Inception was kind of sucky

[MidnightBliss]

I'm going to start this by saying Inception was by no means a bad movie. I enjoyed parts of it and so did the people I went to see it with. But it certainly isn't worth 4 stars or a rating of over 9 out of 10 on IMDB. The reason I say this is that it lauds itself as an intelligent action movie or something along those lines, but it really isn't all that intelligent. It is fun to watch at times but the logic falls apart pretty quickly if put under any scrutiny. I'm going to preface my ranting by saying I never fault a movie for logical fallacies unless they directly conflict with something said in the movie, or something is left unsaid therefore we are to believe operates the same as in the real world, i.e. if Cobb says they only use 10% of their brains then that happens to be true in the movie's universe, but if Cobb says they drive on the right but I see someone driving on the left I am within my rights to tear him a new asshole. I just thought I would list some of my personal problems with the movie:

1) The ending. Okay so we are left with the ambiguous idea that it may or may not have been a dream. Lots of movies do this, hell DiCaprio's last movie "Shutter Island" did this but much better, Hell "Total Recall" did this much better. It has been done a billion times before and you can see it from a mile away, but that doesn't mean if it is done right it can't still be compelling. Inception doesn't do it correctly. The thing about giving a movie an ambiguous twist ending is that you have to be able to make an argument either way and have them both be pretty convincing. Inception gives you two basic options, either it was a dream or it wasn't (alternatively you can choose the he got trapped in Limbo when he ended up there at the end of the movie and never escaped with Saito but that doesn't make much sense in context so we'll ignore it for now). The problem with these choices is that neither of them lead to the movie's internal logic fitting together flawlessly. You are left with either A) it is a dream, thus you have a 4 or 5 large plot holes or it wasn't a dream and you have lots of tiny ones spread throughout the film.

2) We'll say it wasn't a dream, for arguments sake, then most of the plot holes have to do with Character motivation and competency.

-Why was Ellen Page's Character so okay with ruining Cillian Murphy's life, everyone else can be explained away as greedy, but she is the wild card. She never even questions whether or not, except briefly, it is okay to place a man's financial future in jeopardy for a guy she met 2 weeks ago. We never see Cobb offer her an obscene amount of cash, thus causing her to have to struggle with her morals which would have added some depth to her character. Her big moral dilemma comes towards the end when she asks if it is okay to kill so many people in his subconscious and Cobb basically tells her "Sure, Why Not" and she takes it at face value. She barely knows this man, yet she is willing to put her life and the life of everyone else on the team, who she arguably knows just as well, in danger because he has emotional baggage. The same goes for the Grandfather, he has no issues with his son ruining peoples lives or recruiting his students into criminal activities, it would be the equivalent of a college professor introducing a student to his son who is a drug dealer and needs a mule to transport cocaine. Other characters show varying degrees of super competency and stupidity.

-Why was the Indian Chemist an expert driver? When he was introduced he pretty much came out and said "I don't actually participate in missions", but as soon as he is picked to be the escape driver he was able to do it perfectly. If the plan had always been "You'll drive us off a bridge to wake us up" then he would have been the best choice. But no one even questioned his capability before telling him to do his best The Fast and the Furious Impression.

-Why didn't Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy's character) recognize Saito on the plane? In the dream is one thing, but he climbed aboard the plane and it is not like First Class was crowded, he should have looked at him and said "Hey aren't you the guy who owns that rival company?". If Saito is well known enough to have connections able to get a murder wrap thrown out, then he must be swinging a pretty big stick. Also if Cillian Murphy's character had gotten training against extractions, would he not have been a bit weirded out about the whole dream experience in which he was kidnapped, tortured, and questioned by the people in first class, enough to attempt to call Shenanigans on the whole thing. In a world where people can break into your mind, and him being paranoid enough to get security against that, he should have been at least a bit suspicious. It is not like you don't remember the dream, because Saito remembers his and them, and the proof of that is that they ran after they were on the train with him in the same car.

3) No one seems to try and manipulate the dream world. They did it once and it never showed up again. The "Thief" guy, I can't remember his name, pulls a grenade launcher out of thin air and complains that the other guy has no imagination. So shouldn't they have used that little skill? I mean using it too much would have brought them a lot of flack but by the time they had gotten to the 3rd level that was a non issue. They could have summoned up bulletproof armor, a helicopter, anything, but they just didn't bother.

4)If it wasn't a dream his totem shouldn't have worked, the totem had to be a part of you i.e. have always been yours or something only you know the eccentricities of (i.e. only Jason Gordon-Levitt knew the weight of his loaded die), that was made painfully clear, but his totem used to belong to his wife. He couldn't possibly have known everything about his wife's totem because then it would not have been special to her thus it wouldn't have worked for anyone.

5) His wife's death was his fault. Not in a completely direct way, but in a very much cause and effect kind of way. It wasn't so much the kind of "I accidentally left the stove on which caused a fire and she died in that fire" kind of cause an effect, as much as it was an "I pointed a gun that I didn't know whether or not it was loaded at her and pulled the trigger to see what would happen" kind of cause in effect. By all accounts he had never tried Inception when he first did it on his wife, but had probably heard enough times that it was impossible/dangerous because that is the first thing we hear about it. Again Ellen Paige's character falls flat because she should have called him on it with a clear "Why were you messing around in her head?/Why are we messing around in this guy's head if the same thing caused your wife to kill herself?"

