Journal: Why Inception

The thing that really continues to entertain me about the movie Inception is how much people are still arguing over what it all means. Well, the argument may be over. People may have moved on, but since it is all on the internet, it just looks like people are still passionately debating the thing. Wonderful internet. You can't always go back, edit your post, and put everything in the past tense. So to speak.

I understand that people can feel so passionately about Inception that they've actually edited the movie in their heads. Going so far as to insist that the final token actually fell off the table, which didn't happen. I'm even guilty of this. The edited memory part. Not the token falling on camera part. From the moment the movie ended, I was convinced that you never actually saw the children's faces, which is not true. As I relatively recently discovered, you do get a real good luck at the kids faces. The fact that I was convinced otherwise is really cool and goes a long way toward telling you how I interpreted the ending.

I suppose I should point out that I don't really care what actually happened. Whether it can be definitively proven that the movie ended with Cobb still in a dream or the real world doesn't particularly interest me. The important thing to remember is that Inception is a movie set in dreams. Dreams have a tendency to be ambiguous and open to interpretation. So, it comes as absolutely no surprise to me that Inception has an ambiguous and open to interpretation ending. When done well, an ambiguous ending is really cool. It also keeps people talking about the movie, which can increase other people's interest in seeing it. Even seeing it again.

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