send me.

Inception is a movie made by a filmmaker who has dreamed only of success.

John, you've said that choosing the right genre is an important decision, and many writers get it wrong. Nolan chose two genres, science fiction and caper. Did Nolan get it wrong? Before you can answer, you have to work out the script using other genres, so you can put them side by side and compare. If the story continued so that the two billionaires, Saito and Cillian Murphy, had a mano y mano showdown over the right to control Inception, what genre would that be? I was impressed by the ruthlessness of Saito, and Cillian's ability to command his father's empire. It might have been a challenge convincing them to follow his orders with the same enthusiasm, but if you choose the two most powerful characters in the movie for a final showdown, I would think the movie would be stronger. Is there another crime sub-genre that would work even better, to combine with science fiction?

If you can trick people in believing you wrote a brilliant screenplay, you wrote a brilliant screenplay.

I would like to continue with this thread. I appreciate your insights.

I have to disagree about Dark Night being a cinematic masterpiece - it's probably the most overrated film ever. The Prisoner's Dilemma doesn't even need Batman for a succesful resolution - and he's mostly an ineffectual guest star in his own movie.

If the surface action is in the real world, then Cobb's teammates are flat and unrealized. But the filmmaker leaves this question intentionally unanswered.

But if reality is one dream layer higher, then your criticism's are not valid. I believe all the characters (except possibly his wife) are projections of aspects of Cobb's personality. Since he can't be an architect anymore, he hires the girl. Since he believes he performed a catastrophic inception on his wife, the whole dream is an attempt to alleviate his guilt.

You say his desire is weak. I say it is powerful and drives everything. His true desire is to have his whole family back together: wife, kids, and himself. Notice that his totem is his wife's spinner, which was her totem. But I believe that his true totem is his children. I believe that in the real world they are dead and his wife is alive, so any world in which the children are alive is a dream. And it is his guilt (did he murder them? neglect them?) about their death plus his anger at his wife abandoning this level of dream world where the children are alive that prevents him from combining dream wife and dream children into one single level of dream. The whole exile bit is his rationalization for why he can't go to see his kids, because if he sees them alive, then he will know it is a dream. But in the end he deludes himself into believing that he is in the real world.

So, I disagree. I believe that this film is brilliant, and the core emotional struggle of Cobb is not superficial. It is the superficial nature of the environmental problem that tells us that it is an illusion.

I really appreciated this analysis because you hit some important structural points that were on my mind, one being the combination of two seldom-paired genres. On sort of a sideways note, I found myself comparing this film to Shutter Island. Not because of DiCaprio himself, but because the character he played in both stories had experienced life-shattering loss. Also, both stories played heavily with the theme of what was real and what was not. To me, Shutter Island was more satisfying because of the original story structure that was built by Dennis Lehane. His seemed like a tight house of cards that required every single element to succeed; whereas Inception seemed to lose something right at the desire line, as you had said. However, in SI, the hero is going to Shutter Island right at the beginning to find his wife's murderer. Even though we're left to decide what's real and what is not, we at least know and can understand this drive on a relatable level. Would love to hear your thoughts on that movie - as well as the masterpiece "All About Steve" (yeah, just kidding...) :D

The big weakness for me was the fact that we, the audience, didn't have a stake in whether the team was successful or not with regard to implanting the idea into Cilian Murphy's noodle (what kind of name is Cilian anyway?). John and a few others mention this as well. We don't experience how bad everything is, or will be before the inception, and we don't experience how great everything will be (rainbows and unicorns)after wards. Also, the whole time I'm sitting there watching this movie, I'm saying to myself, "Am I too stupid to follow this thing or is the writer leaving something out that would make everything more understandable?" I think perhaps it was a little of both. Oh well, I admire Nolan's bold imagination... I even didn't mind Leo in this role and that probable says a whole lot more about Nolan's ability than anything as a director. ;p

What I missed the most was the complexity of the sub characters: knowing a bit more about their backgrounds or why they'd sacrifice their lives / minds for this mission (and they all being simply addicted to it is not a strong enough reason) instead of watching these one-dimensional players blindly follow poor messed-up Leo. I think the less we know about characters, the less likable they become, and we don't care if they live or die by the end of the story. I remember thinking that no one had a particularly likable personality in this movie.

