RIZABAL - Inception

Karl Derrick Rizabal      

      The last movie we watched in STS X2 is Inception, directed by Christopher Nolan. Inception is about a professional, who uses military grade equipment to have a shared dream and extract information from deep within the subconscious of the target. This man is named Cobb. At the start of the movie, Cobb and his two partners fail to extract information from a man named Saito due to the interference of Cobb’s wife, Mal, which was later revealed dead. Later, Saito approached Cobb to do a task almost impossible where instead of extracting information, they plant an idea in deepest parts of a target’s subconscious; in return, Cobb would be free from the charge of murder so that he would be able to go and meet his children again. This act is called inception. Cobb gathered his group, with the supervision of Saito, to perform this task in a dream within a dream within a dream or a 3-level dream to Maurice Fischer, a son of the rival energy company of Saito. During the process, in the first level, Saito was injured by Fischer’s subconscious projections. In the third level, Mal killed Fischer, sending him to Limbo, a world with infinite subconscious. Cobb went a level further into the dream to Limbo to get Fischer and Saito back. It was showed that Fischer was able to finish the mission himself and went back into the real world, but Saito’s location in Limbo was indefinite. Then, it was showed that Cobb tried to negotiate to Saito, which became an old man in Limbo, to bring him back to the real world, to convince Saito that the reality he was living in was a dream. Then the next scene was Cobb, together with his group, waking up after the mission. He went back to his home and saw his child. He spins a top to know if he is still dreaming or not, but he ignores this and continue on to spend a happy time together with his children. If the top continued spinning, it was a dream; while if the top stopped, it was reality.
      The odd thing was that the kids didn’t grow up at all and it was showed that the top somehow continued spinning and then wobbled a bit, and that was all, the end. The ending can be concluded in two ways: Cobb was still in a dream, or Cobb was able to go back to reality. Cobb could have continued dreaming because his subconscious can project whatever he was thinking after he was sent back to Limbo. And also, Cobb could have gone back to reality, after convincing Saito to go back, although it was not really showed how they got back to the real world. This film may be one of the most interesting movies I have ever seen as it can be concluded in two different ways.