Cobb's totem isn't his wedding ring, like some people have suggested. Cobb only wears his ring in his dreams, because as he tells Ariadne, he and Mal are still together in his dreams. The wedding band is completely distinct from his totem, it's just a reflection of his mental state in the dream world versus the real one.
Robert Fischer has a militarized subconscious that assaults outsiders unprovoked. According to Cobb, this is the sort of training people can receive to resist extractors like themselves stealing information, but it also never showed up in the research like it should have. From the way Cobb talks, it seems that it was an obvious thing to miss, which makes it strange that nothing about it came up in the research. However, there's another possibility: Robert was never actually trained. His subconscious mind has been militarized like this as a coping mechanism against his upbringing.
Alternately, Fischer hired someone off the books to train him. Given how extractors are looked down upon and the risks of the dreamscape, and how in the US and Australia, the drugs needed would be heavily controlled, but not out of reach for someone as rich as Fischer. He just hired someone off-the-books to train Robert's subconscious, just not someone as good as Cobb.
Some of the characters' names are a bit on the nose (eg. Mal is French for "bad"), but put all their first names together (Dominic, Robert, Eames, Arthur, Mal, Saito) and you get "DREAMS".
That only works if we conveniently add certain characters and forget other characters (Yusuf, and either Ariadne or Arthur, depending on who the A stands for).
If you include Fischer's godfather, Peter Browning, you can get D(ominic Cobb), R(obert Fischer), E(ames), A(rthur), M(al), S(aito), P(eter Browning), A(riadne), Y(usuf). In other words, "DREAMS PAY."
Ariadne may have actually inadvertently caused the train incident at the first level. Every other time that a Mal-related projection showed up, it was related to her and/or the children. After Ariadne realizes that Cobb's subconscious is beyond militarized and has become outright hostile, she gives him the ultimatum that someone had to go in knowing the truth. And before they're even finished talking, they literally have to leave for the job. So what was the last thing Cobb actually experienced dream-wise? Mal, the train riddle, and the prison of memories. Not only that, he chose to take Ariadne in after promising not to. So other than general worries about Inception, his last conscious and subconscious issues are literally dealing with both Ariadne and Mal. How did he save Ariadne from Mal? Answering the train riddle. Thus, a train shows up out of nowhere, because Cobb is still panicking and feels even guiltier now that someone knows the truth.
In the opening scene, Cobb tries to give the "world you live in is not real" line to Saito. He almost implanted the same thought that killed Mal. Fortunately, Saito focused on the "promise" for the phone call, not the "reality is not real" thought, and Cobb ran with it. What's the first thing Saito does upon waking up? Pull out his phone. Cobb pulled off not one, but two inceptions.
Simply saying the line is not an inception, for the same reason that they can't simply tell Fischer to break up his father's empire: the mind can always trace the genesis of the idea. Saito listens to Cobb because he remembers Cobb from the real world, and makes the decision that Limbo isn't the real world himself, so there was no danger of him developing the same obsession the way Mal had.
Why didn't Fischer just wake up when he's supposed to, think "Oh well, was just a dream," and maintain the family business? Near the end of the inception, Fischer walks into the guarded room. The audience knows that it worked because of what was in there—perhaps Ariadne could've built the bed and the safe, etc. etc. but she could not control projections, and Eames said he'd like to know what was in there earlier, thus he was not forging Maurice Fischer. So Maurice being in the room, what Maurice said, and possibly even the toy in the safe meant that they were successful.
In one scene, Ariadne tries to tell Cobb about "making the room a hospital, to symbolize Fischer's father." There is no hospital except the one in the vault. She designed the vault and the hospital inside it. Everything else was projected in there.
At the end of the movie, Cobb's totem starts to wobble. This could either mean he is in the real world, or he has come to accept his dream world as his reality.
The final shot cuts away just as the top is about to fall—the viewer gets to be the judge as to whether or not it will fall, and thus whether he's still dreaming or not. Also, the camera lingers on the top for quite a while, building up whether it was going to fall or not—and then we never get to find out. It's a big mental douse of cold water, aka our kick, what takes the audience from the dream world of the film into reality.
The ending can also be thought of in a different light of brilliance: Upon seeing the ending with the top still spinning, the audience's initial reaction is to wonder whether it's still a dream or not. However, Cobb himself doesn't check whether the top is spinning—something which he had been obsessive about since the beginning of the film. Him walking away without looking back to check the result is his way of saying it doesn't matter if it's a dream or not; his kids are there and he's happy, and he's happy to accept it whether it's real or not.
