Overall I thought this film was very good by normal cinema standards, but a disappointment by the standards that I've come to expect from Nolan. It seems to me that Nolan deliberately intended the film to be open to interpretation at every level. Not only at the end when you must decide whether or not his reunion with his kids is in the real world or not, but also whether or not the dream technology even exists. For all we know, Cobb is just an ordinary guy who takes his kids to the beach and then has a daydream while lying down by the sea.

Reasons why I think there is reason to doubt everything:

1) Mal points out how preposterous his real world scenario is, and it's true.

Even his real life seems like a James Bond movie, and a poor one at that. Two giant companies are fighting over the world's energy supplies and the best plan that one of them can come up with to deal with its rival is to influence the heir to break up the company? That makes no sense. I'd expect this plot in a Michael Bay film, but not a Christopher Nolan one. And how ridiculous it is that they can so easily drug the heir, supposedly one of the most powerful people in the world? Even if he were forced to travel in a first class commercial flight, I don't believe that he would travel alone without bodyguards or aides.

2) His escape in Mombassa is too convenient.

This has been conspicuously pointed out in a number of articles before but I'm including it for the sake of completeness. He escapes by squeezing himself with much difficulty through a tiny space between two walls. This is a commonly described scene in dreams. It cannot have been a coincidental choice.

3) Mal's suicide scene is unrealistic.

Cobb enters the hotel room and finds Mal on the ledge. Except that the ledge appears to be on a building opposite the one he's on with a large empty space between them. This makes no sense unless you consider that reaching for someone but finding it impossible because of a gulf between you is also another type of commonly described dream. Since I don't believe that Nolan makes mistakes, I contend that this is a deliberate choice as well.

4) Cobb's situation with his children is incredibly contrived.

Cobb's driving force throughout the whole film is to be reunited with his kids, but if he can't re-enter the US to be with them, why the hell can't they leave the US to be with him? Then there's the whole stylistic choice of not showing their faces until the final scene. In my opinion, all this casts doubt that the real world is indeed real. Plus there's the grandfather's line in Paris telling him to "Come back to reality." One interpretation is that he knows Cobb is misusing the dream technology to see his dead wife but the context of the conversation at that time was that Cobb was desperately trying to find a way to be reunited with his children, not to bring his wife back. I therefore think that this phrase has interesting implications.

5) The dream technology is badly integrated with the worldbuilding.

One would imagine that the advent of this level of dream technology would cause huge changes to the shape of human society, yet the effects seem oddly muted in this film. On the one hand, it's common enough that senior executives appear to be routinely trained to possess defenses against extraction and that some seemingly poor people in an underdeveloped country use it everyday. On the other hand, Ariadne, a university student in Paris, has never heard of it before. Other than these specific instances, the technology also does not seem to have impacted human society much. For example, if we had dream technology now, do you think we would still have televisions? If time can be so efficiently compressed in dreams, you could conceivably finish an entire university course's worth of education in a single day. The whole world would be drastically different.

Since I think Nolan is a smart guy, I would attribute this to Cobb's failure of imagination than Nolan's. Cobb wants to be a superhero in dreams so he comes up with the concept and daydreams about it but he doesn't care whether or not this ends up being a realistic world. But Nolan should.

6) Cobb's totem is unreliable.

One common objection to the view that the real world is also a dream is that Cobb uses the totem in the real world scenes and it falls over. But Cobb's totem is unreliable. First of all, it wasn't his totem in the first place. It was his wife's totem and he'd already explained how important it was that every dreamer should make his own totem or else it wouldn't work. Secondly, he even explained to other people how it would work, defeating its purpose. Remember how Arthur would not allow Ariadne to touch his die because that would defeat its purpose? Arthur even tells Ariadne that Cobbs always tells people not to do something but then he always does it himself. To me, this indicates that Cobb's totem and his methods for staying safe while in dreams is not reliable.

I don't mean to say that the real world shown is definitively a dream. What I believe is that Nolan deliberately injected clues to make every single level in the film ambiguous and give every single level a dream-like quality. The purpose is to make it so that every and all interpretations are equally true. I guess some people might think that's clever, but I think it's pretty cheap and makes this a much weaker film compared to tightly plotted films like The Prestige and Memento in which there are multiple clues dispersed across a variety of narratives but everything joins back up together to form a single conclusion.

This post has been edited by wankongyew: Jul 23 2010, 03:52 PM

And yet in the opening scenes of the film, we apparently see Cobb getting a document from Saito's safe and reading it. If you cannot obtain any new information from dreams, what is the point of doing extraction at all?

Sure, that's why you'd wire up a professor together with a bunch of students. A whole course's worth of studying in just one day!