I had a similar thought when I saw your title. How about this plot hole: the idea that you can put little suction cups on your arm and a pair of headphones connected to a sinister looking brief case, fall asleep, and then enter the other guy's dream. That could only be plausible to an unconscious person.

by hazmat on 09/02/2010 04:59:02 PM EST

Why did they go to so many extremes when the Asian guy could have easily "whacked" the magnate's son and his top advisors/ management crew? Wouldn't that have dented the corporation as badly or worse than planting an idea in his mind? Wouldn't it be 50 times easier?

Maybe I missed the explanation because the Asian actor's voice was so difficult to understand sometimes.

by FlaccidMember on 09/02/2010 05:36:23 PM EST

to a certain degree it is okay to expect from the audience to have its disbelief suspended during a sci-fi flick. obviously we're operating in high-fantasy here.

i liked the movie a lot and i don't think there are any thoroughly disturbing plotholes in inception..

but what i do not accept is the "it's ALL a dream from start to finish" aka matrix within a matrix bullshit-explanation. that'd make the whole thing forgettable for me.

so presuming black and white parts of the movie left me with a few questions :

1. if the dreamer's body's sense of gravity changes and it alters the gravity in their dream, why then does the van's free fall only alter arthur's gravity in the hotel?
Shouldn't the rest of the team suddenly become weightless in the snow covered mountainside (and below)?

2. how did mal and cobb end up in limbo the first time?
entering limbo is clearly not the normal threat when in a dream (or even a dream within a dream), but it is a threat to cobb and his team during their fischer Inception because they're 'too far under'.

3. how does one wake up from limbo?
we know you enter limbo by dying while in a sedated dream, but it seems like it's really not that big of a deal to actually get out of limbo; you just have to die again.
if it's that simple, why is limbo such a threat? how can it ever cause someone's brain to scramble?
we just have to assume that one's grip on reality (their awareness that they're in a dream) has to survive long enough for the sedative to wear off. at that point, death will have the same "awakening" effect that it has in a normal dream. however, one may lose their grip while waiting for the sedative to happen, which is the real threat. what happens if you die in limbo before the sedative wear's off?

4. if portions of the film are real and saito is really a key player in the same energy industry as fischer, shouldn't fischer have recognized saito?
rather unbelievable that two people could become titans of the same industry and not know who one another are, so conceivably fischer should have recognized saito first aboard the plane, and secondly in the hotel within dream level 2 (the appearance of a corporate rival would presumably have shattered the illusion of the mr. charles gambit).
for someone who is rich enough to brag on multiple occasions about how expensive his wallet is, you can assume that fischer lives in an upper echelon of life inhabited by equally extravagant individuals and thus would be aware of a man like saito, who is powerful enough and rich enough to buy the airline he always flies.

5. how does the drug make everyone share 1 dream?
a drug inducing the dream state and the machine that pumps the drug into your arm is cool, but how does it connect you to another dream?

6. why does ellen page create a world where the only way you can make a couple of people fall backwards is by blowing up an entire fortress under heavy fire? i'm slightly kidding here.

7.i'm not really into watching it again though i enjoyed it a lot so maybe i missed a detail or an explanation but isn't arthur able to:
A) fight off a man in zero gravity.
B) wrap the entire crew in wire.
C) set the explosives off in the elevator shaft.
--> all within the "3 minutes" he was supposed to have?
he was in the 2nd dream world, which was supposed to last 20 times longer than the first dream world... they said they had 10 seconds from the music playing on the first dream world, that gives arthur a little over 3 minutes, and the rest of the crew an hour (?)

now that i think about it..
8.when cobb was in limbo, his wife stabbed him in the chest. they leave cobb to find the last crew member who was sent to limbo. somehow, cobb is able to leave limbo (it is not said or shown at all how) and enter saito's limbo. now, had cobb died, he would have simply gotten a "kick" out of limbo. how did he enter another limbo?

9. we're told, point-blank, that the sedative is designed to "spare" the inner ear, thus making "the kick" a viable key to recovery, even under chemical influence. if so, then any disturbance of the subject's physical body-ANY sensation of falling, tipping, or sliding-should be sufficient to produce an awakening.
we're shown this during the sequence where the sedation is first explained: arthur is pushed backwards in his chair, and then tipped over sideways, startling awake in both instances-each time, before the chair reaches a 45-degree angle to the floor.
so WHY, then, when the van careens through the traffic barrier and flips over four times in the dirt, spilling the sleeping subjects all over the backseat (seatbelts or no), doesn't anyone wake up?
a question of impact??
after all, in the opening sequence, Cobb doesn't awaken until after he breaches the surface of the bath water, and all of the other instances of "kick" we're shown in the film involve a collision between subject and object. yet in the first sedation sequences, when arthur is being tipped out of the chair, he seems to startle almost as soon as his body is set into motion, his arms and legs in action before his center of gravity even passes a point of no return, dyou know what i mean?

though the real letdown for me was cilian murphy... i hate his face on the screen in every goddamn movie.

btw. wanna know where nolan got the idea for inception from? http://i.imgur.com/xyhNj.jp g
a Scrooge McDuck comic - "The Beagle Boys have entered the mansion of Scrooge McDuck while he is asleep and set plan to invade his dream with the use of a machine to ask him the combinations of the vault door".

patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it. - mark twain

by EauDeCologne on 09/02/2010 06:50:49 PM EST

Inception was full of plot holes, as some have already pointed out.

I went in to it having heard all the rave reviews, and I gotta say I was more than a little disappointed. Sure there were some nice action sequences, but that was about it. The plot didn't really make sense, and the ending was entirely predictable.

by khon on 09/02/2010 09:15:13 PM EST

At one point they flash back to an elderly Cobb and Mal walking hand in hand through the world they created in limbo, showing how they grew old together in the dream. However, when it's revealed how they eventually got out of limbo (the train), they look young. What then was the timeline in limbo?

by Stonefury on 09/02/2010 09:29:11 PM EST

by tommycurse on 09/03/2010 03:38:08 AM EST