Does anybody care whether Cillian Murphy's energy empire was "broken up" - and what does that mean anyway? Why would two separate companies have less market share than a single giant one?
Once the technology is in place, "Inception" is actually quite simple. The question should be, who will control it? The Japanese industrialist Saito, or Cillian Murphy, or the Team, or a government? Let's say you have a spy in custody. You drug him, implant the idea that his reality is actually a dream world, and he has to kill himself to return to his real life. And release him. A few weeks later, after people get tired of listening to his crazy "Matrix" delusions, he kills himself. Nolan could have made that really scary, a modern "Body Snatchers" where people you've known all your life are suddenly "different."
Instead of moody Leo trying to decide if he's still in a dream, open it up. Two billionaires decide they need to control this technology, only to discover that it's so simple, there's no way to control it. And everything in government, industry and politics changes overnight. Instead of going to the movies, schedule a two-hour session where you can spend an entire week (in dream time) exploring exotic lands. Meeting the girl of your dreams.
This version would abandon the Heist/caper genre, but gain a Title Fight between two extremely dangerous billionaires. Once Cillian Murphy becomes aware that Saito is messing with him, the problems with the Character Web disappear.
There's another possibility: start a new religion. what if thousands or even millions of people all over the world had exactly the same dream, where God told them "Elvis really was God and now you all should worship him"?

Thanks for your analysis of Inception, John. I agreed and feel refreshed to see a precise analysis of why I felt so unsatisfied and ripped off. Whether or not the "real" main character was the ghost or not didn't matter to me by the time it was over I was more than ready for the torture and tedium to end.

John - You nailed it for me in the opening line. My unschooled viewing partner had a similar diagnosis. Have your ever presented that as a caveat of complex plot? Sure easy to forget character arc when tying up all those loose ends. As 8 1/2 continues to resurface in new form I was strangely reminded of Wild Strawberries when I left the theater. But I felt like watching Minority Report and Memento.

The moral challenge was to justify having performed an inception on his wife. That's the reason why she kills herself, after all.

The premise of an "inception" requires the subject to be unaware of the true source of the idea, ie, that it was implanted during the dream. Consider how this was never accomplished: Fischer (Cillian Murphy) travels to Los Angeles, without bodyguards or a personal secretary. When he lands, he suddenly realizes that he has no memory of anything that happened during the flight (because he was drugged).
The logical (and missing) Third Act would show Fischer going after Cobb's team, abducting Ellen Page and holding her as bait to lure the others out of hiding. (Andy Garcia couldn't do this until Ocean's 12.) While interrogating Page, Fischer would be impressed by her ability to create complex dream architectures. And he would realize this is how to "become your own man, not become a paler version of his father." To put his fortune behind a new industry, where a man can spend ten years inside a dream, while only a few days go by in the real world. There's your Moral Argument. Is Fischer the right man to control this new technology that will impact greatly on Western civilization? And it creates a compelling relationship between Fischer, a man who has just lost the only family he had, and a young female student who holds the key to greatness. Better than Starsky and Hutch! Better than Solo and Chewbacca!

The plot didn't require multiple levels in the dreams. If they had a "forger" who could appear as Tom Berenger, or Fischer's father, just create a simple dream in the hospital room, where the father shows him the will, the secret safe, and explains why his game plan for his son involves breaking up the company. If the dream was short, they could allow Fischer to wake up and have memories of nine hours out of a ten hour flight, and he would assume that his dream was the natural result of a trip to deliver his father's coffin to a funeral.

John: I have studied at your virtual feet for years. You are entirely right about this movie. It is all surface virtuosity without the central governing principles of story. Do we really care about the central character's ghost? No. It is a Rosebud retread of a ghost. As for the idea of planting an idea in a man's head to change the world? It is too intellectual and abstract a construct. We don't see the world in chains so we don't really feel a need to have it liberated. In the end, we are simply watching a filmmaker pleasuring himself with surface virtuosity and failing to communicate real values with those people out there in the dark - us.

John Could it be the reason you feel the story teller disappoints is because you missed whose point of view Noland set up to tell the story through? Review the plot again as being told throught the wife who is actually alive throughout the movie from the very first scene to the end and who is unsuccessfully manipulating Leo to wake up, ie like the scene where she tries to get him to jump. Follow the top.... BTW I am a huge fan of your film story analysis'.

In the movie time is spent arguing whether the Inception COULD be done, but I think the Moral Dilemma/Challenge should have been whether or not the Inception SHOULD be done. The only Moral Challenge I remember from the movie was Leo's character not telling the other members of his team how much danger they were in due to his unstable subconscious.

I thought this was a fascinating analysis of Inception, and especially appreciated your discussion of the challenges of combining a caper plot and a science fiction plot. But I'd really like to know what you regard as the moral challenge within this film to be. You only hint at it and how it doesn't work very effectively, but you don't say why. I'd love to hear more from you about this!