I thoroughly enjoyed INCEPTION, and think it’s one of the best films of the year (though in 2010 so far, that’s not exactly a terribly high honor). It had all of Nolan’s typical complexity and brilliance, but one thing I didn’t think was that it was particularly open to debate or interpretation. As complicated as it was, it all seemed pretty decisive to me in the end.
But I know many of you have been arguing various aspects of the film with your friends since this weekend, and what better person to discuss the intricacies of the film than with someone who was in it?
Vulture has a very lengthy, in-depth interview with Dileep Rao, who played the chemist Yousef in the film where nearly all lingering questions with the film are discussed in great depth. It’s an interesting read, and I’ve posted perhaps the most prevalently asked question about the film below. Obvious SPOILERS ahoy.
So what about the final shot, when the top seems like it could keep spinning before we cut to black. Let’s call it the n-1 theory, where the whole film is all a dream, even the “reality” level. In other words, every level is one lower than we think it is.
Yeah. I don’t think the “It’s all a dream” theory makes much sense to me, because where is “the real” Cobb? We never see n. We never see reality. We have no idea who this man is, what his circumstances are. To me, there’s really only two paths: Either it’s a wobbling top, which it does sound like at the end, and it’s real; or the whole thing, regardless of totems, moments, girls, children, people, machines, the whole thing — it’s all some dream. And that’s more philosophy. I think the film does this wonderful exploration of the entire idea to the nth degree. It feels so full. Because of that, there’s so many weird bits that seem to warp our sense of the real and unreal.
After this, there’s a particularly interesting bit about whether or not Cobb himself might have actually been incepted, too lengthy to post here. Check out the rest of the interview over at Vulture.