Inception: Dream logic

The dream logic just doesn’t work. So you are on a balcony, sleeping and dreaming that you are in a hotel. Someone throws you over, your sleeping body is in free fall, accordingly the dream also loses gravity. It’s an old, clichéd idea, and untrue. I for one have had plenty of dreams interrupted, but not once has outside stuff managed to sneak in. But fine, the movie frankly comes out and says, look, this is how my internal logic works, ok? Sure, movie. I'm not the kind of guy who complains about warp-drives in Star Trek.

But suppose in that balcony dream, you have a dream within a dream, you dream you are on a beach. You get tossed, your real body experiences 0 g. This is transmitted to your top dream, and the hotel loses gravity. Now your sleeping dream body in the hotel also doesn’t experience gravity. This gets transmitted to the beach- But in Inception it doesn’t. Why? “Uh, let me get back to you on that later.”

Then, apparently they have control over dreams. One person builds them, one person populates them, and the others get to do minor things (conjure up pistols, change their appearance). Why not build cooperatively? Enemies chasing you, just conjure up rocks above them, or a great pit below them, done. Maybe the machine is designed somehow to prevent this, or more than one person mucking about confuses things. I dunno.

Also, in one scene, a character is shooting enemies with a rifle. Aemes comes over, exclaims that “you need to dream bigger!” and raises a grenade launcher. Wait, they can do that? Why not just dream up RPGs? Tanks? Helicopters? Lightsabers? Crazy futuristic space alien weapons?

Ok, so lightsabers would obviously tick the victim off. But so what? They can capture and torture him indefinitely. You could dream up some crazy torture equipment, I bet. Then there’s tanks. It should be trivial to dream up an invasion or military compound or something. They even do it! But curiously they won’t dream up tanks for themselves. I guess maybe it attracts the projections, but when you have an AC-130, who cares if their little snow-Humvee is attracted to you, honestly? Just gun them all down.

Then the machine. It looks like all it does is take venous blood, give it a little detour through the plastic hose where chemicals can be injected, and send it back in. The only connection is through the wrist. How does information get shared? What links the brains? Magic? To their credit, at least they didn’t actually go and make up some shared consciousness silliness. Oh well.

And the whole waking up business is fishy, anyway. Sleep, while somewhat mysterious, is very well known to be closely linked with firing of certain neurons and certain neurotransmitters. There’s no such thing as someone being in a sleep so deep they can’t wake up, you can always wake them up by injecting the right chemical. There’s comas and the like, of course, but a coma isn’t just a deep sleep. That’s stupid. In fact, given that what we see in the movie requires sedatives anyway, just cut the sedative. Soon the effect would wear off and the dream would destabilize anyway.

Inception: King of fools

So what’s with all the idiot characters thinking they are geniuses? First we have Saito, with his best smug grin, exclaim “Ah, dream within a dream!” Oh wow, what an incredible idea! What if people were in a dream, and they dreamt that they fell asleep and were dreaming in the dream? Woah, man. Maybe it would seem incredible if I was high, I guess. And very stupid. But Saito seems very proud of his insight.

Then there is the exchange, “you want to do two layers?” “Three.” during which I honestly burst out laughing. “This one goes to ELEVEN.” Reminds me of those jokes about multi-blade razors. “Fuck it, we’re going 13 levels!”

The realization should be immediately apparent to anyone who thinks about this concept, that a dream within a dream is theoretically possible, and that what we call real life might as well be a dream and we’d never know, and the dreams could be nested ad infinitum. Yes, each layer adds to the instability, but so what? How do you know that you haven’t been subjected to an advanced sedative without your knowledge? But nobody even mentions any of this. They are all awed at the idea of a dream within a dream like it’s some incredible insight.

Inception: Paging Ellen

Is Ellen Page supposed to be an annoying, stupid undergrad that nobody likes but they keep her around because they need her for now? If so, give the woman an Oscar. So her teacher sets her up for a job. The man is weird, suspicious and doesn’t give her any details. He doesn’t even tell her anything about it. “First I need to know you can do it, before I say what it is.” She just smiles and nods! First rule of job interviews: If the boss is crazy, DON’T TAKE THE JOB. I guess ignorance of this could be excused in this case, after all she is in an undergrad. Maybe she thinks Leo is hot and just wants to get in his pants, I dunno. Anyway, it gets worse.

