure, you're getting downvoted because you're claiming non-programmers can't easily understand the concept of an activity having -multiple layers-. An execution stack is but one example of this. The construction of a cake, for example, is another.

It's nice for someone to actually say so, thanks. I'm getting tired of all the reflexive, unexplained downvotes. HN is an unfriendly and cold place, these days.

Meanwhile, sure, it's easy to understand that Inception is a cake. I'll concede that. But: it's not so easy to frost all three layers of the cake at the same time. The part where Inception gets tricky for me is where they start intercutting from layer to layer, and taking actions on one layer that have ramifications on the others.

There seems to be a pervasive misunderstanding that downvoting is for what you disagree with, rather than for comments that do not add to the discussion. That is, downvotes are for noise, upvotes are for signals, and "signal" includes things you disagree with.

My new hobby (in the XKCD sense) is upvoting every well-reasoned argument that I disagree with on HN. :)

It is actuLly interesting, may be the demographics of hn users is changing gradually, meaning that programmers(people with cs degree) are becomming the minority? So people get offended when you talk about cs education...

Maybe Common Lisp continuations could be a good example in that you go up the call stack, then down, then up again and so on.

No, the plot of Inception really is very complicated, unless you're a computer programmer

Personal anecdote: My friend who is in marketing and is not at all a geek also thinks if you have half a brain the plot is obvious. She has no special math training beyond an MBA, and has done absolutely zero programming in her life.

I do have at least one acquaintance that watched it multiple times to understand it. In fact this acquaintance convinced me to go watch it, as I was actually curios about what's so hard to understand about it. And while watching it, I kept asking myself what's the big deal with it, as the plot unfolded itself pretty linearly.

So there is something about it that makes it hard to understand for some people, although my non-technical wife also had no problems with it.

>No, the plot of Inception really is very complicated, unless you're a computer programmer

Or a carpenter.

Or a secretary.

... chef, janitor, burgerflipper, librarian, bassist, cop.

Sigh. It's so exhausting to have to write bug-free prose.

I apologize. Let's try that again.

What I meant to say:

Some people do not claim to understand Inception all that well. Some do. And some understand it so well that they go out of their way to publicly state their annoyance that everyone on earth doesn't see how obvious it all is. I venture to guess that computer programmers are disproportionally likely to be members of the second and third groups. (Please note that I have said nothing about carpenters! I didn't mean to say a thing about carpenters!!)

EDIT: Incidentally, I'm upvoting you even though your razor-sharp criticism makes me do more work. ;) These downvotes! They are like mosquitoes!

Don't worry, your explanation did sound perfectly reasonable and I have a feeling that the source of these downvotes are attempts to be holier than thou.

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.

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.

While these scroll sites are pretty cool... I don't know if its the javascript library or maybe that is the affect the site's creator wanted but it doesn't feel smooth.

Maybe because of the scroll speed the animations have fewer frames to animate which makes it look choppy? I'm not sure.

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

I was using my mouse scrollwheel though... :(

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.

Perhaps someone here can explain something that has annoyed me since I saw Inception. Falling (accelerating under gravity) is meant to "wake you up". Whilst falling you feel weightless - almost by definition (if you and the weighing machine are accelerating in sync, you apply no pressure to it). For some reason falling causes the loss of gravity in the dream world, and there's that whole scene about "recreating gravity". But since falling is indistinguishable from being weightless, what is stopping the dreamers from waking up? And why does weightlessness only go one level down?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weightlessness

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.

I haven't seen the film since it came out, so I may be mistaken. Didn't Cobb demonstrate to Ariadne that you wake up when you sense yourself falling? By tipping Arthur's chair over as he was dreaming? Arthur (if it was that character) didn't fall on the floor, there was no jolt. Also, doesn't the van land in the water, and no one wakes up?

According to the Inception Wiki, we're both right.

> One method used to awaken from a dream within a dream is called a "kick", which is the sensation of falling, hitting water, or a sharp jolt that can startle the sleeper awake.

Although I still think it's terribly inconsistent, if the details matter. There's too many different kicks with too many subtle differences and similarity for me to go into in a reasonable-length post.

OK downvoters, you're right. In the movie, they explain that a kick is the feeling of falling. So why didn't Cobb wake up when he was falling towards the water, but after he fell in? My guess is that the water invaded the dream and he drowned, and exited the dream via death. But they called that a kick, too. As we've seen, the movie is hardly straightforward. And if one of you had bothered to comment "they say in the movie that it's the feeling of falling" then I wouldn't have had to rewatch half the movie.

> 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.

Feeling weightless feels EXACTLY like falling. It does not feel like floating.

I disagree. I have around a thousand skydives. The only time I feel a sense of falling is when acceleration is involved. When acceleration is involved, weightlessness is not.

When jumping out of an aircraft you are already going around 100mph, close to terminal velocity. There is not a pronounced sensation of falling. It feels more like laying on your stomach in water, it a bit windier.

