huge fan of this movie.
so many people were saying after I saw it "wooo this movie is CRAAAZY it totally screws with your mind I don't even know what just happened at ALL"
but….
honestly, after watching Umineko and Higurashi; I found it quite easy to understand except for that there are a few things that are completely up to interpretation or aren't fully explained.
I like that the ending is open to interpretation. If it had been spelled out for us exactly what happened, it would be a lackluster ending to what is meant to be a confusing and trippy movie that should leave you feeling slightly unnerved.
I thought this movie was incredibly well done- it's one of the movies like Pirates of the Caribbean where there is almost no things I would've enjoyed seeing done better.
All of the actors in it were incredible. It really restored my faith in Leonardo DiCaprio as an actor (loved the work he did when he was younger, lately I haven't been impressed as often).
Ken watanabe is just a great, great, actor (he was saito) and I've seen him in many films before this.
Joseph Gordon Levitt proved to me that he can be good in movies that aren't just romantic comedies.
really just full of great actors the whole way through (including Michael Cain and Cillian Murphy).
Chris Nolan always does really entertaining and beautiful films IMO
also... one of the real things that made me go see this was... HANS ZIMMER. that man is a god. Hearing that he's doing the music to a film is a good reason all by itself for me to see it.
The only thing I disliked about this film was Ariadne. She just really annoyed me. I guess some of her annoying traits were necessary to the plot but still I couldn't help but get angry every time she showed up on screen.
! like when she first shares a dream with cobb and starts messing around with the physics of everything….
ariadne: doop dee doop i'm flipping buildings upside down and making bridges out of nothing whee this is fun!
! cobb: umm.... you really SHOULDN'T do that... see these people walking around? they're my subconscious. and they'll attack you if you mess around too much....
! ariadne: yeah whatever continues doing it anyway
! cobb's subconscious:....attacks
! ariadne: BAWWW OMG COBB NICE SUBCONSCIOUS YA GOT THAR THEY ATTACKED ME WHYYYYYYYYY
! also that she has no regard for privacy and cheerfully enters Cobb's dreams without permission and invades his darkest thoughts only to take a holier than thou position on them and tell him off basically for being messed up that he inadvertently killed his wife.
! I say she's necessary to the plot because without her stupidity and inability to keep boundaries with others, we do as audience members get a tutorial/explanation of how dream sharing basically works, why they can't just always be changing stuff randomly and making weird paradoxes, and also we get to discover cobb's past.
as for the ending…
just keep in mind that totems are kind of like math.
they're supposed to be used to prove things with certainty. You can prove a hypothesis correct because the math checks out, right?
but in the end, math (though based on things that we perceive in reality) was invented by humans.
therefore it doesn't actually prove much.
Totems are the same way.
yes, totems are supposed to be able to tell the person if they're dreaming because only the person will know how it behaves in reality and in a dream it will behave differently but if you think about it....
if Cobb knows how his totem works, and knows that in dreams it spins continuously and in real life will eventually fall, he could be in a dream where he controls things to a certain extent, he could just will the totem to fall in his dream.
also, totems themselves could just be part of a dream. perhaps the idea of totems was invented after Cobb was already in a dream world.
I just don't really see how totems can really tell you if you're dreaming or not. Logically it seems like it would only make sense that a totem could tell you if you were in YOUR OWN DREAM or not.