Inception Revisited (Spoilers!)

Note: There will be spoilers for Inception in this post.  If you haven't seen the film yet, go do so, then come back.  This movie deserves to be seen unspoiled.

So, I think its fair to say that I really enjoyed this movie.  I don't see something on DvD then go and seek out a showing in the theater afterwards very often.

While the visuals and sounds are very well done, what really impresses me about Inception is how smart and introspective it is.  In the end, Cobb accomplishes his goal not by shooting his way out, but by accepting his guilt over the death of his wife and deciding to finally move on with his life.

What's more, its a movie that requires your full attention to understand.  I know the value of flicks that you can just turn your brain off and just enjoy for the spectacle, but it seems to me that we're getting too much spectacle and not enough brainwork.  Inception is one of those rare movie that has grand spectacle and works the lobes, and that alone makes it special.

In particular, the ambiguous ending that makes you decide for yourself how the movie ends really works for me.  It works so much that I've put in quite a lot of thought developing my personal theory.  And I think that Cobb never got out of the dream, and more importantly, that the top doesn't matter at all.

The way I understand it, your personal totem is only useful if no one else knows how it feels.  But Cobb took Mal's totem as his own after her supposed death.  The problem with that, though, is that if he's wrong and Mal was right, when she "died" she just woke up in the next layer up.  In which case the totem Cobb is using is compromised, since he could still be trapped in her dream and never know it since she knows how her totem works just as well as he does.

So ultimately, whether the top falls at the end or not doesn't change a thing.  If he's in reality, then the top is irrelevant.  If Mal is still alive, it's compromised. Either way, it falling means nothing.

The fact that Inception can make me think out the timeline of a top just shows how well done the movie was.  May we get more movies like it.