MovieChat Forums > Inception (2010) Discussion > if the ending is a dream it would be sho...

if the ending is a dream it would be short

posted 8 years ago by jason_leo
4 replies | jump to latest

So assuming the ending is actually a dream he is clearly not still in limbo as that is somewhere where you create your landscape so he would have to create a airport and all his friends and choose to go get on the flight knowing its all fake which is very unlikely. the girl says find him and bring him back at the end. He then turns up with a gun which must mean logically shooting him and himself will kick them up at least one or all the levels otherwise it would be pointless to go after him if there was no way to bring him back
assuming it kicks them the next level up into a dream of them being on a plane the wait would be short before the sedation wears off and they are woken up.
dying in a dream was shown to not kill the dreamer so regardless of how long he would stay under eventually he will always wake up

[–] thepicturesthatgotsmall 8 years ago

assuming it kicks them the next level up into a dream of them being on a plane the wait would be short before the sedation wears off and they are woken up.

The wait wouldn't be short the next level up (level 3) it would be 10 years.

So 10 years of Cobb living with his kids, thinking they're real, before he wakes up.

[–] bobbydallas (8557) 7 years ago

The ambiguous ending was lazy writing.. the movie was about one man who struggles to get back to those he loves and are still alive through any means necessary - including destroying another young man's rise to empire. It should've just ended with them waking up @ the airplane...

[–] ExTechOp (2770) 7 years ago

I dunno, you just said it yourself: "the movie was about one man who struggles to get back to those he loves and are still alive through any means necessary"

So why not end the movie at the moment he accomplishes this? He got back, "through any means necessary," including possibly remaining in the dreamworld

In reality, the point I took from this was that it didn't matter any more. Cobb was always testing himself, ready to commit suicide if the top didn't stop spinning. The movie ends with him no longer caring, because he accomplished his goal

[–] TheUltimateHippo (2250) 7 years ago

Even if the top stopped spinning it wouldn't matter, Cobb could still be in his own dream and therefore the top would fall no matter what. The point of showing the spinning top at the end wasn't to leave a cliffhanger as to whether he's still dreaming or not, it was to show that Cobb has accepted whatever he is in as his reality.