Sure all those could be interpreted a certain way but I like mine the best.

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I think the whole movie was DiCaprio's dream, something he constructed for himself to plant the idea that he didn't have to feel guilty about his wife. Then it would make sense for all the other characters to be shallow because they're just projections of his subconscious and for him to be the only person in the dreams to project their personal lives into the dream. Just my $.02.

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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.

1. The bulk of the story is framed as Cobb & Saito's recollection in limbo. My theory is that the recollection (rather than the gun) is what wakes them up.

2. There is no explanation for why the first kick in dream level 1 (the one they miss) doesn't wake up Arthur, who is awake in dream level 2.

But I don't think the top is evidence of that. At the level of reality in which the plane ride occurs, we've seen the top fall. Consequently, it seems clear that, in the last scene, the top will fall, and we do see it start to wobble before it cuts to the credits.

The question, then, becomes whether the top actually is the reliable indicator of reality that Cobb thinks it is. If the top really is a totem, then Cobb made it back to the real world. But where did the top come from? He got it from his wife after she died. If his wife really did escape from a dream by dying (if Cobb was dreaming the whole time, this is possible), then Cobb acquired the top in a dream, and whether it falls or not proves nothing.

I'm pretty sure that I'm reading too much into the ending of the movie. Personally, I think he made it back to the real world. But the director has made other movies that invite a similar degree of scrutiny, so who knows?

The ending ends that way because the producers clearly wanted us to question as to which is reality. Remember when he says do not create places from reality into dreams as that is the best way to lose which is reality and which is a dream. Also, when he meets his older self and tells him he has to jump. That indicates that the "reality" on which the film begins is not really reality, that his wife was probably right. But how can she be right when the spinner does stop spinning and yet in the end when we are brought to the same reality it does not stop spinning?

This contradiction is supposed to be there as it communicates this entire confusion as to which is reality and which is an illusion we have created for ourselves. Speaking of its applicability to the real world it speaks of brainwashing, propaganda, and formation of our own perceptions, how we can through them create a different reality and be lost in there, yet also struggle to find the real truth. The film, through the metaphor, communicates perfectly this entire confusion and it ends with such contradiction because ultimately we as humans and our thinking can not acquire perfection as to what is truth. We are blind in the end to inconsistencies within our illusions, hence the always spinning spinner.

Its a good film, but in the end I think it is really rubbish. The subject is awesome, but it does not go deep enough. The ending is too subtle. There probably should have been some sort of almighty intervention like in the ending of Don Juan for it to become a classic. To allure in the end that there are great forces out there which we depend on and only through taking a leap of faith in ourself can we acquire reality.

One, it's a red herring as you say, though I'd put a slightly different spin on it. Cobb has chosen his reality, he's had his catharsis and made a very intentional decision to let Mal go. That's true regardless of if the ending is a dream or not.

Two, it's an intentional denial of catharsis for the audience. It's a setup without a payoff, tension without release. Here's the interesting part about that- the audiences I've seen it with provide their own physical catharsis, their own reality-based relief of tension, by laughter or by applause. These physical reactions both release the real physical tension that has built in their bodies and also returns them to the real world, outside of the filmic dream.

Three, it captures the feeling of a certain kind of dream. How many times have you dreamed of almost having the answer, of almost knowing something you want to know...and then abruptly waking up? Yes, exactly.

It's the best ending shot to a movie in quite a long while.

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.

I think that stating that the entire plot is a dream just because the main plot is not realistic is akin to denying the film's right to being science fiction!

How do I know this? Well, what was the climax of the whole drama? When he confronts his wife's projection in the skyscraper near the end. That's when the most important/meaningful lines of the film are delivered, which are to the effect that dreamed characters/projections can never compare to the real thing, even in a very powerful imagination. That's why the film ends with him back with his kids and why we know he's not dreaming. He no longer wants his wife because she's a projection, but he wants his kids because they're real. He knows the difference.

Nolan cuts just after the top wobbles because he wants us to search for real meaning in the film, rather than have things settled by the director's arbitrary power.