This also mirrors Mal's dilemna: she was obsessed with getting back to "reality" to see their supposed real children and wasn't satisfied with what she thought was a false reality. When faced with the same fear (that he was still dreaming and nothing was real), Cobb chooses to let go of his fear and live in the moment, real or not.
It doesn't even matter if the top falls or not. Because Cobb no longer uses his own totem, he will never be able to truly tell if he's in the dream state or not—he can't be sure what it feels like to spin the top except at the state we see most of the movie. And we never see him use his old one, so it's impossible to be certain.
No, it doesn't matter, but not for that reason: if he is in the real world, then obviously the behavior of the top is irrelevant, since it will behave according to real world physics and fall like any top rather than symbolically falling down when certain mental events take place inside his head. So the whole thing is, intentionally or not, a moot point that doesn't prove anything.
It doesn't matter for yet another reason: assuming that the entire movie is not a dream, then regardless of whether or not Cobb is in a dream, he'll still eventually wake up in the real world on the airplane. The only thing that's really at stake for him is his mental state when he finally does wake up. Alternatively, if the entire movie is a dream, then it doesn't matter how long Cobb spends in any one level, since none of it is real to begin with.
Whoever hosts the dream world cannot go deeper than that specific dream world, and thus makes them the ideal candidate to initiate the kick for anyone one level further down: Yusuf hosts the van level (his failure to go to the bathroom makes it rain inside this level), Arthur hosts the hotel level (allowing him to use his favored paradox staircase trick), and Eames hosts the snow level.
Combining this with a previous idea: If whoever hosts the dream cannot go deeper and the movie could be a dream, then who is hosting it? It can't be Cobb, because he goes deeper. It can't be the audience, we go deeper as well.
That can't be completely right, since Mal and Cobb both went deeper and deeper when they were experimenting with only the two of them. If the dreamer can't go below their own dream, than they never could have gotten past the first level together let alone all the way down to Limbo.
There's nothing to say that a host can go into deeper dream levels—they just can't host another dream (because that could create a recursive dream loop). It can be done, it's just...dangerous.
You don't need to maintain multiple layers of dreams in order to reach Limbo. Dying at any level sends you there.
Limbo is not some arbitrary number of levels down. Limbo is just a dream state in which no one person is the dream host. Think of it like a multiplayer video game. There has to be one server "hosting" the game, making sure each player/entity is in a set place. Without that, everything gets all muddled and confusing... like Limbo.
The dream hosts for each level remain at that level to initiate the kick, due to the overly precise timing required to return to the top level as quickly as possible. When Mal and Cobb were experimenting, they didn't need any such kick because they were only riding out the natural length of the dream.
If the level below the van level hadn't been a hotel interior (but instead, for instance, the open-air snow level), the different orientations of gravity would have sent the characters into the sky.
Also, Ariadne knew that they'd drop the van off the bridge to serve as a kick. So she deliberately designed the second level of the dreamworld to be an enclosed environment.
Cobb explains that you can tell if a dream is happening because it starts in the middle of everything. The movie starts In Medias Res, and there is no opening title/credits aside from the studio logos.
What's more, almost every single scene begins In Medias Res, with no establishing shots or preamble. We don't see how the characters get from place to place, they just are. And even though this is fairly typical of films, Inception draws our attention to it as part of its allegory of film=dream.
The movie has successfully incepted in its audience the idea that it might have been All Just a Dream by the end. As described in the movie, you can't shake the idea, and while some people might think they're being clever by exposing that theory, in reality it's not their own idea: the movie purposefully set out to give it to them.
The title itself is pretty clever once you think about it: "Inception" is a word that means "Beginning" and once an idea—any idea—is Incepted into a person's mind by that one beginning, it will continue to grow, since the whole implication of a beginning hints at forward movement, which is why the Inception is usually so dangerous since it (the idea incepted) becomes the whole of that person's world—essentially, it is their beginning.
The protagonists can't get too fancy in-dream or else they risk the subconscious rebelling against them. The bad news? No blatant violation of physics. The good news? The Coconut Effect and Suspension of Disbelief means action movie tropes of all kinds are free game.
Early on, Cobb immediately vetoes the idea of making Fisher break up the company out of spite because, he claims, it's easier to make the mind accept a positive idea because people long for catharsis. Easy enough to accept at face value, but once we finally learn his whole story, there's another good reason for him to write the idea off: he knows better than anyone just how badly implanting a negative idea can go wrong and wants to make sure that if the implanted idea keeps growing in Fisher's mind, it'll be something that bolsters him instead of setting off an avalanche of daddy issues.
