Further Inception Thoughts

[redfiona99]

Which puts Nolan in a very rarified category where I'm assuming lack of sense is deliberate.

I've already written about Saito's actions making no sense, if we go along with him being a high-powered business type. The other character is Miles (Michael Caine's character). If your daughter died and you had even a scintilla of belief that her husband had something to do with it, you'd not be that friendly. And you'd have to have that scintilla if the police were investigating, because they don't just investigate people for no good reason (actually, I feel I should amend that to if you're a white, middle-class male they don't investigate you for no good reason).

I think that if we figure out the why of Miles we will figure out what is going on.





First, it must be said that my favourite theory have there being only one scene in the real world and that is the end scene. I swear this is accidental.

My favourite theory is that the team are actually also performing either an inception on Cobb or some particularly obscure form of therapy (although I totally get the people that don't like the idea of him being patient [whatever the number was], I don't think he is either, I think this is entirely shall we say free-lance).

Now there are two ways this can play. One is that Miles (outside the dream), Arthur and Ariadne are running this while the entire team are running the inception on Fischer. There are two problems with this, one is that I can't see Arthur going along with this because it's so dangerous to everyone which doesn't fit in with what we know about his character, the second is that it doesn't explain Saito.

The second version is a lot more convoluted.

Imagine you are a Professor of something, probably something in the Neurological end of things. You are well-respected in your field and you work on some really cutting edge stuff, with funding from the military.

You have a daughter. When she is older, she decides to follow you into your field. She falls in love with another of your students. He is clever, promising and you like him a lot. They get married and have children. They also continue to work in your field, on something related to what you do, but not exactly what you do.

Your daughter dies. Now it's an accident, possibly something work related, but you know it's definitely an accident and not your son-in-law's fault. Your son-in-law doesn't feel that way and it's negatively affecting his life and that of his children. You need a way out of this and then you suddenly have an idea. What if you could stick the idea that it wasn't your son-in-law's fault into his head.

Now you know this can be done, it's what your daughter and your son-in-law were working on, after all, but you're not sure how to do it. You get into contact with your son's other collegue that also worked on it (Arthur) and you come up with a plan. In order to carry it out you need:

a) a chemist - Yusuf both in the real world and in the top level of the dreams
b) an architecht - I think this is Arthur for the top layer, and the layer of the dream that we see at the start where Mal first appears (about which, more later), and Ariadne for the others.

c) someone who knows what they're doing vis a vie inceptions. Which probably requires a shrink to figure out how to set up the implanting (who I think is Saito) and someone who can actually do the implanting (who I think is Eames). Saito knows that Cobb won't trust him with his secrets, which is why he brings in Ariadne who is a cross-disciplinary student in neurology and psychology (probably a medic doing a PhD). She'll be able to do the quiet suggesting.

Now, you're going to notice that Fischer is missing from this. I think that he's another actor/faker/forger, who is the willing patsy for this scheme. The problem is that he uses his memories (that's his father etc) and that's when it starts going all to hell.

In this version, they grab Cobb while he's flying back from a conference in Australia, giving the time in the first dream layer to create the idea that the hit on Fischer is the reality. This dream is Saito's, that's why he has so much power. It also explains the Mombassa that isn't and walls that squeeze and turning up at the right time at the right place.

What we, as the audience miss, is the kick between the plane in Saito's dream and the real plane. Which explains all the passport control inconsistencies, because obviously, they are going to let him straight through if he's only an academic back from a conference.

The advantage of this theory is that it accounts for all the players and makes some sense of Saito and Miles. It also allows all the tension at the end to be real, because Saito really does get shot so they need to rescue him too.

There are all kinds of problems with this theory (please feel free to poke some more), but at the minute, it's the one I'm leaning towards.

Comments

[pyroyale.livejournal.com]

I only watched this today and haven't read anything about the movie (I had no clue what it was about when I went to see it, just that it was good and had everyone talking) so I may have missed things.

I thought that Miles was helping because as he knew about dreaming, inception and everything else, he was one of the few who believed what Cobb said about how his daughter died (that she though she was still dreaming). The police wouldn't believe that story so they were investigating.

I don't understand how Saito, with one phone call, could get Cobb through immigration and home free. He wanted rid of Fischer's company because it was a rival energy company right? So how did he get the power and stroke to overturn what was presumably, the warrant for an alleged murderer's arrest if he was just in energy? The passport might have been fake but it was under Cobb's name because the immigration officer called him Mr. Cobb. So how did he get through without any problems? Saito's motivations make no sense at any point in the movie.

There's a lot of things that don't make sense and a lot of things that just fell into place too easily during the last 20 minutes of the movie. I wouldn't be surprised if it was one of those movies where they left enough loose ends to prompt a sequel, but also gave a good enough explanation for it to stand alone just in case the box office receipts weren't good enough.

[redfiona99.livejournal.com]

>>Saito's motivations make no sense at any point in the movie.<<

I know, it's very odd, and I don't think Christopher Nolan would do that unless it was deliberate. Although your reasoning for it makes a lot more RL sense :)