7 ms·

Here is something that most people missed: Reality was a dream the whole time. There are hints throughout the movie, but the entire thing was a dream. Most peop

Here is something that most people missed: Reality was a dream the whole time. There are hints throughout the movie, but the entire thing was a dream. Most people point to the wedding ring theory as evidence that it wasn't, but that just shows the lead's state of mind, not reality.

jerf 15y ago
Word of God is that this is not true and that the top level of reality was indeed reality. The camera panning away from the spinning top before it fell down was supposed to represent that Cobb is now dedicated to his children and no longer worried about whether it's reality, not a low-class cheap mindscrew about whether it's all a dream or not. Note that having the whole thing be a dream completely drains it of all interesting dramatic tension, turning an interesting movie into one in which nothing (or very little) is at stake and nothing really happens for any particular reason. (Remember, if the whole movie is a dream there's no longer any reason to believe his wife is waiting one level up.) It's an awfully stiff price to pay for a painfully dull, obvious twist.
- mortenjorck 15y ago
  The cut away from the totem was simply the film's final inception: a seed of doubt in the viewer's mind.
  - egypturnash 15y ago
    IMHO the whole film IS an inception: it's planting the "wait what if MY LIFE is all a dream" idea in the viewer's mind.
  - AndreiVajnaII 15y ago
    I agree - kind of a cheap magic trick if you ask me...
- muhammadatt 15y ago
  This seems to be an overly simplified take. If Nolan had intended to make it clear that the final scene was indeed reality then he could have just as well shown the totem falling while Cobb walked away. It seems pretty clear that Nolan explicitly intended to leave it up to the viewer to decide what was "real" and what as not. This ambiguity between dream and reality is one of the most important themes in the film - Cobb spends the entire movie preoccupied with keeping track of reality, to the point that one could argue that Cobb's had been incepted to remain obsessed with identifying reality to the same degree that Mal had been incepted to perpetually believe that she was dreaming. When Cobb sees Mal in limbo at the end, she also makes point explicit - pointing out that Cobb has simply chosen to believe that his children "up there" are what is real and that Mal "down there" is not. The final scene preserves this ambiguity, while underscoring the fact that the obsession with reality is no longer important to Cobb - he is finally at peace with where he is - real or not.
  - jerf 15y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inception#Ending http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inception#Ending - Nolan himself noted that "I choose to believe that Cobb gets back to his kids, because I have young kids. People who have kids definitely read it differently than those who don't". Good enough for me. You're still right he meant to leave it up to the viewer, but it completely destroys the rest of the movie if everything is a dream. People want to play games with the rules the movie presented and hypothesize about the whether Mal is in the "level above"... but everything we think we know about the rules comes from that level. We learn about the multi-layer inception, the wife, the concept of limbo, everything in the movie, on that level. If it's all a dream, then there's no target to the obsession in the first place, no children, no wife, nothing. Incidentally, note I'm sort of making a metapoint... if Nolan came out and said "Yes, it was all a dream" I would accept it. But it would still dramatically destroy the movie. I'm also sort of hostile to the "all just a dream" idea, whereever it appears in fiction, because it's redundant. It's already just a dream, a movie, a book, a TV show, whatever. It's already not real. Saying that in the context of the not-real work of fiction the entire story was also not-real is silly. (Note the word "entire".) It started at the maximum level of not-realness from the very first word or frame. And it's a short trip from there to the Bergman/Braga incoherent style of ass-pull storytelling. (Or Tennant-era Doctor Who.)

jerf 15y ago

Word of God is that this is not true and that the top level of reality was indeed reality. The camera panning away from the spinning top before it fell down was supposed to represent that Cobb is now dedicated to his children and no longer worried about whether it's reality, not a low-class cheap mindscrew about whether it's all a dream or not. Note that having the whole thing be a dream completely drains it of all interesting dramatic tension, turning an interesting movie into one in which nothing (or very little) is at stake and nothing really happens for any particular reason. (Remember, if the whole movie is a dream there's no longer any reason to believe his wife is waiting one level up.) It's an awfully stiff price to pay for a painfully dull, obvious twist.

mortenjorck 15y ago
The cut away from the totem was simply the film's final inception: a seed of doubt in the viewer's mind.
- egypturnash 15y ago
  IMHO the whole film IS an inception: it's planting the "wait what if MY LIFE is all a dream" idea in the viewer's mind.
- AndreiVajnaII 15y ago
  I agree - kind of a cheap magic trick if you ask me...
muhammadatt 15y ago
This seems to be an overly simplified take. If Nolan had intended to make it clear that the final scene was indeed reality then he could have just as well shown the totem falling while Cobb walked away. It seems pretty clear that Nolan explicitly intended to leave it up to the viewer to decide what was "real" and what as not. This ambiguity between dream and reality is one of the most important themes in the film - Cobb spends the entire movie preoccupied with keeping track of reality, to the point that one could argue that Cobb's had been incepted to remain obsessed with identifying reality to the same degree that Mal had been incepted to perpetually believe that she was dreaming. When Cobb sees Mal in limbo at the end, she also makes point explicit - pointing out that Cobb has simply chosen to believe that his children "up there" are what is real and that Mal "down there" is not. The final scene preserves this ambiguity, while underscoring the fact that the obsession with reality is no longer important to Cobb - he is finally at peace with where he is - real or not.
- jerf 15y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inception#Ending http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inception#Ending - Nolan himself noted that "I choose to believe that Cobb gets back to his kids, because I have young kids. People who have kids definitely read it differently than those who don't". Good enough for me. You're still right he meant to leave it up to the viewer, but it completely destroys the rest of the movie if everything is a dream. People want to play games with the rules the movie presented and hypothesize about the whether Mal is in the "level above"... but everything we think we know about the rules comes from that level. We learn about the multi-layer inception, the wife, the concept of limbo, everything in the movie, on that level. If it's all a dream, then there's no target to the obsession in the first place, no children, no wife, nothing. Incidentally, note I'm sort of making a metapoint... if Nolan came out and said "Yes, it was all a dream" I would accept it. But it would still dramatically destroy the movie. I'm also sort of hostile to the "all just a dream" idea, whereever it appears in fiction, because it's redundant. It's already just a dream, a movie, a book, a TV show, whatever. It's already not real. Saying that in the context of the not-real work of fiction the entire story was also not-real is silly. (Note the word "entire".) It started at the maximum level of not-realness from the very first word or frame. And it's a short trip from there to the Bergman/Braga incoherent style of ass-pull storytelling. (Or Tennant-era Doctor Who.)