Inception/YMMV

Ariadne: Who would want to stay in a dream for ten years? Yusuf: Depends on the dream.

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Is Saito simply a Corrupt Corporate Executive trying to sabotage the competition, someone who sees the threat of transnational monopoly and is willing to be a little Necessarily Evil to counter it, or both?
  • Can we really conclude that Dom killed Mal? Yes and no.
  • Did Saito con the con-man? Is Dom the real target of inception?
    • Definitely. He has the same type of realization regarding his wife that Fisher has regarding his father and his inheritance, i.e. they both explicitly state what they have just learned.
  • Are the main characters themselves Villain Protagonists simply out for a payday, or in Dom's case, a chance to reclaim a normal life.
• Award Snub: Has been nominated for Best Picture, Director, and Screenplay at the Golden Globes, but no nominations for acting (leading or supporting).
  • And it lost each of those to The Social Network (even Best Original Score!).
  • And now that the Oscars are out...Nolan wasn't nominated for Best Director (yet still managed to nab Best Picture and Best Screenplay nods) while Lee Smith wasn't nominated for Best Editing.
    • True, but it did win best sound editing, best sound mixing, best cinematography and best visual effects. The only other film to win as much was The King's Speech.
  • During the MTV Movie Awards, it lost Best Jaw-Dropping Moment (to Justin Bieber's Never Say Never), Best Kiss (to Twilight), Best Fight (to Twilight again), Best Line From a Movie (to Grown Ups, of all movies), and Best Movie (to...wait for it... Twilight). Fans were not happy.
    • Those fans should probably be told that the target audiences of the MTV Movie Awards and films like Inception don't have a lot of overlap.
• Crowning Music of Awesome: Mind Heist, the trailer music is epically awesome.
  • Hans Zimmer's score counts as well
• Ear Worm:
  • In a really creepy way.
  • Bwong!, this sound my friend, is evil incarnate
  • One of these Earworms is actually derived from the other one. When you hear it, you'll shit bricks... It's implied that this music is in the movie because the characters are hearing it, distorted by the time dilation.
• Ensemble Darkhorse: We could pretty much call this movie a case of a Darkhorse Casting. Every member of the team has fans and is considered awesome in one way or another.
  • But for a more specific example, before this film Tom Hardy was only particularly well known in the UK. US filmgoers, if they had heard of him at all, would probably only know him as being the Big Bad in Star Trek Nemesis, which was a critical and commercial bomb. This film kickstarted his American film career by the sounds of it - he's been linked to quite a few films since Inception's release.
• Fan Nickname:
  • "Team Inception"
  • "The Dream Team"
  • Robert Fischer is "Fischer Jr."
    • Which he is only referred to once in passing by Eames
  • Ariadne is a Worldbender!
  • Eames is "the Face", thanks to his filling the same function as the character from The A-Team.
• Fetish Fuel: Ariadne in her business suit and her hair up.
• Fountain of Memes
• Harsher in Hindsight: Robert Fischer's father is dying of a long-term illness and passes away before the Inception begins. Just under seven months after the film was released, the actor (Pete Postlethwaite) lost his second battle with cancer.
  • In the movie itself: The scene with the shared dreamers in Mombasa who have come to see their dream as the reality which they "wake up to." Most stinging when the man watching over them asks Cobb what right he would have to tell them they are wrong. Ouch.
• Hell Is That Noise:
  • BWONG!
  • That odd, sort-of-breathing noise the PASIV makes. There's an extended sequence near the beginning of the film featuring the sound throughout--it's excruciating.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • This video of Joseph Gordon-Levitt on SNL.
  • This video of Ellen Page on SNL.
• Holy Shit Quotient:
  • Several city blocks fold up like a taco!
  • The design of the final area.
  • The variable-gravity fight sequence.
  • The freakin' freight train that comes barreling down the middle of the street out of nowhere.
  • Everyone killing themselves at least 4 times in a row in each successive dream at the last sequence JUST to wake up.
  • The scene where Ariadne is in Cobb's dream, right after she presses the button leading to the proverbial Basement of Cobb's memories. The scene is presented in such a terrifying fashion; the elevator door opens and Ariadne steps into a fancy hotel room...that's been trashed. The background music is gone, and there's absolute silence. Then Ariadne steps on a glass. Then we see Mal. And she's looking at you. The net result of that entire scene can be summed up as Cobb has a grade-S Yandere in his subconscious and she wants to get out.
• Ho Yay: Eames and his "darling" Arthur live and breathe this. Especially on Eames's part.
  • Especially when they're headed into the third level and Eames is getting all concerned about Arthur going up against security. It's amplified by the staging, since Arthur is kneeling by Eames's side and holding his hand. (To hook him up to the PASIV, but still.)
    • Even better in the French dub, where Arthur's answer ("I will lead them on a merry chase") is translated using the adverb gaiement ("gaily"). Yes, it carries the same connotation as in English, nope, it's not commonly used much anymore for that exact reason.
  • Solid example: while Eames is making his way through the hotel in the second dream, disguised as a gorgeous blonde woman, he stops Saito in the elevator and starts stroking his face. Saito looks pleasantly surprised at first, then catches their reflection in the mirrors, sees through the disguise, and reaizes it's not a woman at all. Yeah... he wasn't so pleased then. Before that, Arthur looked like he was checking "her" out, too. I think it's safe to assume - Eames is a cocktease for the lulz.
  • Eames's smirk when he first mentions Yusuf is a bit... suggestive. It's just something about Eames, isn't it?
    • Note that, if IMDB is to be trusted, Tom Hardy is bi in real life. I think some Yaoi Fangirls just went insane with pleasure.
