Merkuri
Explorer
Since there have been a bunch of other things I consider spoilers upthread I won't sblock this.
I'm on the fence about whether the ending means he's still dreaming or not. The children not aging really does it for me (when he spoke with them on the phone they sounded older than that, IMO), but I actually wanted the ending to be ambiguous - I didn't want to be able to come to a conclusion about it. I like it when a film keeps me guessing at the end.
I think, though, that if he really did get stuck in limbo that, in effect, the plane would never land for him. When he was in limbo the first time he spent 50 years there, yet he and his wife woke up on the floor, presumably where they started. I would imagine that if they had actually been locked in limbo in any significant real-world time (like days) that somebody would've come looking for them and they would've woken up in a hospital or something.
The threat of limbo is not so much that it could take away your life, but that it psychologically screws you up so bad that you can't live the rest of your life the same way. I mean, imagine if you live your life, get married, have kids, have grandkids, do your job for years, get old, and then one day you wake up and you find out the last 50 years were just a dream and only a few hours have passed. That's really going to screw you up.
When Cobb was talking about Saito going into limbo, he wasn't worried about Saito not waking up, he was worried about Saito forgetting that they had a deal when he did wake up.
Let's do some math here... Assuming limbo is a fourth-level dream and that the 5 real minutes = 1 dream hour (1:12) ratio applies to each level down, that means that 1 minute of real time equals 12 minutes at the first level, 144 minutes at second level, 1,728 minutes at third level, and 20,736 minutes in limbo. 20,736 minutes is 345.6 hours, or 14.4 days. So a ten hour (600 minutes) real-world flight would be 8,640 days, or 23.7 years. In theory, if Cobb and Saito spent the entire flight in limbo they would have experienced almost 24 years. I got the impression that was longer, though, so maybe that ratio's not quite true in limbo.
If we do that backwards, 50 years (or 18,250 days, or 438,000 hours), in limbo would have been 21.1 hours in real time spent lying on a floor, dreaming. That seems somewhat reasonable. Being missing for less than 24 hours probably wouldn't get the police knocking down your door, but I wonder where their kids were during this time.
The other alternative is that limbo doesn't follow the ratio of a fourth-level dream, but rather that real time just sorta stops for you. You perceive things going on so fast that limbo years go by in a real-world blink, and there's no ratio for it. In essence, you're in limbo for infinity, and the real world just stops ticking by until you find a way to wake up.
I'm on the fence about whether the ending means he's still dreaming or not. The children not aging really does it for me (when he spoke with them on the phone they sounded older than that, IMO), but I actually wanted the ending to be ambiguous - I didn't want to be able to come to a conclusion about it. I like it when a film keeps me guessing at the end.
I think, though, that if he really did get stuck in limbo that, in effect, the plane would never land for him. When he was in limbo the first time he spent 50 years there, yet he and his wife woke up on the floor, presumably where they started. I would imagine that if they had actually been locked in limbo in any significant real-world time (like days) that somebody would've come looking for them and they would've woken up in a hospital or something.
The threat of limbo is not so much that it could take away your life, but that it psychologically screws you up so bad that you can't live the rest of your life the same way. I mean, imagine if you live your life, get married, have kids, have grandkids, do your job for years, get old, and then one day you wake up and you find out the last 50 years were just a dream and only a few hours have passed. That's really going to screw you up.
When Cobb was talking about Saito going into limbo, he wasn't worried about Saito not waking up, he was worried about Saito forgetting that they had a deal when he did wake up.
Let's do some math here... Assuming limbo is a fourth-level dream and that the 5 real minutes = 1 dream hour (1:12) ratio applies to each level down, that means that 1 minute of real time equals 12 minutes at the first level, 144 minutes at second level, 1,728 minutes at third level, and 20,736 minutes in limbo. 20,736 minutes is 345.6 hours, or 14.4 days. So a ten hour (600 minutes) real-world flight would be 8,640 days, or 23.7 years. In theory, if Cobb and Saito spent the entire flight in limbo they would have experienced almost 24 years. I got the impression that was longer, though, so maybe that ratio's not quite true in limbo.
If we do that backwards, 50 years (or 18,250 days, or 438,000 hours), in limbo would have been 21.1 hours in real time spent lying on a floor, dreaming. That seems somewhat reasonable. Being missing for less than 24 hours probably wouldn't get the police knocking down your door, but I wonder where their kids were during this time.
The other alternative is that limbo doesn't follow the ratio of a fourth-level dream, but rather that real time just sorta stops for you. You perceive things going on so fast that limbo years go by in a real-world blink, and there's no ratio for it. In essence, you're in limbo for infinity, and the real world just stops ticking by until you find a way to wake up.
