The first "it's only a dream" movie I've ever accepted.

Rating: 10/10 (3 August 2010)

Spoiler: When the totem-top keeps spinning at the end of the movie, are we really supposed to wonder if it's going to fall or spin infinitely, (reality if it falls, dream if it spins)? Please! : It spins a LONG time. It's another dream. IE:The beginning, thus the whole movie, may be a dream. There's not necessarily any such thing as shared dreaming, inception, nor any real character except for the lone dreamer, & he's invisible to us: Not necessarily bearing any resemblance to his conception of himself in the dream. Is the ending a return to the 1st level or a deeper level? (I think neither: Speaking for my own "dreams within dreams", I've never returned "back up" through the levels. Lighter levels of sleep perhaps as wakefulness approaches, but new dreams from beginning to end.) As a rule, this sort of thing bugs me: Suddenly telling me the characters I cared about a minute ago were never real is cheating. "The Red Jacket" & "Jacob's Ladder", (dreams of dying men, but dreams nonetheless), come to mind as otherwise potentially good movies that ended by saying:"never mind, nothing's real". Why doesn't "Inception" bug me in the same way? I'm not sure. Maybe because Nolan was willing to take the concept so far that caring about characters was a non-issue. (We were never even really asked to sympathize with the lead character's elaborately widowed status.) Maybe because the bulk of the film was already known to us as a dream, I feel no need to complain that the dream's still a dream. In any case, well done.