With a synopsis, and the final posters and trailer for “Inception” hitting just before the weekend, the pieces are (just) starting to fit together for Christopher Nolan’s mysterious blockbuster-in-waiting. However, with rumors of a major third act twist, and still only a vague sense of what the film’s truly about, there’s plenty of new questions being raised. Hearteningly, many of you are trying to avoid spoilers for this in particular, so here’s your advance warning, just in case we turn out to be right in any of our speculation. And since you ask, yes, its a slow news day.
First of all, the first of the “Inception” posters featured a mysterious figure at the back alongside the more recognizable line-up of Leonardo Di Caprio, Ken Watanabe, Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Tom Hardy. Due to the low-resolution of the image, we couldn’t tell who it was, but a reader the E.I.C. tipped us off that it was in fact Dileep Rao, who played the psychic in “Drag Me To Hell” and Sigourney Weaver’s scientist sidekick in “Avatar.”
The actor hasn’t yet appeared in any of the three trailers for the film, or any other marketing materials, and indeed his casting wasn’t well-known outside of IMDB, so it’s rather surprising that he makes it onto the poster above the likes of Michael Caine, Cilian Murphy or Marion Cotillard. Unless Warner Bros are trying to make a half-hearted connection to “Avatar,” it suggests that Rao will have a key role to play, and perhaps one that’s being kept hidden for good reason.
As for the trailer, there are plenty of new hints and clues here, and we’ve taken a few shots in the dark below, although it should be noted that they’re a mix of speculation and educated guesses based on what we know already:
0:11 – We open with a shot of Cobb (DiCaprio) seemingly unconscious in the surf, and it’s clear that water is going to be a recurring motif in the film. Shots of DiCaprio falling back into a bathtub, and of a room being filled with water, are familiar from the first trailer, while the first teaser poster shows the film’s star up to his knees in a flooded city. The new clip features several new watery moments, including DiCaprio, Gordon-Levitt and a masked figure in a car being filled with water (1:48), and a city crumbling into the sea (2:03)
0:35 – This seems to confirm previous reports that Ellen Page plays a graduate student recruited by Di Caprio to his team — Nolan previously told Empire magazine that she served as the audiences surrogate, essentially.
0:50 – A character (Cillian Murphy?) enters a vault with a “Tron”-style interior. Previous reports suggested that the characters enter dreams via an injection, carried in a suitcase (0:21), so we assume this is taking place within the dream world.
0:52 – Is that Marion Cotillard playing with children on the beach? This could suggest the source for some of the water imagery elsewhere, in particular the lone figure walking down the coast as a city crumbles into the sea (2:03).
1:08 – “I’m ready,” Cobb says, as a white light shines on his face. Is he about to enter a dream? Or about to wake up? Or something else entirely?
1:17 – “I think I’ve found a way home, and this last job, that’s how I get there” we hear, over shots of DiCaprio and Cotillard in Paris. Either Cobb’s become trapped in a dream at some stage, or, more likely, he sees Cotillard as ‘home,’ and is trying to get her back — it seems, from later shots (1:41) that reports that she dies within a dream early on were correct.
1:49 – Joseph Gordon-Levitt (whose character is probably called Arthur) is in a foetal position in a lift, as we hear him say “The dream’s collapsing.” Does something terrible happen if the dreamer wakes up before Cobb’s team?
1:54 – As Arthur leaps down a corridor, the frame freezes, something that on first viewing, we thought was a streaming glitch. But it actually happens twice in the trailer, here and at 2:07, suggesting either that it’s a stylistic device in the trailer or that it’s a technique that Nolan’s using in a film itself — perhaps to show the end of a dream?
1:59 – Arthur floats in a hotel room, manipulating bodies in mid-air. Between this, and the earlier “Fringe”-esque shot of bodies connected to the walls by wires (0:59), it seems like he’s designing a dream — perhaps the “inception” of the title that’s referred to in the synopsis. If this is true, our guess is that “Inception” will be as much a personal look at storytelling and the nature of creativity (like “The Prestige” was) as it will be an action-fuelled blockbuster.
2:14 – It’s a little unclear the first time you hear it, but the line by Eames (Tom Hardy) at the end is “You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling,” just as he holds up some kind of grenade launcher, one-upping Arthur. In “The Matrix,” which this film clearly shares a lot of DNA with, Neo could learn any skill in a blink of an eye; can Cobb & co create objects just by thinking about them?
Also worth noting is the absence of Rao, as well as the continued absence of Tom Berenger (who does get poster billing). Even Ken Watanabe, who, Nolan told Empire, features almost as much as Di Caprio, is nowhere to be found here. It’s clear that, even if we’re right about everything here — and we won’t be — the director has plenty more surprises up his sleeve.
The trailer’s embedded again below, as well as three new TV spots for the movie, via The Movie Mash & Awards Daily, which mostly feature the same footage:
