Inception, released in 2010, won 157 awards from 2010-2011 and was nominated for many more. At the Oscars, it brought in four wins: Best Achievement in Cinematography (Wally Pfister), Best Achievement in Sound Mixing (Lora Hirschberg, Gary A. Rizzo, Ed Novick), Best Achievement in Sound Editing (Richard King), Best Achievement in Visual Effects (Chris Corbould, Andrew Lockley, Pete Bebb, Paul J. Franklin). It was also nominated for Best Motion Picture of the Year, Best Writing (Original Screenplay), Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Score), Best Achievement in Art Direction. The film was directed by the genre-bending time-lord Christopher Nolan. He drew inspiration from science fiction movies like Blade Runner (1982), The Matrix (1999) and is rumored to have been inspired by the animated film Paprika (2006). Short stories from Jorge Luis Borges also inspired Nolan, having subtle nods to The Secret Miracle and The Circular Ruins.
The film was first proposed in 2002, after Nolan's successful completion of Insomnia. However, he decided he needed more experience before tackling such a complex narrative. The project was shelved until Warner's purchase in February 2009. Inception became the fourth-highest-grossing film of 2010, grossing over $828 million worldwide. After being considered one of the best films of the 2010s, IMDb ranked it number 13 on its Top 250 Overall Films. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio with a fantastic ensemble cast of Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Elliot Page, Tom Hardy, Dileep Rao, Cillian Murphy, Tom Berenger, and Michael Caine. Dominique Cobb (DiCaprio) is a professional thief who steals information from major business players by infiltrating their subconscious. After being offered a once-in-a-lifetime chance of getting his criminal history erased, he takes a job that requires him to plant an idea into a target's subconscious. It was said to be impossible, but Cobb knows he can do it because he performed this on his (now) dead wife. How does Cobb's guilt over Mal's death affect his own perception of reality throughout the movie?
Cobb's feelings of guilt over the circumstances of his wife's death provide the emotional center of the film. After performing an Inception on his wife, Mal, they finally woke up from a fifty-year dream. Still, the idea stayed with Mal until her suicide. Cobb's sense of guilt over his wife's death and his children's abandonment leaves his subconscious in chaos. Cobb allows his guilt to motivate and restrict him. He would do anything to get home to his children, who were left parentless after Mal's suicide. He would even do the thing that caused his wife's suicide. His perceived guilt causes him to project violent apparitions of his wife in his dream state, which hinders his ability to correctly complete his work. In one of the final scenes, we see Dom and Mal's projection at a table confronting each other. When Mal asks how he feels, he responds with:
COBB: Guilt. I feel guilt, Mal. No matter what I do. No matter how hopeless I am, no matter how confused -- that guilt is always there reminding me of the truth.
In this heartfelt confession, Cobb finds freedom. He's confronting Mal, his own projection of his own guilt. The only way he can move forward is to deal with his guilt and forgive himself. The first hint of his inching to freedom is when Mal's projection shows up in the snow mountain dream stage. Mal jumps down from the ceiling and attempts to assassinate the target (Fischer). Although Cobb waited for a second too long, he did succeed in shooting her. This was his first step towards unlocking his shackles of guilt.
Just like the voice of Piaf's song ("Ne, Je Ne Regrette Rien"), Cobb eventually learns to grow around his feelings of guilt and regret over Mal's death. Cobb's guilt puts himself and other dreamers in danger. It gets to the point where he can no longer trust himself, which is why he refuses to look at the dream plans that the architects create in case Mal decides to infiltrate them. His guilt over performing inception on Mal also transpires to him. Every time he does anything, he needs to use the spinning top as a grounding tool to tell him that he isn't dreaming.
A lot of watchers dislike Inception because of its vague ending. After Cobb performs a successful inception on Fischer, he lands in Los Angeles. He sees his children, then the camera pans over to the top, and we see it keeps spinning. The camera doesn't stay on it long enough to know if it topples over. This definitely indicates that the end part was a dream after all (taking my stories written in the seventh grade to a whole new level). But what if the entire movie was a dream? Since the spinning top wasn't originally Cobb's totem, how does he know how it's really meant to work? Dreamers can manipulate everything in the dream; it would make sense that he manipulated the totem to spin and stop whenever his subconscious tells it to. Much like a dream, we don't know how we got to the beginning of the film. The first scene is Cobb washed up on the shore of Limbo and being carried to Saito's house. I think the movie took place in Limbo in itself, and Cobb isn't aware of it. Meaning that Mal is actually alive in the real world and that her "suicide" wasn't really a suicide. It was her getting out of the dream. Cobb is a very unreliable narrator, so none of the viewers should trust what they see through his perspective. This would be my 11th time watching Inception, and it's still easily one of my favorite movies of all time. With each re-watch, I find a new theory and notice small details that the director tried to expertly place.
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