Why didn't Fischer recognize the people from his dream when he woke up on the plane?

"Cobb's father is key to understanding the movie. In the end it doesn't matter if the top stays up or falls down - Cobb has been coerced to join his father (Caine) in Caine's dream reality. Apply everything you know about Cobb's role to Ariadne, the architect - she brings Cobb to the deepest levels of his dreams/memories, she tells Cobb to trust her with his deepest secrets, she convinces Cobb to shoot Mal. All this after 'an idea' is implanted in Cobb's brain early in the movie - when Saito suggests that he can live his life happily with his children if he does one more job. They also made the point over and over that only the dreamer can populate a dream landscape - his kids and Mal keep showing up. One last hint - after escaping the van Ariadne states "He'll be fine" - because she orchestrated everything, and the rest of the cast (including Fischer) were part of her team, working for Michael Caine's character. There's no conclusion to the 'Level 4' story because he had already parted with Mal - goal accomplished, at which point the rest of the team (on the plane) woke him up"

Well, I'll take my dreams for instance. I'll see something or someone and they'll be featured in my dream just because I saw them for the briefest moment. Probably something like that. I don't really think anything of it though. Didn't he pause and look around too?

Saito takes control of Cobb's totem when Cobb washes up in Saito's limbo. The movie shows him touching the gun, suggesting he shoots the both of them to get them out of limbo and back to reality, but what the movie would not show us in between is Saito immediately putting Cobb back under, and placing him in a "happy ending" dream. There's a bit of a hard cut there and Cobb could be said to be entering in the middle, as in a dream. The rest of the group is probably fucked too, because Saito bought the airline. Easier to send them all into dreamworld in some facility somewhere than send them awake to jail and have them reveal they planted an idea into Fischer. Saito gets what he wants, then fucks everyone over.

Be a dream of Leo. He was creating Mal, and said he could only do a decent job, based off of his memories. So all the people on his team were memories of his, the less he knew them the more shallow they would be.

I really like this theory. I think Nolan was trying to get us to think it was a dream, which is why the movie starts off so fast (as said in the movie, dreams always start in the middle).

But I like the above post. The kids were the real totem. I need to see the last scene again, but maybe someone remembers more clearly: Did Cobb spin the top before or after he saw the kids faces? IIRC, he came home, saw the kids backs, spun the top and saw the kids faces and ran to them.

Reminds me a bit of that scene in The Bourne Identity, where Bourne orchestrates a massive multi-layered coup in a hotel to obtain information while Marie just walks to the front desk and asks for it. Sometimes the simplest answer is correct, even if other pathways look like they'll lead to the same destination. That top spinning in the end might not be an indication of a dream world, but more a test of the audience's faith in the reality of the final scene. We never hear any tension-relieving clank, but we see the top teeter a bit.

Or, from a more cynical point of view, us not seeing the top definitively fall could be seen as a red herring.

I guess I never actively thought about who Caine's character is to Cobb, but he's Mal's father. Perhaps Cobb never told Caine's character what happened. Caine introduces Cobb to Ariadne. Ariadne is a team of her own, there to go into Cobb's mind and find out what happened.

Possible, but I doubt it. Marion's character is clearly French, Caine, not so much.

Caine is in Paris. Caine has custody of Mal's children. Whether you buy this theory or not, Caine's definitely Mal's dad. The grandmother must be French.

I was tired and got wrapped up in the details, but the point was you're not supposed to let someone touch your totem and yet Saito has it in his old man form. There's a really hard cut after he touches the gun, before Cobb wakes up, and I feel like a lot could have happened in there. It seems pretty clear, I think, that the last two minutes of the movie are a dream for some reason -- the kids wearing the same clothes, the light being the same, everything being perfect, etc. And in the real world, at the beginning, Saito shows he's a businessman, not their buddy.

The question is, who could Saito call? Why would Saito's word make a difference? I think it's easier to believe that Saito screwed over Cobb and his team than it is to believe Saito has enough leverage to phone up one person and solve all of Cobb's legal problems.

He washed up on the beach in a daze, and Saito's men grabbed him right away taking his suff. I am pretty sure Cobb didn't have the wits, or time to defend his totem.