Warning: Contains Spoilers

I've had time now to watch Inception twice and digest the experience. I think it is a great movie, but what makes it great is everything but its fuzzy ending. I will endeavor not to write too much about the ending, except to iterate how much more satisfied I would have been if the damn top had just fallen, allowing the movie to decisively avoid the single biggest cliche in all of speculative fiction, namely, it was all a dream.

I appreciated this movie on many different levels. Although it is most definitely a heist flick preoccupied with everyone timing the job perfectly to get the big score, and although it was also a postmodern epic, I actually cared about the central characters. At least one review I read seems sure that "we," the viewers, can't connect to Inception's characters, but I have to disagree. This viewer could and did. I was surprised, actually, at how much I came to care about Cobb and Robert Fischer. My disappointment with the ending actually stems from the degree to which I cared about Cobb. I wanted him to have his reward, and I wanted the film to trust itself enough to avoid the cliche intellectual ending and go for the ending that would fulfill a main character who has suffered emotionally throughout the film.