Great Scene: “Inception”
Cobb wakes up. He’s home. Finally, home. But… is it real?
Movie: Inception (2010), written by Christopher Nolan.
IMDb plot summary: A thief, who steals corporate secrets through use of dream-sharing technology, is given the inverse task of planting an idea into the mind of a CEO.
Scene Setup: In limbo, Cobb washes ashore where the armed guard finds him. He is brought to the seaside palace where the elderly Japanese man recognizes his brass top.
Here is the scripted version of the ending to Inception:
There is some additional dialogue in the movie most notably a line from a U.S. customs agent: “Welcome home, Mr. Cobb.”
A few interesting pieces of trivia:
- If you take the first letters of the main characters’ names — Dom, Robert, Eames, Arthur, Mal and Saito — they spell “Dreams”. If you add Peter, Ariadne and Yusuf, the whole makes “Dreams Pay” which is what they do for a mind thief.
- During an interview, Christopher Nolan addressed the ambiguous ending, saying he believes Cobb makes it home to his children, although it is open to interpretation by the viewer. He further claimed that the point of not seeing whether or not the top stops spinning is that Cobb no longer obsesses over his dreams.
- Christopher Nolan first pitched the film to Warner Bros. after the completion of his third feature, Insomnia (2002), and was met with approval from the studio. However, it was not yet written at the time, and Nolan determined that rather than writing it as an assignment, it would be more suitable to his working style, if he wrote it as a spec script, and then presented it to the studio whenever it was completed. So he went off to write it, thinking it would take “a couple of months”, but it ultimately took nearly eight years.
The story I have heard is that Nolan’s original idea was to do a heist movie, however, his early attempts at writing the script did not feel right, so he set it aside to do other projects. Over time, he realized the primary problem was Cobb didn’t have a strong enough emotional reason to pull off the inception. Then he thought of Cobb’s goal: To get home to his children. Once Nolan had that, he was able to write the script and move forward with the movie.
This speaks to the importance of character. No matter how mind-blowing and entertaining the spectacle, the audience has to have an emotional connection to the plot — and the conduit to the emotional life of a story is the characters.
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