Pretty sure the headline makes it clear enough, but I’m gonna go ahead and slap a big ol’ SPOILER ALERT on this one anyway, because Read the full post.
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My absolute favorite thing about this ending is that it’s the kind of open-ended ambiguity that just invites – nay, demands – the viewer to project his or her own personality into its interpretation. (Although Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s hallway fight scene is rather awesome, too.)
The Tagline says “The Dream is Real”. Which makes me think he’s dreaming it but has accepted it as reality. Really, there is no way to know for sure. The trick is to create a mind@#$% ending in such a way that polarizes the public’s opinion. But in reality, there’s no answer. Nolan won’t say. Its ruins the mind@#$%.
Another tagline is “Your mind is the scene of the crime.”
As in, OUR minds.
These are all great points and I think Nolan definitely wanted to leave it open. There are definitely complicating points, like the kids wearing the same clothes and the overall dream-like quality of the movie.
I wanted to find out what the stars thought about the ending, and one of them actually said something to the effect of “Don’t look with your eyes, listen with your ears.” If you find a copy of the final scene, you can hear quietly, but clearly, the sound of the top hitting the table after the scene goes black. That settles it for me!
Remember how Cobb and his wife killed themselves in the railroad?!?! Well the old man killed Cobb and himself almost at the end with the gun…..it was like years for that old guy( don’t remember his name) but it was like 5 or 10 minutes on the plane. Get it!!!!!
so he wasn’t dreaming.
The old guy in limbo is Saito, right? And, they explain in the movie when you are that heavily sedated, being shot won’t bring you out of it. In fact, I thought once you were in “limbo” there was no getting out? Didn’t they say that? So, when Cobb goes to limbo to find Saito, he’s going for good, isn’t he?
But he was once in limbo remember they said that in the movie….Cobb was in limbo once….and I’m guessing with his wife so when they came back was when they killed themselves in the railroad.
Cobb’s still dreaming
1. Ariadne who knows Cobb’s situation the best doesn’t have even a smirk on her face. Reason- its a recreation by Cobb, bassically the best memory/projection of her in his mind.
2. Eames’ shirt when they board the flight (notice when he is blocking Fischer while taking his coat off) is purple whereas its pure black near immigration. Again that’s his perception/projection.
3. The kids r wearing the same clothes and philipa looks the same age although she sounds older in the first call from the hotel in Japan.
4. As for seeing his children’s faces go, in level 4 his projection of Mal was about to show him their faces.shows that the subconscious was going to do it anyway.
5. What were the multiple kicks after say Saigon shoots him in level 4. In level 3, they went into Fischer ‘s subconscious. Who is alreadybawake given the obvious time difference.
A lot more folks..saito and Cobb r dreaming g
Verdict: It’s all a dream
For those of you who have watched Requiem for a Dream, it is a mind bender to question reality vs. well clearly not reality. In all his dreams he envisioned his children in those very same clothes and very same positions and longed to just see their faces. Going back to when he first met his father, it was him he was looking to for a solution to be able to go home. His guilt has been what’s been keeping him from finding his way home. Once he got over his wife and told her how it is, he had to ensure he kept his deal. Once all of those things went into place in his mind, that was all he needed to be able to move on. Whether it was real or not real to him he’s spent enough time in both sides, he had created an ending for himself. Kids could not have been wearing the same clothes, and in the same spot Deja Vu uh uh… not on my watch……
FYI: For all the people who used the argument that there are two different sets of kids in the credits and that this in effect proves he woke up, I have an important detail you missed:
The ages of the boy listed in the credits were 20 months and 3 years. The scene of the boy squatting in the grass I would argues is that of a 3 year old. The boy is also shown on the beach with Mal in Cobb’s elevator of memories (the only place in the movie where the whole family is together) as a baby (versus a toddler in the grass). The 20 month old actor is in this scene, the 3 year old in all the rest.
Thereby suggesting in the final scene that Cobb in fact is still dreaming (especially when you consider all the other corroborating evidence about their clothing, posture, etc…)
ok, first off, LOVED the movie. second, i was firmly in the “he’s dreaming” camp until I looked up the back history on the name Ariadne. As an educated nerd, as i watched the movie I felt like her name had significance–sure enough, a wiki entry had this to say “Ariadne fell in love at first sight (with Theseus), and helped him by giving him a sword and a ball of red fleece thread that she was spinning, so that he could find his way out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth.”
