Ambiguous ending?hungry_pixelDecember 12 2010, 00:03:28 UTC
Resopnse to facebook comment where I'm all obtuse due to spoiler-avoidance:
I did wonder from early on, whether the big plot twist would be that the whole thing was Dream Level 1, and poor old Leo was in fact trapped through the entire film. When his wife "committed suicide", I was sure I was right; that she was correct about it all and waiting one level up for Leo to get clued up. It was fairly strongly signposted if you were looking for it.
Garry then said that that would be a crap plot twist because it was way too obvious (base don the idea that if WE think of it, it is too obvious :-) ), and we'd heard far better things about the film than that. So we thought that might be true, but that there would be something more to it too.
I wondered if the ending was meant to be ambiguous because it could still all theoretically be Dream Level 1, but they didn't say one way or the other, and didn;t offer any other twists, so...meh.
It's also possible, being me, that I have COMPLETELY missed a huge chunk of subtext.
I wanted one more head-fuck, to make the whole audience go "Wooooooooah!". But it didn't happen. I wanted the whole thing, all the multiple layers, to link back to the start of the film and be solely about trying to gain Ken Watanabe's trust and find his secrets.
Whilst I did enjoy it and thought was a very good film, I did find it far more linear than I'd been led to expect. Umpteen critics and viewer comments said it was incrediby confusing, but it really wasn't if you had half a brain.
Oh, and for my money he wasn't stuck in the deeper layers of his own subconscious at the end, as you could hear the spinny thing's rotation getting ropey.
@ols - I DID enjoy it. I am a terrible victim of hype, I end up expecting too much and I'm fairly certain that the hype was, as david says, from viewers and critics, not friends. Garry and I had independently picked up the idea that it was a plot-twist movie, probably because (as again david says) it was meant to be complex and confusing, but the central concept was actually, for sci-fi fans, a familiar one, and not really hard to grasp. (I think that's part of why I felt short-changed. I *wanted* to have to use my briain, to not properly understand it until a second viewing
( ... )
I also think that the 'Limbo' stage is different from the other dreams, it is a shared state/ares, anyone can manipulate it (both Cobb and Mal do) Hence the Top not spinning properly ie spinning for eve, when they are limbo
( ... )
I think he was still in a dream level because he wasn't using his own talisman - he was using his wife's, so had no way of knowing which was the real world. I wasn't particularly keen on it myself though.
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I did wonder from early on, whether the big plot twist would be that the whole thing was Dream Level 1, and poor old Leo was in fact trapped through the entire film. When his wife "committed suicide", I was sure I was right; that she was correct about it all and waiting one level up for Leo to get clued up. It was fairly strongly signposted if you were looking for it.
Garry then said that that would be a crap plot twist because it was way too obvious (base don the idea that if WE think of it, it is too obvious :-) ), and we'd heard far better things about the film than that. So we thought that might be true, but that there would be something more to it too.
I wondered if the ending was meant to be ambiguous because it could still all theoretically be Dream Level 1, but they didn't say one way or the other, and didn;t offer any other twists, so...meh.
It's also possible, being me, that I have COMPLETELY missed a huge chunk of subtext.
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Whilst I did enjoy it and thought was a very good film, I did find it far more linear than I'd been led to expect. Umpteen critics and viewer comments said it was incrediby confusing, but it really wasn't if you had half a brain.
Oh, and for my money he wasn't stuck in the deeper layers of his own subconscious at the end, as you could hear the spinny thing's rotation getting ropey.
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Sent you an email earlier about possible dates to get together, when you are able to check your calender let me know what works.
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