Also Cobb mentions that "We all yearn for catharsis." Guess what he does in Limbo?
The entire movie can be seen as a metaphor for film-making. Cobb is the director; Arthur is the producer who does research; Saito is the producer with the money; Ariadne is the screenwriter and set designer; Eames is the actor; Yusuf is the cameraman, or special effects director who lures us into the movie; the projections are the audience who can either turn against the movie or endorse it; Fischer serves as the movie theater or projected audience.
Cobb says that the mind accepts a positive, cathartic thought over a negative one. What sells best? A cathartic Happy Ending kind of movie.
Saito is the moneyman who wants to be involved with the film, but due to his Executive Meddling the film's production has to be rushed, and only due to some last-minute vast creative changes does the film actually come together.
In the movie, Ariadne is "The Architect", the person who builds and navigates the paradoxical puzzle of the dreamscape. In Greek Mythology, Ariadne (creator of Ariadne's String) was a Grecian Princess who could navigate the un-plottable, un-navigable maze of Daedalus' Labyrinth, leading the Greek Hero Theseus out of the Labyrinth.
Cobb is a man haunted, asleep and awake, by his regrets; in his dreams, he's built a multi-story building to contain them all. And his signature tune is Edith Piaf singing "I Regret Nothing".
Most people have already figured out that when the Edith Piaf song (used to alert dreamers their time is almost up) is slowed down, it sounds exactly like the main musical motif of the film. Here's the kicker: when the dreamers hear this music, it is severely slowed down since the dreamer experiences time differently. The "Inception" tune that we hear is exactly what the dreamers hear when they are about to wake up.
At the very end of the credits, the last song the audience hears before leaving the theater and returning to reality is Edith Piaf's "Non, je ne regrette rien", suggesting that the entire film was a dream from which the audience was intended to awaken.
The dreamworlds are set up to look like real world locations, and are grounded in reality. This makes sense because a dreamworld based in reality would thus have projections who would have real-world weapons and equipment. Setting the dreamworlds in a real place with real-world physics limits the abilities of the projections and thus renders them controllable and predictable.
Robert Fischer's father might be more on the level than we're led to believe. We're told the name of the company is Fischer Morrow, but Maurice Fischer's business partner's name is Browning. So the name of the company makes no sense, until you remember that the elder Fischer's name is Maurice and the younger Fischer's name is Robert. (Of course, the only time the film tells us the name of the company is when Eames is impersonating Browning, so this might just be another part of the inception plan.) Saito calls Fischer "heir to the Fischer Morrow energy conglomerate" when explaining the job in greater detail, so it's certainly possible.
Robert probably doesn't mistrust Browning. The message he got was not "Browning was keeping your father's desire for you to be your own man from you", but "Dad wanted you to be your own man". When he wakes up on Lvl 1, he immediately starts talking about a deeply personal topic with him. That Robert thinks the whole thing was just a dream during near-death experience, and Browning was kidnapped along with him, so when he wakes up for real, all he really remembers is the idea to break up the company.
Arthur and Eames are hyper-badass in the hotel and snow levels, respectively. Of course, they're fairly badass already, but they take it almost up to eleven in those levels. Eames and Arthur are the dreamers for their levels, allowing them to bend reality around them more easily. No wonder they're so effective; they're not architect-level Reality Warpers, but they're still able to twist the rules of the dream around to help them take down the projections in subtle but significant ways.
Your totem tells you whether or not you're in someone else's dream. If the question is, "is it all Dom's dream?", then it's irrelevant whether the top falls at the end, because he would be in his own dream.
Why did Dom's inception of Mal work so well? Because he touched her totem to do it, which meant that even if they woke up, she could never be sure that she was awake.
It can also be attributed to the fact that he left the Mal's dream totem spinning in the safe of her mind, so she would be willing to wake up from limbo. However, Mal's totem never stopped spinning after they woke up, which caused her continual doubt of reality that led to her death.
For some reason, Limbo has no projections in it. However, think about how people get into Limbo: dying in a dream, but too drugged to wake up. In a normal dream, the architect creates the environment, and the main dreamer's subconscious fills it with projections. When people go into Limbo, they enter a dream state where they're the architect, but there's no main dreamer; therefore, no subconscious to create projections.