So after that, I believe he was in reality–guided there by his architect and guide, Ariadne who told him to find his way!
Wow!
Good catch!
Thanks for finding that quote, as I had been meaning to look up her name too. But that quote could also support the theory that Ariadne was performing the inception on Dom, and maybe that could also fit with the theory that Mal was right (and trying to get him back to reality).
LOL! what you have actually proven is that the whole movie is Cobb’s dream. Why is would a character who could build mazes be coincidentally called Ariadne, the goddess of the labyrinth!
I think the movie gives proof that he is NOT dreaming in that last scene – remember, they say repeatedly that the way you know you are dreaming is if you can’t explain how you got to where you are. But, in that scene, the explanation is abundantly clear – he woke up on a plane, went through customs, met Alfie at the airport, and was driven home.
But, the author raises a good point – why don’t the kids seem any older? I got the impression he was a fugitive for at least a year or so, and kids grow very fast.
The kids did age. Listen to their voices when he calls them. One was even irritated.
i think part of the reason why so many people think that it was reality at the end was because of the similarity that the movie had to shutter island. i mean, im sure lots of people would think its reality anyway, but after seeing how shutter island completely twisted at the end, and inception had the same feel, its like…you almost kind of expect them to be the same. (im not really sure why exactly i think this way, but reading all the comments and comparing the two stories made it easier for me to see the possibility of him being awake)
Guys… if you think that that whole this was a dream (such as Keltic’s comment in this post)… how has the totem stopped spinning in some of those dreams… shouldn’t it have also been spinning there… so there is reality in that film… and he has reached home because the totem wobbled… whereas it did not when he was near the old man in the limbo… or any other dream….
But the Totem is unreliable now. It used to be Mal’s and that guard touched it when Cobb met Old Saito.
Hi,
Chris Nolan has planted the idea in all our minds that his movie has an ambiguous ending. That is the real inception !!
Njoy!!
Ok so I am unequivocally convinced that Cobb is still dreaming and in some level of unconsciousness that is deeper than he had explainied earlier. Be cause he let go of his guilt he was able to, even though he was dreaming see his kids faces. If you can remember when he went to see Miles at the University, Miles told him that he needed to come back to his kids because essentially his could would no longer remember him and needed him. That and many other scenes lead me to believe that a significant amount of time has elapsed, since he left his children. How is it possible then to come back and have them, not only dressed the same, in the same squating position, but also in the same clothing?! I believe that shows that he was still dreaming, and because he no longer felt responsible for his wife’s death he was able to continue to build to the last piece of reality he had with his children. Which translated into them having faces, but not uch else changing. He preserved there memory just as he had left them, all those years ago. This is just happens to be my smoking gun. I also agree with others who wrote about how Cobb was being stared at, at the airport and how the spin thing kept going.
He was still dreaming.
Consider this: In the base world (where he is reunited with his kids), he has been living in exile in several countries all over the globe. Everyone speaks English. Everywhere. The kind of thing that makes sense in a dream, but would never make sense in the real world.
Moll was trying to explain it to him – that a lifestyle of traveling all over the world, hiding from corporations and hitmen – that it was unrealistic. But Cobb is too deep in limbo to realize it. Moll got out – but it is Cobb who is stuck in a dream world, and who forgot that his dream world wasn’t real. He is the one that abandoned the top, sitting on the table – the same way it was pictured abandoned in a safe.
Nonetheless – this is okay – because the message of the film was that it doesn’t matter whether the dream world is real or not; because he is happy there. Moll was trying to save him from the illusion – and if that’s true, perhaps she is still alive in the “real” world. Or more to the point, the world that exists one level up from the world where Cobb was reunited with his kids.
LEO’S FANTASTIC DREAM DURING FAMILY BEACH DAY – NOLAN STRIKES AGAIN!
A Nolan film is never what it appears to be. There’s always a straightforward plotline, but buried within 5 layers of complexity is a completely diffently story he’s telling us.
Like an unsolved Rubik’s cube, a person might twist it and turn it hoping that there might be an actual solution to the whole puzzle – and in a Nolan film, there always, ALWAYS, is a definite solution. The answer of “leaving it to your imagination” is the simple answer, and the Rubik’s equivalent of solving one side. Many can be happy with that accomplishment, enjoy the puzzle, put it down and never think about it again.
