10 Movie Endings That Leave More Questions Than Answers
3. Inception
Was it all a dream? That's the central question everyone was asking after watching Christopher Nolan's Inception for the first time.
In Nolan's masterpiece, we see Dom Cobb and his gang play out complicated missions as they must place an idea into a man's head by going inside his dreams to do so. The film is a complex one to follow as it goes into many dream worlds by building a dream within a dream, slowly disorientating the reality of what is real and what is a dream.
A running plot is that Cobb is doing this last job so he can go back home to be with his kids again – something he has been dreaming about for a while. In the very last moment of the film, we see Cobb walk into his home and see the back of his kids' heads, but this time they turn and run towards him.
Cobb spins his spinning top to test if he is in a dream or not, but completely abandons it as he sees his kids for the first time in years. The camera slowly pans towards the totem, but the screen cuts to black before we see if it topples or not.
Is he still stuck in the dream or not? A popular theory many have pointed out is Cobb's real dream totem is his wedding ring, as he's only seen wearing it in the dream world.
Which begs the other question, which totem is his real dream totem? What happened to the rest of the team? If Cobb is still in a dream is he dead or is there a possibility to save him?