6) How did Cobb and Ariadne get to Limbo without dying? That was the rule about Limbo. They just used the machine to go a level down which should have just been a 4th dream floor. Not only that, but they weren't at all connected to Saito on the 3rd dream floor so Cobb should not have been able to enter his Limbo. They also went straight from being in Limbo to the being on the Plane, so there would have been no need to rush to try to kick them back in the order of levels. Of course you could make the argument that they never left Limbo, but it is very heavily implied that Saito kills both of them with the gun which would kick them back.

7) The time limits they imposed on each level were unnecessary. The guy on the second level fought and killed several men, moved about 7 bodies through narrow doorways, set up and detonated bombs, all in, I believe they said he had 15 minutes but I could be wrong? That is completely impossible as anyone who has ever tried to move a couch through a doorway that was slightly smaller can tell you, just moving the bodies should have taken most of his time up.

There are plenty of other plot holes that can be attributed to the "It was not a dream camp" but most of those clear up if you say "It was all a dream". But that interpretation is also full of holes, much larger ones.

8) Okay it was all a dream, fine. Then all the characters are just subconscious projections of Cobb, fair enough. Then why didn't him and his wife wake up fully when they died in limbo? It was implied that what made Limbo so dangerous was that when you went there you forgot you were dreaming, therefore you don't know you have to kill yourself to escape. But they do so why don't they escape? For that matter why don't they escape much earlier. It is stated that they spent 50 years there, but Cobb pretty much outright stated that he knew they were in Limbo for most of that time. Why didn't they leave as soon as they found out? There was nothing keeping them there. Even if his wife didn't believe, he knew and could have just killed her then himself and left. There was no need for the tearful on the train tracks death. In fact it makes him even more incompetent because he knew the dangers of being in Limbo too long. For that matter why isn't his wife trying to wake him up now? Shouldn't she be dropping him or kicking him or rolling him over?

9) If he was in Limbo the whole time, does that mean he was going deeper than Limbo? Shouldn't that be impossible? I mean at face value he would be at -4 dream floors below Limbo. But you could make the argument that he had been in Limbo with his wife, then got kicked back up to dream floor 1, which is the only way it could work since he ended up on the plane after their plan at the end of the movie, and all the dream floors between Limbo and 1 had been destroyed. Therefore when he enacted his plan, since dream floor 4 was confirmed to be Limbo, he should have never ended up at the snowy fortress because that would have been the actual dream floor 4, not where ever Ariadne took him. See how complicated that is? That is how the movie forces you to think and then when you do, you aren't treated with a brilliant plot you're pimp slapped with plot holes and confusion.

10) Back to the totem. At the end it is supposed to be ambiguous as to whether it was going to fall or not which would be interesting. Unfortunately, he had used the totem already to demonstrate it to Ariadne and it falls regularly. If it was all a dream and the totem HAD all along been his it should have either always worked or never worked, that was the point of the totem, it was a definite test. If it had been his wife's totem and she left then it should have left with her because only she knew all about it. He could have created another one that he convinced himself had been hers all along. Again that wouldn't explain why he would use it considering it wouldn't work, even dream Cobb should know that. But then there is no ambiguity at the end, his dream is supposed to be real enough to fool him so then it would have fallen regardless of whether it was a dream or not, thus proving one of two things. Either he was never dreaming, or he was a moron to believe the totem would work in the first place even though he openly acknowledged it shouldn't. The top never stopping would only be applicable if it was both HIS totem and a dream. So since it fell once it would have to fall again or else it was actually his Totem, never his wife's and he was trapped in a dream, therefore it would not have fallen the first time regardless of what he believed to be true or the totem thing would be a useless test because if it can be changed by what you believe it is fallible to dream logic. I guess what I am saying about the top spinning ending in short is... if it fell because he thought it should fall when he first used it then it isn't a totem and there is no reason to believe it would not fall at the end, unless he had accepted that it was a dream, but since he is seen as being reunited with his kids/i.e. us seeing their faces for the first time it is implied that he believes this to be reality thus the top should have just fallen.

In conclusion, the only way this movie makes sense is if you except that it was not ONLY a dream but that the rules that Cobb laid out throughout the movie were lies as well. Then everything can be explained away as just following the whim of the dreamer i.e. Cobb. The problem with that is that that is lazy writing, that is the screenwriting equivalent of someone coming to your house and robbing you and telling you not to call the cops because it was all a "Dream". That explanation removes all internal logic from the movie and thus removes all responsibility from the writer to write a coherent script. He could have put in anything no matter how ludicrous and would have been able to get away with it. But even if you except that explanation it still doesn't really pan out, because the reason Cobb is supposed to believe his dream is reality is because it is so close to reality, once things stop making sense in the dream he believes is reality then he should become suspicious considering his knowledge. The movie falls flat in it's attempt to come off as the thinking man's action film, because it has been done better before by almost every movie with a flexible view on reality.

Again the movie is worth a viewing in my opinion, even going to the theater to see it, but it is not worth the praise it is getting and it definitely isn't worth thinking too hard about, because it will just disappoint you once you start unraveling it. Also the justification that the movie is a comment on how dreams can become indistinguishable from reality and what makes a dream less real and all that nonsense does not excuse plot holes.