This doesn't explain Saito's guards at the beginning and near the end. It could be they simply manifested in Limbo, but that would fall under projecting.
This would mean instead of being projections, the guards are essentially "architecture," built up by Saito.
Saito is a business executive, used to having subordinates. No surprise that he would build some.
More directly, Limbo does have projections, but only ones that are consciously produced. The lack of a main dreamer prevents them from spontaneously generating.
The relationship between Ariadne and Cobb is like a zillion other movies in which a young talent is recruited by a more experienced mentor, learns from them, realizes their shady intentions, then eventually must surpass them. Only this time, we're seeing it from the mentor's side! Which means, if this story were being told from the usual viewpoint, we'd see that Cobb was always the villain of the movie, and Ariadne is the hero. Everything Cobb does, up until the very end, is done for selfish motives and endangers everyone around him. Whereas Ariadne selflessly goes along with the team to ensure their safety, and eventually saves them all (by realizing they can go deeper after Fischer is shot).
How did Saito know so much intimate knowledge about Cobb’s situation? Sure, he more than likely did his research beforehand, but it's also possible he learned about (such as Cobb's desire to be reunited with his children) from Mal’s shade. We’re never told if it was Mal who informed Saito that he was dreaming, or if he’d known all along, but we can bet that Mal told Saito some other things about Cobb. It would also explain why Saito specifically told Cobb to "take a leap of faith": Mal, a projection of Cobb's subconscious, would likely use phrases that Cobb assosiated with her, and Saito may have picked up on the fact that it would be significant to Cobb.
In the end, everyone gets what they deserve. Eames, Arthur and Yusuf finish the job and presumably get their money. Ariadne's faith in Cobb is renewed. Cobb gets his children back. Fischer, an innocent, wakes up with a new positive outlook on his life. And Saito, whose motive was greed the whole time, earns decades in limbo to atone for it and wakes up wiser.
It may seem strange that Saito would change his mind and decide to go with Cobb's team for an inception. After all, Saito wasn't fooled by the dreams. However, once Nash and Cobb lay it on him that they aren't in Saito's dream, they're in Nash's dream, it has a profound effect on Saito's opinion. Because Nash was the dreamer, the projections were going to attack him, not Saito. The extraction team was putting themselves in danger, not Saito. Any other extraction team would have put the target on the dreamer to make things easier, but Cobb and his team took an extra risk in order to keep the client safe, proving both that they were professionals and that they had a moral backbone. That's why Saito was so impressed.
Lots of comparisons have been made between the concept of making dreams and of making movies, which makes sense when you think about it, because the dream levels are a lot like video game levels. They are limited in size, but are designed to feel larger and or like part of a larger world, and often have their own strange or seemingly inane rules. Inception's dreams are more like a story FPS, full of a bunch of spawned, somewhat mindless creatures, attempting to kill the "main characters" entering the world.
Also, Cobb's explanation about how the dreamer's mind fills in details that the architect left out sounds a lot like the ELIZA effect, another key concept in game design, in which virtual simulations can appear to be a lot more life-like than they are.
It might seem strange that despite being militarized, Fischer's projections were all graduates of the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy. In fact, the unarmed Zerg Rushes of other people's untrained projections were far more effective. However, Fischer is just the CEO of some corporation. His subconscious can't hit the broad side of a barn because he doesn't have any weapons training.
It's also possible that Robert isn't a naturally aggressive person, despite his attempts to play his father's role as a ruthless corporate tycoon. This would account for his belief that his father was disappointed in him, as well as his subconscious projections' poor marksmanship.
It's worth noting that trying the drugging agent in Yusuf's basement is the last time we see Cobb try the totem, and he ended up not seeing if it worked because it fell off the counter right when Saito walked in. If the whole thing really is a dream, it's most likely that Cobb is dreaming in Yusuf's basement.
Arthur and Ariadne's totems are very similar—both are game pieces (die/chess piece) that work as totems because they are weighted differently (Arthur's die is loaded/Ariadne's chess piece is hollowed out). Since Arthur is the one who explained what a totem was to Ariadne, she would naturally pattern hers after his.
It makes sense that the extraction team (plus Saito) go into the dream level in order to plan how to incept Robert Fischer: a busy CEO like Saito wouldn't have had the time to attend their meetings in the real world, whereas they have ample time in the dream level.
The music that plays during the climax of the is actually a note for note reproduction of a slowed down "Je ne Regrette Rien", the song they use to warn dreamers that they're about to be kicked. If that wasn't fridgey enough, it plays at the same time "Je ne Regrette Rien" would be playing two layers above Dom, who's in a significantly faster time frame than the song.
