Jaw-dropping Movie: Inception

Title: Inception
Director: Christopher Nolan
Main actors: Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page
Genre: Action, Mystery, ThrillerDate watched: 21 August 2010
Place: Lotte Mart, Phu My Hung, HCMC, Vietnam
Category: Outside of Class

“Dreams feel real while we're in them. It's only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange.” –Cobb –

“You keep telling yourself what you know. But what do you believe? What do you feel?” –Mal –

Inception is a movie about reality and dreams. Cobb, the main character in this film has a unique skill of stealing secrets using other people’s dreams. Although this skill is very valuable, it has cost him his loved ones—his children and his wife, Mal. However, he is given an opportunity by Saito to have his life back, to see his children again and to be with them again if he could plant an idea into his rival’s mind. To achieve this, he must go into three levels of dreams and come back to reality with a given amount of time. His projections (Mal) act as the obstacles in this “maze” created by the dream architect. This movie questions whether our life is real or if it is all a dream that we are not able to escape from. If it is all a dream, who are the dream-makers, the architects of our dreams? If it is all a dream, who are the projections? Are we in the limbo right now? These are questions that the movie makes us think about. The movie leaves the audience to question whether Cobb is still in a dream, or if he is back to reality.

I think that in the end, Cobb is back to reality. I think this is true because the totem (that allows him to determine whether he is in a dream or reality), had lost its balance and was on the verge of toppling over. However, it may just be my desire for the ending to be the reality that I try and come up with reasons why I think this is true.

Because dreams feel so real when they are happening, I don’t think there is a way of knowing whether our life is a dream or a reality unless we wake up from this big dream. However I come to wonder, ‘What happens when we fall asleep in our life, do we go into another level of dreams? Or do we come back to reality? What is reality itself? How should reality be defined?’ I think the life we are living in is reality, but I don’t think there is any way of knowing this is true. It cannot be proven, because to be proven, we should know the difference between reality and dreams. Identifying this difference would essentially answer the original question of whether our life is a dream or reality. Like Nagal said in his article “How do we know what we know?” it is all a big loop.  Trying to answer the question of reality and dreams is a cycle; a cycle which will not lead to answers, but lead us back to the question itself.