I was enjoying reading other interpretations of what happened and listening to people arguing over the (I think) deliberately ambiguous ending. But then I read one theory that seems to hold water, though I need some additional viewings to confirm this for myself.

The theory basically revolves around Cobb’s wedding ring. Apparently, whenever he’s in a dream, he’s wearing the ring. When it’s reality, he’s not. The theory goes that in reality, he accepted her death and took off the ring. But in his mind, he clung to her and thus still wears the ring. The one exception to this is the flashback sequence where Mal kills herself, because she’s still alive at that point, so he would be wearing the ring.

Now, when he wakes up on the plane, everyone is surprised and smiling and it seems dreamlike, but he wakes up in the exact spot where he went to sleep. If he had woken up already at home, or on his way home, then it would be a red flag. You never remember exactly how you go there in a dream (in the movie anyway), but when they wake up, everybody knows exactly how they got there. That’s why they’re all smiling at each other; because the mission was a success. In addition, you can see no ring on his hand when he’s going through customs giving the guard his passport.

The other part is his totem, the top. He’s wearing his wedding ring in every scene where it spins endlessly. Whenever it falls over, it first wobbles a little, then goes into a hard wobble before finally toppling over completely. Whenever it spins endlessly, it just continues to spin. Right before the camera cuts in the final scene, it goes into a hard wobble as if it’s going to fall over, not correct itself.

However, the fact that Nolan cuts away is still significant. By doing so, he plants a small seed of doubt in your mind. That seed grows into either doubt about the ending, or reaffirmation that it is reality, depending on the person. The movie essentially performs inception on the audience.

Like I said, I need to see this film again and watch for these things, but so far this seems to be the most credible theory I’ve heard so far. And it appears that this film is slightly deeper than I thought it was.

For most of the countdown, I wrote the reviews immediately after watching the movies since all I really had to do was close my media player and open a document. I wrote the review for Inception nine hours after watching it because I had to go to work right afterwards. For Kick-Ass, I wrote the review two days later. For Knight and Day, it was two weeks.

I had a boring day at work which gave me plenty of time to digest Inception. This also gave me ample time to think of snappy lines and thoughts to include in the review, which is something I like to do when I’m walking or taking the TTC home afterwards.

So in a perfect world, I would write the review immediately. In my world, it’s whenever I feel like it/whenever I can get around to it.

I feel like I need to sleep on it before I can say how much I actually liked the movie. How long do you usually wait between waiting movies and writing reviews?