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. 

I felt Cobb's devastation at having planted the idea that killed his wife, even though he planted it to save her. I admire the movie's pacing in releasing that information. It took a while to get to know Cobb's big secret, and the peeling back of those layers kept me intrigued. I admire Cobb for having the strength to face down his projection of Mal at the end. I feel that he is genuinely conflicted, and I believe that he is tempted to stay in the dream world, but I also believe he loves his real children and has managed to maintain a grip on the real world, despite the many years he has spent away from it in dream time. 

Cobb was the main character, so it makes a certain amount of sense I would feel for him, but what really surprised me was how much I cared about Robert Fischer. This character is decidedly secondary--the victim of the heist who, in heist movies, would traditionally be the antagonist. But as part of the brilliant turning of this genre on its ear, the heist in question is actually an act of healing that will do some good for both the victim and the world at large, even as it serves the corporate interests of Saito, the man paying for the job. Part of my concern for Fischer has to do with Cillian Murphy being a great actor (and, let's face it, a cute Irish boy, which might be swaying me here), but it also has to do with the structure he moves through, leading to his moment of catharsis at the end, which the whole movie exists to support.

Personally, I was moved by the movie's climax, in which Robert Fischer sits at his father's deathbed and learns that his father was not disappointed he failed to be more like him, but that he was disappointed he ever tried to be like him. I was totally sucked into this moment, even though I was explicitly aware that it was not only artificial but an act of manipulation on both the character and me. 

The film's climactic moment elicited a response from both my heart and mind, and that is what I believe contemporary narratives need to do in order to make a lasting impact in our era. I cared that Fischer was being healed, and simultaneously I found it incredibly interesting that I could see the flatness of the set he walked through, that I had been given a guided tour of its back doors, pulleys, and cutout windows, and still I genuinely felt exactly what I had been manipulated to feel as the viewer, just as Fischer felt exactly what he had been manipulated to feel as a character.

As many have noted, Inception comments on movie-making and narrative construction in any medium. It does so by diving into its own layers of story construction in postmodern fashion. But unlike the postmodern narratives I've read, such as O'Brien's At Swim Two Birds, Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Night, and Coetzee's Foe, I felt connected to the characters even as I was taken through an intellectual thrill ride. I believe that accomplishment is what will allow the movie to make a lasting mark on our collective consciousness, not the cheap gimmick of an ending.