But there are those of us who can’t let it go. We have to keep twisting and turning the problem in our mind. Because, no matter what, we have the agonizing belief that the entire thing can be explained… and in Inception’s case, there is most definitely a solution. Nolan is that clever, and not that cruel to leave us hanging infinitely.
Nolan caters to the intellectual elite who can strip back the main story, dig past the brilliant cinematic misdirection and find out what is Nolan exactly trying to tell us?
HERE’S THE ANSWER (after all of that premilinary buildup) – The spinning totem at the end is part of Nolan’s classic misdirection. The totem is the seed of doubt that Nolan plants in our mind, forcing us to wonder that “the movie we’re watching isn’t real.”
The truth is that at the end Leo is still asleep, but just about to wake up. He has been asleep on the beach. When the totem stop’s he’ll be kicked into reality and back with his family.
The only “real” moments in the film are in the first few seconds of footage. Leo is at the beach with his wife and kids, who are building a sand castle. Leo has fallen asleep too close to shoreline, and is briefly awakened by a wave crashing upon him. In his waking vision, he sees his children from behind, but is too sleepy to awake. He falls back asleep, and the wonderful, bewildering, funtastically complicated dream begins.
His dream has one singular mission – return to your children.
In the main plotline of the film, Nolan demonstrates how a small seed planted in a dream can have gigantic effects in shaping a life. The demonstration that he’s planted in this film and left us fellow geniuses to figure out is the opposite: how dramatic the effects of the real world can have on our dreams.
It is the fleeting, sleepy glance of his children that forms the motive of the dream. It is the waves crashing upon him that provides much of the environment of the dream. Water being “washed over” is prevalent throughout the dream world:
- Leo splashes into a bathtub and emerges, just like a wave of water at the beach.
- The city on the first level of the dream is drenched in water. The van splashes into the river.
- The bar on the second level of the dream suddenly erupts into storm.
- The freezing cold nature of the himalayas… a place you might find yourself in a dream if you were wet and cold in real lifem leading to a wave of freezing water (avalanche). Immediately after the avalache, one of the characters cracks the joke “geez couldn’t he have dreamed he was at a beach?” Nolan’s brilliant sense of humor shines again!
- Leo wakes on the fourth (and fith) levels at the beach.
Add to this that the very top floor in the elevator of his “dream prison” is a sunny day at the beach with his family. This is the highest level of the dream – the level that is closest to reality.
In reality Leo was asleep at the beach with his family. Though he wanted to be with his children he also wanted to stay asleep – hence the struggle over reality and the dreamworld in his dream. Each wave crashing upon him drew him deeper into sleep, producing a stranger and stranger dream, with stanger and stranger representations of each wave in the dream.
The really fun nature of the film is that the logic all makes sense in the dreams, because it’s “dream logic” that we’ve all experienced. But this logic can not work in the real world.
For example, the “dream machine” that enables sharing of dreams itself is a piece of fantasy. The machine is deliberately simplistic – with simple wristbands and a big rubber button in the middle… something you might find in a dream – mighty in conept but not fully realized in the imagination. Even if such technology existed in the real world, your group would enter the first dream together, but within that dream the machine is not real so it could not then plunge your whole party into a second shared dream. The sedatives in the first dream are not real, so they couldn’t induce sleep strong enough to start the next dreams. However, this planning and logic seems rock solid in your dreams while they occur.
There is so, so much more detail and wonder in this film but I couldn’t proceed without first determining simply which scenes were and which scenes weren’t real, if any.
This is all that I’ve figured out so far after three viewings in two days. I’d love to read everyone else’s reaction to this.
What’s I’d really love is if Mr. Nolan wrote me back to tell me if I’m right or wrong!!!
I’m not Nolan, but this seems right to me.
This is the cleanest explanation I’ve seen so far and fits right into the elevator of Leo’s dreams and the beach comment by Cillian which was the thing that very sharply stood out to me. Excellent work, thank you.
Dude AWESOME explanation! I knew it couldn’t be as simple as “leave it to your own imagination.” Your explanation is gonna make me sound way smarter than I really am around the water cooler tomorrow!
one thing is for sure here… Dream or No Dream, Nolan have done an inception successfully into millions of minds, that keeps us waitng for his next movie or even a sequal??!! An Inception?? Maybe..