It might seem rather convenient that Mal's father happens to a professor of architecture. However, that's probably why she was such a good architect—she already had a family background in building design.
Not to mention Cobb was one of his students, which is (presumably) how he met Mal, and definitely how he got into shared dreaming.
A running joke of Eames' during the film is that Arthur has "no imagination," but during their mission, Arthur managed to come up with one of the most inventive ideas to defy the loss of gravity.
Some people have accused Mal of not being well-developed. But the thing is, she's supposed to be that way, because she's just Cobb's projection of her. He said outright that due to being projections, shades aren't as complex as a real person.
In the first "collapsing dream" scene, right before water floods everything, the place feels strangely empty. Have all the hostile projections been killed by falling debris? No. They disappeared from that dream when Saito woke up.
Mal's totem had a special property (keep spinning) which can only be noticed in a DREAM. Arthur and Ariadne's totem had special properties (weighted/hollowed out) which can only be noticed in REALITY.
Why is Saito still sane after living through Limbo? Because he's a respected Japanese man, and he has a promise to keep. Honor and keeping a promise are very important for such a person. A Japanese man keeps his promises- that's why you don't need a guarantee in Japan. Because of this, Saito enters Limbo with a though that stabilize his mind: "I died in a dream, I'm deeper in this dream, but when I wake up I have to fulfil a promise." He was also prepared for this by his earlier conversation with Cobb.
Going off of the theory about Inception being a metaphor for film-making, a lot of Dom's conversations with Ariadne take on a whole new meaning, when you consider that she's essentially his screenwriter. Nearly everything that Dom tells her about designing dreams can basically be translated to a piece of advice about writing.
The scene where she learns about paradoxical structures is really about Willing Suspension of Disbelief in storytelling. She learns that some inherently impossible things are possible in dreams because the laws of physics can be bent (though not blatantly broken) in dreams when it suits the architect's purposes.
The scene where Dom advises her on using her own memories and experiences to build dreams is about Write What You Know, and its limitations. Dom chastises her for modeling an entire section of the city landscape on the route that she takes to school, telling her that it's always a mistake to try to recreate entire locations from your own memories in dreams—just like it's a mistake to try to recreate whole occurrences from your own life in your fiction, even though you have to use your own experiences as a starting point.
The scene where Dom cautions her against abusing her reality-warping powers (since it attracts the attention of the subconscious) is about continuity in plots and world-building. In theory, every writer has completely omniscient power over the worlds that he creates—but audiences won't accept stories set in that world if the writer doesn't consistently follow his own rules and make conclusions that follow logically from established plot points.
The scene where she encounters Dom's projection of Mal for the first time is about her discovering the role that one's personal demons can play in one's art. After Dom tells her never to build dreams entirely from memories, Dom admits that Mal is always influencing his dreams in some way—just like writers' stories are often influenced by their most painful memories, whether or not they want to be influenced by them.
In the scene where Dom tests her by asking her to draw a maze (stipulating that it must take the average person more than two minutes to solve), he's essentially testing her ability to tell a story without making its ending and twists immediately obvious. After all, no one's going to buy a book (or watch a movie) if they can immediately guess how its story is going to end.
"I'll tell you a riddle. You're waiting for a train, a train that will take you far away. You know where you hope this train will take you, but you don't know for sure. But it doesn't matter. How can it not matter to you where that train will take you?"—The answer that Mal produces is "Because we'll be together" (they'll be together wherever the train takes them). A more conventional answer might be because it's a train of thought.
The entire inception process, if you work out the time dilation, took place in a fraction of a second of real time, Fisher's life was literally changed in an instant. (I've heard that expression a few times, but in this case, it actually applies.)
If you subscribe to the theory that Inception is about filmmaking, and the projections/marks are the audience, then Cobb's Mr. Charles gambit is Lampshading. Arthur disapproves because he calls attention to the fact that it's a dream, especially strange or incongruent aspects of the dream, and on This Very Wiki the definition of Lampshade Hanging is to call attention to something that threatens Willing Suspension of Disbelief, rather than trying to hide it. The purpose is to get the mark to trust Cobb - and really, isn't one of the best ways to make a moment in a film seem more meaningful to play up something obviously camp or silly in contrast first?
Even better, consider this; revealing themselves and their situation to the mark means they're attempting to fake a Proscenium Reveal, a la Dark City or The Matrix. That carries with it an incredible risk of Breaking the Fourth Wall, which instantly ruins everything but comedies.