1) By getting Cobb to convince Fisher Jr. to feel like his daddy loved him and wanted him to be his own man and dissolve the business to start his own empire and

2) Get back at Cobb for trying to steal his secrets for Cobol by _incepting_ the little seed of "you want to go back home to your kids" in his head and making that his obsessive ends to justify all means. Saito, meanwhile, was willing to wait the dream equivalent of _eighty years_ to exact this revenge. Then, as DiCaprio fulfills his promise and gets Saito in his 80-year Limbo, Saito fulfills his promise, architects a layer where Cobb does reunite with his still-young-as-Cobb-remembers-them children, and the spinning totem wobbles but doesn't actually fall, then the "I N C E P T I O N" credits roll, because Saito ran the inception on Cobb.

Ta-da!

Many years ago I commenter on Slashdot gave his (or her, don't remember) take on the movie ending and since then I had to completely re-evaluate the whole thing.

The film is now old, but...

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When Tom Cruise's is captured they put the "halo" containment device on him. If you remember, when they did the same to the guy who attempted to murder his wife at the start of the movie, he asked, understendably worried, what would happen to him, and the policeman answered something like "you will just dream what you want to dream".

Ok, now consider that everything that happens from the moment that Cruise was arrested until the end is... a device-induced dream. He was framed for murder, and... he just spends his life (or an untold number of years) in confinment - but he dreams the whole ending. Over and over...

This blew me away. Especially because it could hardly be more Dickian than this, while at my first watching the ending was too damn sugary/optimist/Hollywood for my tastes.

(1) It would make a mockery of what Nolan seems very clearly to intend as a positive ending. In the script he actually tells us he is centering the film on a simple, positive emotional message. So what is that message?

(2) It would create a glaring inconsistency with the symbolic landscape of the rest of the film. Case in point, the dream worlds are strongly associated with water symbolism, which even creeps into the real world when the dream world intrudes: it is a glass of water that sends Fischer to sleep on the plane, while Cobb's waking hallucination occurs while he is washing his face. And yet... unlike any other dream... there is no water at the end of the film. In fact, we have the exact opposite, since we are told the events take place in a garden on a cliff.

(3) An aside, but anytime you have people who are named after apostles frolicking in a garden with Dad, you should jump to asking yourself if there might be Christian imagery lurking there. So what's with all the biblical imagery, or the constant references to "leaps of faith"? Is it really accidental when characters blaspheme, or invoke religious imagery?

(4) the visuals of the children building castles on the beach would suddenly serve no purpose. There would also be no explanation for why Mal is supposed to be bad, when her name clearly suggests she is a malevolent character. Likewise, the names of James, Philippa and Ariadne would be meaningless. Ariadne's mythological role is helping Theseus out of a maze, so what is Cobb still doing stuck in one at the end?

(5) Cobb clearly develops as a person. Why does Nolan go to such pains to show this, and what does it matter if these changes accomplish nothing of significance? Which brings us back to point one, why doesn't Cobb just stay in limbo with his wife?

(6) This is a bit esoteric, but you'll get stuck arguing that Saito's palace is destroyed by water because Cobb was pushed into a bathtub rather than the opposite: that Nolan engineered the bathtub scene in order to find a way to destroy Saito's palace in a storm. This requires a violation of the principle of Occam's razor unless you're prepared to argue that there isn't really any water symbolism in the film, in which case you would be wrong. :)

a) At the end of the movie he is awake, and he really meets his children. The lack of the ring is consistent with all available evidence prior to this point because he only has the ring on when he is asleep.

b) At the end of the movie he has successfully escaped Limbo twice. Cobb has mastered his own psyche; he has achieved closure on Mal's death; he has finally embraced in his own mind that the Mal in the dream is just a ghost, and can be in the dream without the ring. He can dream again without Mal invading from his subconscious.

The only confusing bit is whether he was actually ever in the real world at all, or it was all a dream. This is almost the main concept of the film, and not answered when we see the spinning top still spinning at the end.