She is told the job is illegal, in no uncertain terms. She doesn’t even flinch! What the hell, some stranger asks her to commit a crime and she just… Accepts? Wow. Maybe the pay is gre- But they don’t even discuss the pay! Sure, unpaid internships are a common way to build up portfolios, but there isn’t a portfolio here, and I doubt she’s expecting to land a nice job working with a sleazebag thief.

Then we get to the dreams. The first thing she does with her power? Act like a toddler at the playground. She folds the street in two and makes two opposing mirrors. Oh wow. When I joked about this sort of stuff in middle school, my friends called me childish.

Speaking of which, I don’t get the bit about Arthur kissing her. If there was some awkward attraction, possibly one sided, from Arthur towards Ariadne, it would be sort of interesting. I could see him having less than gentlemanly intentions with his “try”. But it’s played off as some half-hearted idea that Arthur got, tried, and failed. Oh well. It doesn’t help that this is maybe Arthur’s only idea in the whole film (ok, I guess there’s the elevator). It’s just a pointless scene, the kiss is awful, it doesn’t develop either character, it doesn’t add to the desperation of their situation (they don’t seem to care about the projections much before or after, nor is Arthur at all upset or disappointed when his desperate attempt fails).

Inception: Crimes of idiocy

So let me get this straight about the ending: Mal came to the hotel room, made a mess, toppled the furniture, then leapt across the space to the opposite window… Wait, what? I guess she could have made a mess and then snuck to the building across to startle Cobb, but why make a mess? Just leave the window open. Not like he’ll ignore an open window.

And anyway, what’s with her “trap”? It doesn’t make sense. All Cobb needs to do is wave and yell the moment she hits the ground. Somebody sees him at the window, instant bulletproof alibi! The street below them has 4 or 6 lanes at least. How’d he push her out of a building that far? Why is there no sign of struggle? Any competent lawyer will get Cobb off the hook in a flash. And surely it would look fishy when a psychiatrist examines the children and they don’t seem abused or in danger from Cobb?

Now, I’ve never heard of such a thing as being “declared sane”. Sure, there’s documents you get for driving licenses or diving cards and what not, and they include mental health. But all that means is the doc checks if you ever got sent to the funhouse, and your behavior with him obviously shows you are not completely batshit. So they sign you off. That’s it. Maybe you lied, maybe they didn’t ask the right questions, maybe you are actually a psychopath inside, obsessed with acting out Carmageddon in real life. He wouldn’t know! These things are a 5 minute visit to the doctor, and all they show is whether you have overt, very obvious issues. The legal system is probably aware of this, so saying “hey, she was sane enough to drive!” is a bullshit defense.

As for a more thorough examination, you simply can’t take someone and say they are “completely sane”. Just checking for one disease takes many sessions over weeks, and the DSM has hundreds. The psychiatrist’s job is hard enough with willing clients who try to helpfully describe their issues, it would be trivial for a crazy person to fake sanity (Obviously, there are extreme cases. If a guy walks in wearing a tinfoil hat and starts checking the room for bugs, yes he is obviously out there. But just because he doesn’t, can you say beyond reasonable doubt that he isn’t paranoid?). This is like TSA asking travellers if they are a terrorist. I mean… Geez.

So how Mal obtained such documents, such that they are hard proof of her sanity, is beyond me. But that’s not the only problem. See, even in a fantasy universe where this is possible, wouldn’t someone obtaining unusual documents proving their sanity, just before committing a rather insane act, look a wee bit suspicious?

In all honesty, Cobb should’ve just gone to court. Doubtless his occupation could pay for a decent lawyer, I’d be surprised if he didn’t have a team of them already.

And finally, why bother with Saito just to see his kids? So he can’t enter the US. Well, move to Switzerland and take the kids there! Genius idea, I know. Is it the grandmother? Get one of his teammate to kidnap them. They know the reason is solid, and even if not they are all immoral knaves anyhow. The most the relatives can do is probably file a missing person report. Cobb is a man adept at disappearing from powerful multi-national corps. Sure, he botches this in the movie, but I can’t imagine him surviving in his job without being good at it, and he implies he is.

Inception: And his tiresome wife

Cobb's wife. She could be a great femme fatale nemesis, but instead, we get a passive aggressive memory who keeps making a nuisance of herself. She doesn’t do anything, she’s not interesting, she adds nothing. She could have been part of the team at the beginning of the movie, that would allow me to actually care about her being dead.