If you were one of the folks upset by the ambiguous nature of the film's ending, there's a reason not to be; according to a theory out there it isn't ambiguous at all, provided you don't believe that everything, including the real world, was part of a dream as well. Said theory states that the top is not actually Cobb's totem, (which is obvious in hindsight, as the movie flat out tells us it was Mal's) and that it was actually his wedding ring that was his totem, and that if you pay careful attention, you see that he wears it while he is in the dream world, but not when he's awake. And at the end of the movie where he goes to meet his children, he's not wearing it.
If you consider the members of Cobb's crew to be metaphorical stand-ins for members of a filmmaking crew (Cobb as the director, Arthur as the producer, Ariadne as the writer, Eames as the leading man, Saito as the studio executive, etc.), there's a subtle in-joke about special effects technicians in the character of Yusuf, who designs the sedative that puts everyone to sleep. Yusuf is a Non-Action Guy who generally stays in the background and has little say in how The Plan comes down—but as the Chemist, he uses his technical expertise to ensure that the elaborate illusion of the dream isn't broken by Fischer suddenly waking up and realizing that it wasn't real. And in one rather memorable scene, he uses his driving skills to evade Fischer's subconscious in an awesome car chase, only to realize that—to his dismay—the others were sedated and didn't even notice his moment of glory. In the movie business, this is often said to be the eternal curse of special effects technicians: the audience never even notices their best work, since their best work is supposed to be indistinguishable from reality, and it keeps the audience focused on the story and characters.
Saito is worried that Fischer's company will become a global energy monopoly that no one can compete against. He is rich and powerful enough to take care of Dom's murder charges with a single call, and to buy an airline off-hand. If someone like that is worried about someone else getting too much power...
Combine this with the first entry, and it leads you to wonder what would happen to the world if both major power companies were dissolved almost simultaneously. But would that be a good thing or a bad thing ...or both?
There has been a lot going on about the ending and whether it was real or not. If it was a dream, it would necessitate Cobb being drugged up for an extended period of time. The Big-Lipped Alligator Moment with all the dreamers in Yusuf's basement seems more like a Foreshadowing in light of that.
A similar Fridge Horror to the above: While the "real life" ending is perceived as the good ending, it's actually the worst if you think about it: Cobb has been on mental anguish for a good number of years, his children will never know what happened to their mother and lost their father for that period of time (or worse, if they did learn about what their mother's fate), Fischer is going to live a life based on a lie, Nash is presumably dead, and Saito, a man who bought an entire Airliner company as well as clear Cobb of murder charges now has free reign over the financial world. If Mal was right, Cobb would eventually wake up in the end and think it was all just a bad nightmare. All those people would at least still presumably be alive, his wife and children wouldn't have suffered through all of that, and he'd probably forget it within 12 hours.
After realizing Mal was Cobb's projection, this troper was somewhat troubled by the fact that Mal shot Arthur in the knee...
Cobb's projection of Mal does whatever she can to sabotage Cobb, tearing up his schemes and jobs and causing pain to everyone around him, an expression of his self-loathing. She shot Arthur because it was exactly what Cobb didn't want her to do.
This troper's interpretation of Mal is that she was what Cobb imagined Mal would be like, if she were still alive. Any projection could be his self-loathing; she was different. She didn't hate him because he hated himself, she hated him because he thought she would blame him for her death. Which means that he imagined that she would want to torture Arthur, for whatever reason.
I interpret her as his subconscious guilt over "murdering" Mal by making her believe the world isn't real, and that she comes in the shape of a murderous, crazed, obsessive shade of his wife that upsets all his plans in shared-dreaming and urges him to fall back into Limbo/die because subconsciously, he believes that's what he deserves and that's what he should have done, so they could be together. She's very little like the real Mal because she's an expression of a single regret/desire felt by Cobb and thus one-dimensional (pretty much only repeats his own words back at him, violent and cruel, can't be reasoned with, focuses on Cobb and only Cobb unless injuring someone else will make things worse for him, only brings up their children as a carrot to dangle over him, etcetera). But she's all he has left of her, so he preserves her just to assure himself that as long as she's in his dreams she didn't really die - and thus prolongs his punishment at her/his own hands with his denial. Anyway, she shot Arthur to get at Cobb, knowing seeing Arthur in pain would hurt Cobb too and screw up his plan. Cobb's pretty messed up, but his subconscious hates him, not Arthur or Ariadne or Fischer. They get hurt by her if it hurts Cobb, too, that's all.
