Just saw Inception (yeah I know a little late, but I hate crowds) and wow, did it live up to the impossibly big hype. I had high expectations for Christopher Nolan (one of my favorite directors) and he delivered on all accounts. In typical Nolan fashion he left the ending (and much of the movie) up for interpretation with a simple path of explanation for everything and much more expansive explanation paths if one chooses to go deeper down the rabbit hole.
I’m really surprised at the lack of any in-depth explanation here on Prime since I find most of the users here intelligent and creative. Perhaps because it’s a huge time undertaking to go over all of the details of the movie and it’s just not worth it. But I’ll go ahead and give my take on several possible paths of explanation.
First off, you must understand the core basic mechanics of the movie. I found
this website does a pretty good job in explaining how the level of dreams work and the roles of the different characters. If you understand off of that, then you’ll understand the most simplistic answer to what happened in the movie and how it ended. The website also does a pretty good job in explaining that as well.
Before I get into the most straight forward and simplistic explanation, let me first discuss a few very important key scenes at the very end of the movie. If you recall the very end was very sparse in detail (in relation to the rest of the movie) and cut away at the most critical parts to give you a solid answer. The most critical parts being:
1) When the old Saito see Cobb again and Cobb explains who he is and why he is there. Saito picks up the gun and the scene cuts away.
2) When Cobb sees his kids again, he firsts spins his totem (the spinning top) and the scene ends before we can see if it falls or not.
Those two key scenes are critical because they have the ability to clarify what exactly happened at the end. However, because Nolan does not reveal the outcome, you are left with a series of combinations of possible conclusions. So for example, let me return to the most simple straight forward explanation.
In the simple explanation, Saito understand why Cobb is there. When Saito died, because he was under such heavy sedation, his mind went into Limbo. Normally when you die in a dream state you wake up, but because this sedation was so different your mind would enter Limbo to which time would just go on and on for a very long time (even though you are asleep in reality for just a few minutes.) It’s like being in a coma. The main problem with that is that if you are awaken in real life with your mind still in Limbo it could completely scramble your brain so you want to make sure you are out of Limbo before you awake. So Cobb went into Limbo to find Saito and get him out of Limbo. It explains why Saito was so old while Cobb was so young because Saito having died a few minutes before Cobb entered Limbo much earlier than Cobb. But because Limbo time is exponentially longer than even the very long 3rd level of dream state, it translated to several decades of time between the few minutes Saito died and Cobb entered Limbo to find him. So as we learned from Cobb’s previous experience in Limbo, the only way out of Limbo was to kill yourself, so at the end of the movie, Saito realizes that he is in Limbo. The simple explanation is that kills Cobb and then himself to exit out of Limbo. Once he is out of Limbo (but still stuck in the 3rd level of dream state) they pull him out of sedation and he awakens naturally. This explains why on the plane, Cobb and Saito are the last two to awaken, while everyone else appears to be awake already. That is because they were already awakened by the planned “kicks” while Cobb and Saito (who missed the awakening “kicks) had to wait to be taken off of sedation. So knowing that they are reality, we know that Saito fulfilled his promise to clear Cobb of his charges and go back to see his kids again. He returns home, spins his totem top and because he is in reality, he can see his kids faces again and the top supposedly falls down as it should in reality.
However, this is the most obvious and simple explanation. It takes the most basic and logical path with the fewest leaps of faith and is probably the easiest to follow. But there are other very interesting explanations as well. If you are interested continue reading.
