Really opened my eyes to some stuff I wouldn’t have otherwise seen. Does anyone think the DVD Special Features will explain stuff? Or do ya think Nolan will leave it ambiguous?

http://cinematicjackass.wordpress.com/2010/08/18/on-dreams-and-dreams-captured-on-film/

well… we actually see the bishop working. It always fall “smiling” to you because of the weight difference.

Cobb is wearing the wedding ring on the dreams, but in the real world/1st dream he isn’t

and I don’t remember ever seeing the top falling. on the first scene that it appears, Arthur enters the room, and Cobb hide the top before it falls… in other scene, he is so nervous that he drops the top instead of making it spin… but there’s always somebody or something that don’t let us see if the top will stop or not…

and if it really is a dream, the first inception was probably made on Cobb…

Mal’s place of death. Wouldn’t be easier and more logical to stand on the window of their room?

After writing so much with so many people about this movie I can’t remember if I made this point in my original 7 Layers post or not. But this one scene was a BIG piece of evidence that it was in fact a dream. The same building next door? The same room with the same billowing curtains? Sure, she could have booked a room in the EXACT opposite room in the other building… but really? The dream-like qualities of this experience are way way too coincidental for me.

The only totem we see at work throughout the movie (assuming that Eame’s chip is not a totem) is Cobb’s.

Some people have posited that Saito and Yusuf didn’t need totems as they were just visitors and wouldn’t have normally come along for the ride. But everyone MIGHT have had one? We just haven’t been shown what they are if they do. Not sure, we only know what Nolan has shown us. The one that totally baffles me is Cobbe. Just makes zero since that he wouldn’t have one of his own. (At this I’m sure I’ll get 42 people saying that his ring is his totem. But I’ll reiterate that I don’t believe that “nothing” could be a totem. NOTHING that turns into a ring when in dream.)

So accepting that we are actually watching a dream, it has to be a really really huge one and the characters are set apart from each other.

This is a really good point. I hadn’t specifically thought of this before.

I personally maintain that the whole concept of the dream sharing technology is a dream. That the architecting of dreams is a dream. That the whole Cobol run around the world business (as pointed out by Mal) is a sham that only a dream would conceive. And with this perspective I don’t have a problem trying to envision how hard it would be to create a dream of this size and magnitude because our brains create dreams of this size every night.

But I will concede that if you believed that at dream layer 1 – the layer above the movie’s “awake” layer – the dream sharing technology works and Mal and Cobb have dreamed down to the movie’s awake layer… it would have to be one an enormous dream architecture to have been built. And for him to have forgotten creating (or Mal creating it) seems a bit of a stretch for sure. So kudos to you.

But whether you buy it or not, hopefully that makes logical sense.
Taylor

I just wanted to share which points of the movie i find “disturbing”.

1. Mal’s place of death. Wouldn’t be easier and more logical to stand on the window of their room?

2. The only totem we see at work throughout the movie (assuming that Eame’s chip is not a totem) is Cobb’s. Didn’t the other characters feel the need to make reality checks? Of course somebody could say that they haven’t experienced limbo as Cobb presumably had done with Mal.

3. Another thing is Mombasa. Let me explain. Cobb goes to Mombasa, Kenya where he meets Eames, Saito and Jusuf while Arthur stays behind in Paris(apparently?) with Ariadne. Now when Arthur is describing to Ariadne the technique of setting the dream level boundaries with paradoxes like Penrose stairs he is asked by Ariadne how big are the levels. He responds saying anything from a floor to a whole city (In limbo Cobb and Mal built a huge city). So accepting that we are actually watching a dream, it has to be a really really huge one and the characters are set apart from each other, something we don’t have a chance to watch in other parts of the movie.
So in conclusion we have 4 characters talking in Africa (on top of that one of them,Cobb, briefly enters a dream at Jusuf’s basement using the strong drug) while 2 other characters are in Paris, talking inside another dream. Seems a little odd even if this two dream events don’t coincide chronologically.

But as I’ve said in the beginning i haven’t decided yet.

The tanks and the hats are the same thing folks, they’re the great diversion used by Angier (and Nolan) to make us think the machine is magical.

Nightly, Root would fall through the floor to saftey, allowing Angier to recieve his ‘Prestige’ n balcony. Root is a better actor when treated well, Ainger made sure of that the second time. Of course Angier knew eventually Borden would come and try to sabatoge his trick, think about how many times they do it to each other throughout the movie!
Paraphrasing here…but remember this line before the real transporterd man run…
Cutter: what kind of billing are you looking for

Ainger: The kind Borden cant ignore

Ainger/Cadlow is loaded. Buys tanks to be prepared for the night Borden shows up and goes underneath, this is how he can frame Borden, and rid himself of Root, the only other guy knowing the trick. The tank gets moved from center stage to beneath every night, Ainger scopes the crowd then informs blind stagehands of slight change on the special night.

Ainger never knew about the twin, hence never knowing Borden would arrive to shoot him. If machine worked his monlouge would have started with “your machine worked too!!” At that point Ainger was just preparing to destroy all the evidence(that he bought from the court/police/mourge… including Roots body in the one tank.

Cheers!

Ariadne: “You going under on your own?”
Cobb: “No, uh… Just running some experiments. I didn’t realize anyone was here.”
Ariadne: “Yeah, I was working on my totem actually.”
Cobb: “Here, let me take a look.”
Ariadne: shakes her head.
Cobb: “So you’re learning.”
Ariadne: “An elegent solution for keeping track of reality. Was it your idea?”
Cobb: “It was Mal’s actually. This one was her’s. She’d spin it in a dream and it would never topple. It would just spin and spin.”
Ariadne: “Arthur told me she passed away.”
Cobb: “How are the mazes coming along?”

Until next time,
Taylor