Some people have said that Mal might've been right, and Cobb is really still dreaming. Which begs the question; why wouldn't she come back, or give him the kick to wake him up? The answer? She wouldn't. She'd just keep killing herself, even when she reached the top, unable to distinguish between the dream and reality.
Why would she come back at all? If she got kicked out of the dream, it'd be what? A few hours before Cobb woke up? You are only in a dream for a long time, because of the time distortion of dreams within dreams. In the real world she could get breakfast, send her kids to school, get groceries, and come back to say, "I told you so." It might still be a dream, but Mal is definitely not the real part.
Unless all that was just a dream too. Alternately, I'd be trying to get my best beloved out as fast as possible. You don't want your husband spending what might be years without you, thinking you're dead.
After the first shared dream experience Ariadne angrily leaves with no intention to return. However, Dom tells Arthur: "She'll be back. Reality won't be enough for her now". They are deliberately hooking this young girl on a drug, knowing she won't have other choice but to return to them for another dose!
And of course, this must be exactly how it was with Cobb himself and Mal... He's really talking about himself (in the past at least), not Ariadne.
"They come here to wake up. For them the dream has become reality. Who are you to say otherwise?" At first glance it seems that Ariadne just whisked Dom out of limbo but given what the old man said, Ariadne and Dom and Saito were lucky to get out of limbo.
Paranoia Fuel: An underground network of thieves going around stealing ideas from your head? In you dreams? Everyone's worried about their "million-dollar ideas" getting stolen from them, and who's to say it hasn't happened like this? Think about it - sure, that one dream was weird, but you really have to put time and effort to train yourself to remember those dreams. And if it was All Just a Dream, it makes the perfect cover to steal an idea. And then there's the eponymous inception. Difficult, for sure, but the guys can fundamentally give you any idea they want you to have. Imagine this process being done by the government. What's more, the right idea in the right mind can fundamentally screw up that person forever, turning them into an idealist at best, and a fully-fledged psychopath at worst. They could come any time, any moment. Dozed off? Slipped into a daydream? It might have been them. Sweet dreams!
Cobb's success in his inception mission doesn't just mean a fat paycheck and a tearful reunion — it also means that he's definitively proved that inception (read: undetectable brainwashing) is possible, and that it can be done by anyone with access to dream-sharing technology. How do you think the rest of the world's dream-thieves are going to take this revelation? Cobb and Saito may have had good intentions in incepting Fischer, but can everyone in the criminal underworld be expected to use inception responsibly?
Which was done by the best of the best in their field and even then, they almost didn't succeed. The amount of time and effort they put in and the resources needed (buying an airline to access their mark) is probably beyond your average dream thieves. It's unlikely that they will reveal that inception is possible or how they did it. Cobb is done with extracting, Ariadne actually has a conscience, Arthur seems like a decent enough guy, same with Eames, and Saito has no reason reveal that inception is possible or else it may reveal he did it to a business rival.
While most dream thieves probably wouldn't have the resources necessary to pull off anything on the scale of the Fischer Job, the U.S. government definitely would (remember, dream-sharing was developed by the military). Let's hope Uncle Sam won't be tempted to abuse inception...
When Arthur discusses the origins of dream-sharing with Ariadne, one of the few concrete details we get is that it was originally developed by the military for training exercises. How else do you think the military might have used dream-sharing technology — which makes it possible to effortlessly steal information from targets' minds? Now that Dom has proved that inception is possible, what kind of havoc could the military wreak if they used it against America's enemies abroad?
Another idea that the team probably accidentally incepts on Robert is the distrust of Browning. It's clear from the get go that he trusts him completely, and considers him family... but as Eames jokingly says, they're repairing Robert's relationship with his father by destroying the relationship with Browning. But by the second layer, Robert is convinced "Uncle Peter" is trying to get him.
Except for the part where he clearly trusts Browning on level 1, and only seems to remember the idea that he needs to be his own man. Just like he can't remember the details of the hospital room.
Eames actually stated that they were "exposing the godfather's true nature". He may have been joking but bear in mind that Eames had been very close to Browning while preparing for the job and had stated earlier both that Browning was becoming more powerful as Maurice became more ill and that the "vultures" were circling (which could well have been a reference to Browning). Perhaps convincing Fischer that Browning is not entirely trustworthy isn't that bad an outcome.