The current Mal could still be effective, if she was haunting Cobb. Two things ruin this, however. First, she does more harm to Cobb’s friends- she shoots Arthur in the leg and insults his taste in expressionist art (that bitch!), she lunges at Ariadne, she shoots Fischer. She barely harms Cobb at all. Now, if whenever Cobb was isolated in the dreams, she appeared and relentlessly closed in on him with ruin in her wake like some pyramid head without the pyramid, it would be a whole different story. Second, Mal is awfully needy. Every time she shows up, she does nothing but yell “me me me why is this dream not ALL ABOUT ME!” It’s obscene and irritating. So many times I wished Cobb would glare at her and yell “Mal, can’t you see I’m busy here? Just bugger off now will you, I don’t have time for your bullshit right now!” Whenever she shows up, Cobb almost instinctively begins to defend against her- he doesn’t seem particularly entranced by memories of his love either. It’s not that he wants her in his mind but knows surrendering to that memory will destroy him. He doesn’t want her there at all, and she is too obnoxious to leave.

Inception: That damnable Di Caprio

Cobb as Leonardo Di Caprio is an absolute sleaze bag. He is written as a sleazebag, and Leo acts like one. When the legality of his work comes up, he smugly dismisses it. He sets up rules for his teammates, but doesn’t follow them. He arrogantly scoffs when they bring up the fact. He blames his failings on others. He destroys a young man’s psyche without a moment’s hesitation. The man’s a crook and a total jerk.

Now, I don’t mind this kind of character. I usually love them. Sometimes I may even feel sympathy towards them. But I expect a fitting motivation. Maybe lust for power, or money. Maybe simple megalomania. Cobb? He just wants to see his kids again. Ain’t that sweet! He’s a proper crook with a heart of gold, our Cobb.

Man, I don’t care. He’s an asshole. He won’t see his kids? Great! Serves him right. Kinda sucks for the kids, I guess, but then again I don’t care about the kids either- I never see them do anything but play in the sand for a moment, and that they are used as symbols of impending doom doesn’t help.

I am just irritated by the lead character for some reason. Ariadne, on the other hand, would have made a great protagonist. We’d follow her as she suddenly discovers the world of extraction through her teacher, as her relationship with Cobb evolves from professional cooperation to disgust at his lack of scruples to sympathy for his grief. It might even convince me to care about Cobb. It would do away with the confusing preludes. It would allow Cobb’s plan to rescue Saito to be an epic revelation, to which Ariadne and the audience can react with enthusiasm and excitement, as they should: It’s the climax of the story!

Instead we get to watch a petty scumbag thief be mean and inconsiderate to his friends, shirk responsibility, pity himself and then have the gall to pretend he has noble goals of reuniting with his children.

Inception: Introduction

So, this is about Inception, which I watched recently. Mostly, it’s some rough plot analysis and whining about things I didn’t like, with a few things I liked. So expect spoilers, boredom and frustration.

The film was released quite a few months before I watched it, so you can see how I’m a tad late to the party. Naturally, I heard it being talked about, a LOT. I knew it was about dreams, and that it would end with “They are actually also living in a dream!” from the start. It turned out that last bit wasn’t exactly true.

One other thing was the minor fad of “the movie stupid people watch to feel intelligent”. So I expected pretentious sleight of hand to disguise a complicated plot that doesn’t make sense, and resolved to pay extra attention to spot as many holes as I could.

That was a very bad idea! Inception is a run-of-the-mill mindfuck with a “gotcha” plot. It throws piles of obfuscated nonsense at you, only to disarm you and deliver its final “Haha, thought I was gonna do that one huh? Gotcha!” It’s like that riddle where a bus visits various stops, and so and so people get on and off each time, while you haplessly try to keep up with the arithmetic, and turns out the question is how many stops it visited.

The whole plot is an irrelevant red herring. All you get for seriously thinking about it is a nasty headache and a lingering feeling of “man, what.” So, what happened? Cobb and his buddies enter dreams and steal secrets. But Cobb is kinda hung up about his dead wife, so she keeps messing up their dream antics and being a nuisance. They try to steal from Saito, a businessman, but mess up (because of the wife. Women, right?) Saito then hires them to put a bad idea in a competitor’s mind, so his business fails and Saito benefits. They come up with a crazy dream-within-a-dream scheme to do it, encounters certain problems, overcome them, and Cobb goes back to his kids, in the real world… Or does he? Maybe he’s still dreaming! Guess we’ll never know, because it faded to black before we could see! Oh man, so exciting!