Yeah, though I didn't really see this as confusing, simply an unknown left open to interpretation.

I was half waiting for some kind of twist like say, it turns out that Cobb was dreaming the whole time and is in reality the heir to the company and is the target of the Incpetion... or something. I didn't really think that one through too deeply though and I'm not sure that a twist like this would have made the movie better in any case. I guess it just comes back again to that expectation that was built up in me of it being a full on "mind fuck" movie. In some ways I was kind of happy walking out of the cinema that my mind had not been fucked, just well entertained.

We know Cobb doesn't need his totem by the end, because his rejection of Mal at the climax is an expression of faith. To understand the implicit alternative, look to the parallel heist sequence which opens the film. There we had a very different Cobb place his faith in the "reality" of Mal when he lowered himself out the window above a fatal fall. Nolan emphasizes that this is the wrong decision by showing us Cobb's immediate (biblical) fall, blasphemy and then betrayal and loss. Death destroys the world by water as foreshadowed in the parable that opens the film.

At the end of the film the logic of this sequence reverses. Cobb resists Mal's temptation to stay with her in limbo. He rejects her for the first time ever, telling Mal she is not "real" where even moments before he was expressing lingering doubts to Ariadne ("how can you know"). And whereas his lack of faith had previously led to his defeat, here his expression of it leads directly to Fischer's symbolic reconciliation with his father. And while the film presents another death sequence as required by Matthew 7.24, this is but prelude to a heaven sequence that breaks the endlessly circular logic of the dream world / penrose staircase. The rules are violated because they no longer apply: Cobb is free of the maze.

Spoilers!

For example, a friend was confused how Fischer could be revived. They explained that death with the heavy sedation would lead to limbo, so it could be concluded that dying was actually just a shortcut to go into a deeper dream state, he wasn't actually "dead". When they woke him up from that dream, he came back.

Another oddity I found was that they needed to synchronize all the kicks, wouldn't one kick in the deepest dream suffice? Well, in one level of dreaming if you think you're falling, you can actually feel it (whether the falling feeling happens in the sleeping environment (dude sleeping in a chair and being tipped) or in the dream (dude being thrown out of a building)), but at 2 levels of dreaming, the falling would be too abstract to cascade all the way up.

You probably found different glitches in the movie, but the above shows the process I used to answer some questions.

So you're not supposed to worry too much about the logic of the dream levels, since all dreams are basically metaphors for life: mazes where people "get lost" and from which they need to "die to wake up". The only thing that makes limbo special is that it is particularly symbolic. Nolan is presenting a metaphor of life itself as a Penrose staircase, and portraying faith as the way out. When Ariadne shatters the mirrors that trap Cobb in a recursive chain, the image is symbolic: she is a gift from Cobb's father ("ask and ye shall receive") and her role in the film is to guide him out of the maze that is the mortal world. This is presumably why she is the character who accompanies him to immigration.

For more evidence that this is intentional, look at the overwhelming creation imagery and the narrative emphasis on father-son alienation and reconciliation (with Fischer as with Cobb). Look at the curious way Michael Caine seems to be playing God when he shows up in Paris. And then look closely at the ending, which shows us neither a dream nor reality. What Nolan presents is symbolic: we see Cobb's judgment and forgiveness of sins at immigration, and then his reunion with his family in the heavenly garden. The film closes with Cobb ignoring his totem (as a crutch of faithlessness it is no longer needed) and then his son James (who represents faith and like his sister shares an apostolic name) telling him that they are building a castle on a cliff.

A what? That last bit circles back to the opening shot of the children on the beach. It is a bookend reference to Matthew 7.24 and the parable of the wise and foolish builders. The contrast (beach -> cliff) reinforces Cobb's character journey while telling us that the ending is NOT a dream (something reinforced by the lack of the water imagery associated with the other dream levels). It also reinforces the parallels Inception creates between the buildings of limbo and the sandcastles on the beach, and explains why all are ultimately washed away by water just as death washes away life in the Christian parable.

Brilliant movie.