The newspaper articles implying that Browning resents Robert for taking "his" job certainly suggest that there was actually something going on there, whether Robert knew about it or not.
When Cobb recruits Eames for the job in Mombasa, Eames says, "[Inception] is perfectly possible, it's just bloody difficult." However, we're also shown that no one except Cobb (and later Ariadne) know that Cobb performed inception on Mal, so Eames can't be referring to that. So, does this mean that Eames performed inception on someone?
Might be theoretically possible, but as far as he knew no one had actually done it.
Yes, it sounded like although Eames failed when he tried to perform inception, he still got close enough that he believed it was possible.
Dream sharing relies on the architect to build the dream and the subject to populate it with their subconscious. This potentially lends itself to all sorts of... interesting applications in every field of business from simple therapy to the oldest profession. Now suppose your target or dreamer has a serious mental disorder or something similar before you go inside now you've just openly unleashed their subconscious and you're trapped inside with it.
At least you know that you may kill yourself if things go really awry, and be done with it. Unless your client and subject suddenly announces that they're using heavy sedation... and then you're screwed.
We know that Mal's time spent in Limbo, and the sudden knowledge/remembrance that everything she'd experienced in there was in fact a dream, led to her believing that reality was also a dream. Cobb and Mal woke up by killing themselves, and once they reached reality, Mal committed suicide because she thought that she would simply "wake up" again. Now think of Saito. He spent just as long in Limbo, possibly even longer due to how aged he looks, and Cobb's reappearance suddenly triggers the memory that it was all a dream. How do Cobb and Saito wake up from this dream? Presumably shooting themselves with the gun that was on the table. So now Saito has been trapped in Limbo for decades (as he perceives it), shocked with the knowledge that it is all a dream, and killed himself in the dream in order to wake up and return to reality. Is Saito going to go down the same route as Mal?
The big difference is that Mal was forced to take on the idea that the world wasn't real; Cobb had given her the idea in an inception, and, as he says, it grew until it completely consumed her. Saito had no such inception—while he may have some lingering trauma, he won't fall into the same depths of madness that Mal did.
Not to mention that Saito had the whole agreement-honoring pledge to anchor his perceptions; he just needed to be reminded of it.
Fischer has such a blase attitude when he gets kidnapped. Most people when they get kidnapped would be horrified, frightened and desperate. But Fischer blows off the kidnappers easily, calmly offering his money and not caring about what happens. This makes sense if he's been kidnapped before in order to threaten his father. Which begs the question, how often has he been kidnapped before? How many times must a person be kidnapped before they get this blase about it? How young was Fischer when he was first kidnapped?
Possibly he didn't actually think he was being kidnapped in the first few seconds. He thought he was being robbed. That's why he held out his wallet, expecting them to grab it (and "Mr. Charles's" too perhaps) and leave.
He seems to have it figured out by the time they get him out of the cab and into the warehouse, and yet he's still calm, almost bored. He only starts to panic once he realizes they have Browning.
He's had training in how to deal with dream invaders, so it's very likely that he's had extensive training in "how to behave when you are kidnapped" in real life as well.
Kidnapping preparedness training is common for celebrities and the extremely wealthy, and their families. Robert may well have been considered a potential kidnapping target from a very young age because of his father and trained for this most of his life.
Or his calm reaction is due to it being a dream. Even before you realize you're dreaming, your reactions to such don't always make sense. Thus, he could have just been feeling unpanicked due to his subconscious sensing he's just in a weird dream.
Later, when Dom puts a gun to his head and demands the first six numbers that pop into his head, he's not calm, exactly, but he refuses to say anything. He clearly thinks it's a credible threat, because he starts talking the second Dom turns the gun on "Browning," but he doesn't say anything when it's his own life on the line. That seems like the reaction of a person who's been threatened, or at least knows that it's very possible that someone will pull a gun on them at some point, and has prepared himself for it.
Gets into Tearjerker territory when you consider that the crew pulled all of this the day after Robert's father died, on the plane escorting his body back for the funeral. At that moment, intensely conflicted by grief and past issues with his dad, he may well have been okay with a bullet to the head.
Near the end of the film, the team rides up the kicks to get to the first level. Cobb said that since the plane flight was 10 hours, they would stay in the first level for a week and that they would not be able to last a week against Fischer's subconscious. And yet, it isn't explained how they get back to the plane. Given, since they have already performed the Inception, and changed Fischer's mind, that might explain why they're not all in Limbo, but then what do they do with all that time?
supporting this idea.