When jumping out of a stationary object, the feeling of falling is quite pronounced until you stop accelerating. A hot air balloon or helicopter produces this effect (and is pretty damn fun). While I've never done it, BASE jumping provides a similar sensation.

Why do you disagree? You are describing EXACTLY what I said.

Did you typo and mean to write agree?

When you hit terminal velocity you are no longer in free fall, I would expect it to feel like pressing lightly on something - which is what you describe.

To be in free fall you have to be accelerating (that's why it's called free fall and not zero gravity), and again that's what you describe.

This is not a correct sentence: "When acceleration is involved, weightlessness is not." In fact it's exactly the oppose of that.

You can't have zero gravity near the earth - the earth has gravity, and you can't get away from it. Instead you accelerate at exactly the same speed as the acceleration from gravity. In order not to hit the ground due to your acceleration you move in a big circle and keep missing the ground.

The reason you don't keep getting faster and faster is that you keep accelerating in a different direction, your average is zero, but you are always accelerating, just in different directions (and you make sure to always put the earth in the right place to match your acceleration).

People on the space station feel like they are falling the entire time. Presumably they get used to it after a while, but that's what it feels like.

You said feeling weightless feels like falling.

I don't know where you get the idea that being weightless feels like falling. Astronauts always feel like they're falling? Do you have a source for that?

They dive bomb a 747 to simulate zero g to train astronauts. I've done it is smaller planes. It feels like your are weightless - floating a pool. It does not feel like you're falling, like you just fell off a roof or a hot air balloon. When you fall, your stomach drops. You go from 0mph to fast.

When skydiving you do not feel like you're falling. Sometimes you get little stomach drop when you leave the plane (the 30mph increase in speed) but after you hit terminal you feel weightless and the sensation of falling is gone - you are no longer accelerating.

Now, we call this state freefall and you say freefall is the state prior to this, when you are accelerating towards terminal. I don't know the physics behind it, nor do I have a grasp on the nomenclature as you do.

That said, I have felt it with my body many thousands of times.

When you jump off something that isn't moving you feel like you're falling because you're accelerating (like a rollercoaster). When you hit terminal you no longer feel like you're falling, you feel weightless, an entirely different sensation, similar to laying in a pool. You have no sense that you are moving at all, let alone at 120mph.

I have never been in space, but I've been in zero g bouncing around the inside of a plane and I can tell you it in no way feels like falling. At all. Not even a little. No way astronauts feel like they're falling the whole time they're in space. They probably feel - weightless :)

Check out #5 for another illustrated version of the plot, and one that predates the movie:

http://www.cracked.com/article_19021_5-amazing-things-invent...

I don't understand how this is a "cool animation". In both Chrome and Firefox it does nothing by default. Pressing up or down moves the page by a single (useless) frame. Pressing page up or page down moves it by some random number of frames. Again totally useless, since it often ends up in a middle of some fade-in or fade-out. The scroll wheel is no better. Nor the scroll bar. What am I missing?

The content might be interesting, but it's impossible to tell since this might be the worst way of presenting data I've seen this year. Which is quite an achievement, congratulations :-)

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

If you want to go deeper: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ginQNMiRu2w

This froze my entire computer (newish macbook pro) and and I had to restart. Also didnt have that much stuff open, anyone else?

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

Yep, same, a little bit laggy under Firefox on Windows 8. (Odd; hardware acceleration should make this pretty nippy.)

Was using Chrome, I like the concept but didn't just crash my browser, crashed my entire machine. Ouch.

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.

I use chrome on an 64 bit Win7, i7 2600K with 16GB ram and a 35/35 FIOS connection and plenty of flash sites slow things down to a crawl. Honestly, I cant help but wonder what exactly some developers expect people to use.

I don't think it's a question of what they expect. More like they have no idea how to program and Flash has let them get away with it. Seriously, there is no other sane reason why you should experience slow downs on a machine with that spec (assuming Flash can even harness most of that power).

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

Same here: only a bit laggy on FF10 on a 1.6GHz single-core CPU (2GB of RAM, though).

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.

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.

CoreTemp touched 90 degrees Celsius on my i7 Air.

Visuals: Cool Performance: Hot

Out of curiosity, does anybody have an estimation about how much money the link (which I assume to be affiliated) may generate?

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.

Can someone explain how its done?

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

The first illustrated version of Inception is here http://disneycomics.free.fr/Ducks/Rosa/show.php?num=1&lo...

This is even more confusing than the film :)

i get a spammy access-restriction warning (see screenshot: https://img.skitch.com/20120321-86btw83e3gcnea6x4prr8wcj75.p... )

that's probably really cool on a fast computer.

So does the top stop spinning or not!?

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.

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

The webpage is very garbled in IE9

So how does this work in VMWare? :P

Great way to make some quick cash via the affiliate link.

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.

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