Inception (Spoilers)

So today I went to go see Inception, as a friend once told me, the journey is not as important as the ending, even though the ending had been semi-spoiled for me by TIME magazine and its Twitter feed, although that was debatable in and of itself. That said, please do not read this entry any further if you wish to be able to go spoiler free and see the film itself.

Inception is a story about the reality or lack there of of the world around us, of the world that we live in. It is a story about a journey that possibly never began, nor ended during the course of the film. Quite succinctly, the entire film was nothing more than a dream. All the clues point to such, we never see his children's faces until the very end, when we know for certain he is in a dream while confronting his dead wife; and her totem kept on spinning on the table when it should have fallen back to the ground after a short time to prove that he was in the real word, if it could be labeled as such.

He was hired, Cobb, was, to plant an idea in a competitor's son's mind. To dissolve the empire that his father had forged. The Japanese man who hired him was offering him the chance to move on and return to his family, which by the end may or may not have existed for certain. The Japanese guy, Saito, wanted to stop his competitor's son from continuing the empire and driving him out of business, and holding a monopoly on the world's energy market.

This however, was all told in a form of a flashback, because at the beginning of the film Cobb washes up on a beach with only his wife's totem, infected with an idea that the world is not the real world, and a gun on him. He was taken to an old Japanese man we find out is Saito towards the end, asking if he had come to kill him, as the totem was one he recalled from a half remembered dream so very long ago.

If it sounds confusing, there's good reason. I counted, not counting the end where it was most likely all a dream, approximately eight dreams within dreams within dreams type deals going on, each level and dream within a dream within a dream holding its own plots and twists, it's own turns and all other such deviations. The dreams were as real as reality, in some cases more so than normal.

Anyhow, after the old Japanese man says the words that it was like a half remembered dream, the story picks up right in the middle of a mission. One of the things they tell you is that you never recall the beginning of a dream, you always remember only halfway through, and never how you made it to that point. That should have been the first hint that things were not entirely right in the world of Inception. It was after that mission that Saito hires Cobb and his friends to plant an idea in the competitor's son's mind, rather than extract it. Some say it's impossible, all except Cobb who says it has been done once.

As the plot turns again and again we eventually find out that it's true, it was done once before, when Cobb and his wife, called only Ma, were able to go down really deep into the depths of a dream and fell into a limbo; time works differently in dreams, seconds become hours, hours become days, etc. In dream limbo, he and his wife lived for decades and grew old together in a dream city that they had built themselves. He planted the idea in her mind, on her totem itself, that they were trapped in a false reality, and so they killed themselves to escape dream limbo...except the idea carried over into reality, and she killed herself to get back to what she thought had to be the real world. That idea, it is implied between the lines, infected him as well, and that is why he is never sure of whether the world around him is real or not; he carries her totem, not his own, even though they warn the new person on the team never to touch another's totem, only your own, lest your own reality senses become corrupted by dealing with something that is not your own, to remind you of what is real and what is not.

It all ends with him apparently killing dream!Saito in dream limbo and they all wake up on the plane and go their separate ways. We finally reach his home, Saito carrying out with his payment of making everything okay once more for Cobb with the authorities, and we see Cobb's children's faces at last. However, he had set the totem rolling on the table, and as the film cuts to black, the totem hasn't stopped spinning in over several minutes of scene...Cobb is still in the dreaming, and he doesn't even realize that he is.

Inception...anyone who writes or role plays a lot on instant messenger can relate to this film in a way. It is the art of continuous creation, to the point that the story creates itself; when the muse gets the keys to the asylum and runs away with them. When the story and its author, creator and creation become so intertwined, it is as if the story writes itself. Creation is, Creation was, Creation will be...Creation. If you don't get that statement, then you won't get the movie. Time is, Time was, Time will be; the Ouroboros is the key to Inception.