      • It's to be trusted. More details (with a side of Tom Hardy fanboying) can be found here.
  • There's also a teensy bit of this between Cobb and Fischer during the bathroom scene.
  • Cobb and Saito? The whole "grow old together"/"be young men together" parallel is just the beginning of their subtext.
  • And for the girls, Mal walking close to Ariadne and asking her if she knows what it's like to be a lover. It Makes Sense in Context, but...
• Hype Backlash
• Launcher of a Thousand Ships: Arthur, if the kink meme page and fanfiction.net are to be believed. The usual suspects are (in descending order) Eames (Darlingshipping), Ariadne, Eames and Ariadne, and Cobb. Mal, Saito, and occasionally Robert Fischer too, though that's less common.
• Magnificent Bastard: Saito. In the prequel comic, it's revealed that The Cobol Job was an attempt to get information from Saito's corporation, in an effort to keep Fischer's energy monopoly together. It appears that in actuality, this was all Saito's plan to lure Cobol's best and brightest to him, so he could audition them and steal them from under Cobol's noses, and use them to break up the very monopoly Cobol was trying to preserve.
• Memetic Badass: Fandom has very rapidly turned Saito into one of these.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • [blank]CEPTION. Anything that has something within something will fill in the blank.
  • Bwong! It's been getting the image macro treatment as well.
  • Thanks to the application of Older Than They Think, Paprika = Inception: The Anime, A Nightmare on Elm Street = Inception: The Gorefest, etc.
  • "I bought (insert item/corporation/nation here). It seemed neater" has become mildly memetic in Inception fanfics, usually the lighter pieces.
  • And then there's...the Leo Strut.
  • How about Eames's use of pet names being dialled Up to Eleven? In the film, he calls Arthur "Darling". Once. With definite irony. But in many fanfics, he not only calls him "Darling" left, right and centre, but also "Love", "Pet" and sometimes "Sweetheart". And he often uses the same pet names for Ariadne (although she gets "Darling" less often because apparently that one belongs to Arthur) and occasionally other characters get pet names too. Sometimes it's almost like he's Spike without the bleached blond hair and vampirism. Unless it's a Vampire!AU fanfic, of course.
  • X within an X.
  • "We need to go deeper." Alternately: "We need to go deeper." "That's what she said."
  • The "Owl Face" Leo squint reaction image comic.
• Mind Game Ship: At times, Cobb and Mal can become this. Especially on Mal's part.
• Moral Event Horizon: Mal's Wounded Gazelle Gambit. She planned to kill herself (though only to "wake up"; she thinks she's dreaming) and convince her husband to go with her. This alone wouldn't be a Moral Event Horizon if not for her method of going about the latter; she told her lawyer that she was fearing for her life, and then trashed the room Cobb was in, just so that if she died and he didn't go with her, everyone would think he killed her. Mal literally framed her own husband for murder, and she doesn't seem to voice the slightest shred of remorse for it. On the other hand, the only reason she did this was because said husband had intentionally brainwashed her in a completely untested bit of manipulation that was believed to be impossible and eventually drove her completely insane - hence, this - it's less horrible than it sounds, especially since she doesn't plan on seeing him ever face the murder charges, and is just asking him to do what she already did. She lay in front of a train when he asked, but evidently that only went one way.
• Paranoia Fuel: Both in the movie and outside the movie.
  • In the movie, the extractors have to be careful not to alert the projections to their presence or they will be physically assaulted, which Ariadne learns the hard way.
  • Outside of the movie, it's a similar problem that people had with The Matrix. What if, at this very second, you are asleep and there are people poking around in your brain searching for secrets? Or maybe you're stuck several layers down in your own dreams, and have forgotten. Maybe your entire "life" has taken place over a few minutes. Eek.
• Ship Tease: A small one between Ariadne and Arthur after the rather humorous Fake-Out Make-Out.
• Straw Man Has a Point: Due to the Twist Ending, Mal may have actually been right about the supposedly 'real' world being All Just a Dream as well, making a significant part of the plot entirely pointless.
  • Hilarious part? She is right.. From a Certain Point of View. Inception is just a movie.
• Tethercat Principle: The last shot of the movie. Maybe.
• The Untwist: Genre Savvy viewers with any kind of familiarity with these kinds of stories should have expected the Twist Ending.
• The Woobie:
  • Fischer Jr. The poor guy doesn't know a damn thing and got dragged into this dreamy mess just because a Japanese businessman wants him to split his company. He got a daddy issue in the real world and then Cobb's team hijacked his mind, injected a (probably) false solution to his daddy issue and made him believe what Saito wants him to believe. Plus, what with the seed of doubt the team planted in him, he will most likely come to distrust his godfather from now on — the only family he has left. It also doesn't hurt by the fact that Fischer is acted by Cillian Murphy.
  • Cobb as well. Living with the guilt and belief that he caused his wife's death, being on the run for being falsely accused of murdering her (though not too far from the truth), probably never getting to see his kids again, and always being tormented by visions of Mal in long-held dreams really makes you want to hug the poor guy.
  • Mal (the living one) as well. She killed herself fully convinced that this would cause her to wake up in the real world, so she could be with her real children again, unaware that this was the real world maybe, and those were her children. And it all happened because her husband underestimated the power of the suggestion he implanted in her mind. Her dream-self however is a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Mal. Yes, she ruined Cobb's life by framing him for her suicide, but this was only because she had spent so much time in the dream world that she was unable to distinguish what was a dream and what was reality. This would lead to her killing herself, convinced that she could wake up into what she perceived as reality. In the end, all she wanted was to go someplace where she could be happy forever.