Inception

         Recently, I had the opportunity to see the movie Inception  with my boyfriend. This movie is about a man, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, whom, with his team, is hired to plant an idea into a man’s head using several levels of dreams within a dream.  The team succeeds and the idea is planted and takes root once everyone is fully awake again.
          This movie was very interesting and suspenseful. It was action packed and a great storyline, however, it was slightly difficult to keep up with the different levels, or which dream within the main dream they were actually in.  I found it confusing as to who was really still in what dream and what the snap back to reality would be for them. I, for the most part, thought the movie was an alright movie, until the end.
      Throughout the movie, each character carries a ‘totem’, or something that only they know how it works. DiCaprio’s character’s totem is a small, metal top that was his late-wife’s totem. The secret behind it, is that if he spins it, and it falls down and does not continue to spin, then he is not in someone’s dream, but he is in reality, or at least what our, as the viewer’s, sense of reality is. If the top continues to spin, then he is still in a level of someone else’s dream.
          Throughout the movie, we keep coming back to DiCaprio’s wife, Mal. She is in every dream he has, trying to kill him, someone else, or mess up the plan in general. We learn that she and him were stuck in a dream together for years. They spent an entire lifetime in this dream. They had children here, a home, everything was perfect. Then they woke up. Mal continued to believe that that dream was the only true reality, and when they had ‘awoke,’ they had really entered into another dream. The only way to exit this dream and get back to her reality was to kill herself, which was the way they had gotten out of the first and only dream to begin with. She commits this suicide to get back to her life, to her kids, and their home, and begs him to come along; however he refuses, trying to convince her that where they were was reality.
             In the end of the movie, after planting the idea in the man’s head, they snap back to ‘reality’ and DiCaprio’s character gets to see his children again. At the very end of the movie, he spins the top, which was his totem on the table, gets distracted, and leaves it before it tells him where he is. Once the camera zooms back onto the totem, the viewer gets to see it start to wobble, but the movie ends before you really find out if it kept spinning or stopped, signifying he was either still in a dream or reality.
         So the whole movie leaves you the viewer with this huge question, well, many questions. Was he still in a dream? Was the whole movie a dream? Was it not a dream and this is reality? If it was a dream, then did Mal killing herself really send her back to the reality they had with their home and children, and she was there with his body begging him to come back to her? If that was it, then the whole movie was just a big dream inside his head; everyone, everything was a piece of him.
           The whole ride home with my boyfriend we argued about what it meant. The ending of the movie made the movie so much better to me. It left me with the huge feeling that I could create in my mind how I thought the movie should end, and then have the fun of arguing that point with my boyfriend. It was like a very fun game to play. Had I gotten a clear-cut answer on how the movie was, and had not been left with this fill-in-the-blank ending, I would have still been confused and bored with the movie overall, and I would had not had near the fun that I had that night.