Inception - Film Analysis

Inception is a science fiction action film produced and directed by Christopher Nolan with his wife, Emma Thomas in 2010. In the film, Leonardo DiCaprio played a role as Dom Cobb, a thief who has a special ability to steal people’s secrets from their subconscious by creating a dream world. Inception is about planting an idea into someone’s mind and thus deep in their subconscious they believe they came up with the “story” themselves. Instead, extraction is an idea of stealing where the extractor takes information from his target’s subconscious through the dream for personal profit.

One of the main concept Inception has questions us to talk about is Limbo, unconstructed dream space where dreams within dreams, three layers above and it is a dream space where no other dream can be dreamed again. Inside the movie, their body napped for only few hours but in Limbo, they had already lived for so long. They constructed a whole city, had children and grew old together. On the surface, Limbo seems like a paradise but in fact it is a space where people are trapped and they will never back to the reality. Hence, a dream actually a distortion of reality. This means a subconscious state (dream) is much less logical than a conscious state (reality) and we never question ourselves the aspects of “reality” when we are in a dream. For example, we will never remember how the dream started when we enter a dream. By the time we hit Limbo, we will most probably forget that we are dreaming at all and that is actually the danger of Limbo. When a world get rid of all the restrictions and boundaries, how does one find anything real to hold onto?

In another aspect, Inception has asked us that if matter really matters as if we change our perspectives of what is truly real. In the movie, Cobb changes his wife, Mal’s perception just like the extractor team did for Fischer’s. Inside the dream, Mal seems so real that Cobb could not let go of her. “Real” is just a matter of perspective. Another example such as when a whole bunch of people go to a place where sells sedative in order to enter a dream world. “They come here to be woken up”, they changed their perspectives of reality especially in the dream where the place they always dream to live by. Even in the real world, our experience is completely created by our own. We think it is a reality just because of what we think we know about the things we see.

In the movie, Cobb and his extractor teams work for Saito, a businessman who want to convince Fischer to sell his father’s company after his father’s death. To succeed in this, the extractor team must lead Fischer deep into the layers of his own subconscious and to get the idea that he never knew he had. In some way, the director does the same thing to the audience, us. Maybe, the movie Inception is actually performing inception on us. I think the movie Inception is like an onion, waiting us to peel its layer one by one and hopefully I will completely understand Inception after peeling the last layer of its.