nah!! it would just make the ending a far grander scale.
Films don't require a huge finish or a grand arc to be good stories. This film is not about the beginning or the end, and these things are essentially irrelevant. The focus of the film is on the journey and the spectacle provided by the concept. It doesn't matter if the idea was successfully implanted in Fischer's mind, though it appears it was. Why would you care? Would you have enjoyed the car chases and gun fights and amazing effects and the multi-layered narrative any more if there was some arbitrary "ending" to it all?
Nickg said:
well it didnt seem to make sense that leonadro said he had grown old with his mrs and it showed them as an old couple, but then showed them die young under a train. maybe they had a dreamworld inside a dreamworld but to make that kind of aging and still be young, you'd need a dream inside a deam, inside a dream as a minimum! and even then it would still take a long time to execute so many years...
Pass, but I'm not too bothered by this. We see them old together there, and he says that's how they escaped, so it's probably just due to the way it was shown when he remembered it. They'd somehow got stuck in limbo, though it doesn't appear that it was within multiple layers of dreams, given that the train kicked them back to the reality where Mal killed herself, though it could be that there were other layers in between. We don't know, and it doesn't matter too much. I concede that the issue of them looking young when he recounts the story of them dying on the tracks is odd, although I seem to recall that in one of his memory dreams (that he took the lift to get to) he saw Mal on the tracks, and in his memory she was always the age she was when she died in the real world, so it's likely that what we saw was his memory of their escape, and in his memory the age was fixed.
Nickg said:
why would a kick in another layer of dream not wake you up in a lower level? what happens to your 'real' body when you are in purgatory? once you wake in real life does
that mean u come out of it altogether etc?
Remember how in the Matrix if your jack got pulled while you were in the Matrix your mind was lost? I figure it would be like that. You'd wake up but your consciousness would be lost inside your mind, leaving you in something like a coma. Hence they have to time the kicks right to bring you out from the deepest level first. As for your body while you're in limbo - it just stays where it was, the same as their bodies did in any other level of the dreams.
Nickg said:
and why did saito have to wait for leonadro to turn up before he could kill himself to get out of purgatory? that didnt seem to make sense to me..
As someone else has said, he'd been there so long that he'd forgotten he was there. That was discussed when they first explained limbo.
Nickg said:
also the architect, like...how did they create the world? that was never quite explained. but then she wasnt planning to made the trip by plane...so like ... who was going to make their world if she wasnt going to go?
The architect designs the world and then the dreamer dreams it based on what they've told them.
Nickg said:
the plot was quite played out by the end. it was just a Mission Impossible 3 style, 'will he wont he', no 'will he and then WTF UNSOLVED MYSTERY MOMENT OH NO IT WAS ALL FOR BAD in in the end' tragedy or enlightenment...
Not every film needs a big mysterious ending or a big twist. Yes, the ending of The Sixth Sense was very clever, but how often does anyone re-watch that film once they know what happened? You might watch it once more but only to see all the points at which something clever happens to demonstrate that he is unknowingly dead, but beyond that there's no point re-watching it as the whole thing becomes a one trick pony.
Inception is an action film with what is essentially a tremendously simple premise. The reason it works is because the premise is well fleshed out and considered, so the whole thing makes sense. Adding some big twist or ending would detract from that.
Nickg said:
except his kids had no aged since he last saw them, and they appeared just like his dream...which tells me that he may welll have been dreaming right to the end.
Another good point that suggests he may have been dreaming, but to be honest, it doesn't really matter, and that ending does smack of Nolan bowing to the pressure to leave some little trick or mystery at the end. I could have lived without that. It wasn't interesting in the same way that, say, Magneto moving the chess piece at the end of X3 was, as there is no implied threat or danger. He'd just be in another dream and to think about that leaves so much unanswered as to be silly rather than clever. It's unnecessary to the narrative.
Nickg said:
the entire last hour was a certain ending really. no hint of movement or scope for change. its like did u ever feel that the guys in the lift werent going to wake up? that whole bit to me was filler, rather than a cliff hanger.
Show me a single film in which you are genuinely worried about whether the heroes will survive, or will die without going out in some sort of "blaze of glory" or in a self-sacrificing Messianic nod. You'll struggle. We are so conditioned to believe that the heroes will make it and that is all that stories ever give us. The question is never "will they make it?" but rather "
how will they make it?".
Nickg said:
and was kaito fighting one of the team in that part? it made no sense - they never explained it either and nor did they fight for very long..
Sorry, I forget which part you're talking about.
I'll wait for Blu Ray. 
Surely the fact that the movie didn't provide what you expected is a good thing given the current trend for predictable, hollywood by numbers rubbish out there.
