It’s a question that’s baffled movie-goers since 2010: what the heck is happening at the end of Inception? Is it a dream? Is it real? We are all Troy.
But leave it to director Christopher Nolan’s good luck charm (totem?), Michael Caine, to clear up the mystery. While introducing the film for the Film4 Summer Screen series, the actor said that when he got the script, “I was a bit puzzled by it and I said to [Nolan], ‘I don’t understand where the dream is.’ I said, ‘When is it the dream and when is it reality?’ He said, ‘Well, when you’re in the scene, it’s reality.’ So get that — if I’m in it, it’s reality. If I’m not in it, it’s a dream.”
There you go: the ending, where Professor Miles (Caine) accompanies the hilariously-named Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) to his home so he can be reunited with his kids, is real. Take that, spinning top. As for Nolan, all he’s said about the ending is that “all levels of reality are valid… I feel that, over time, we started to view reality as the poor cousin to our dreams, in a sense… I want to make the case to you that our dreams, our virtual realities, these abstractions that we enjoy and surround ourselves with, they are subsets of reality.”
Or are they?
(Via the Independent)
