Inception reminded me a lot of a couple other movies: 2001: A Space Odyssey and Kill Bill. Like 2001, Inception is an intensely cerebral movie that, while centered on profoundly human concerns, considers those concerns from an objective distance. The audience sees Cobb’s struggles, but never fully identifies with him. Like Kill Bill, Inception is the sin qua non of its director’s aesthetic. Kill Bill is the most Tarantinesque movie Quentin Tarantino has made. He stuffed it with every movie reference he could, and offered an homage in some form to every genre he loves — exploitation, wushu, chambara, western, anime — and then told exactly the kind of story he likes to see. Inception is certainly the most Nolanesque movie Nolan has made. All the themes that have defined his ouvre — dead wives, obsession with those dead wives, grand but morally dubious projects, self-delusion, sharp action, architecture, head games — are fully exploited. With Inception Nolan has indulged himself in the same way Tarantino did with Kill Bill.

So I finally saw Inception. I meant to see it earlier, since I’m such a fan of Nolan, but even if I wasn’t the frustratingly mixed reviews would have driven me to a theater anyway. And now that I’ve seen it, I definitively say that I have no idea what to think. It doesn’t suck, just to get that out of the way. Many have argued that this or that element of the film is badly done. Aside from Cobb, the characters have no backstory. The dream worlds don’t feel surreal. The device used to share dreams (and the culture surrounding its use) is never introduced or explained, just taken for granted as part of the movie’s world. The characters talk and explain too much. The movie is emotionally cold though formally masterful. The action is complicated and demands that you pay attention. I’ve heard all of these and more offered as flaws, and I’m content to dismiss them as mistaken or beside the point.

The criticism that really interests me involves a major spoiler, so be warned. The film predictably ends with a brief shot of the top that serves as Cobb’s totem. If he spins that top and it keeps spinning interminably, then he’s dreaming. If it stops, as per the requirements of physics, then he’s not dreaming. So the top spins in the movie’s final shot, it wobbles suggestively, then cut to black the movie’s over.

This ending is the most contentious element in the movie. It contends with the viewer, demanding you to sit up and decide what you think it means. So you contend back, wondering where the hell Nolan gets off robbing you of a satisfying ending and provoking you like this. Then you contend with yourself, trying to decide what you really think. Finally, you end up on the internet contending with other contentious people who have also been provoked by that damn top, and your night at the movies has turned into a circular pattern of thought that plagues you for days because everyone’s been talking about this and won’t let you forget it. Presto, inception!

I’m not going to argue that Nolan meant to break the forth wall in that final shot (i have no idea what Nolan was thinking when he made Inception,) but that was how I interpreted it off the cuff. If the movie consists of dreams nested within dreams, it’s natural for me to see the movie itself as a dream nested within our own reality. I think this way because I’m a McCloudian formalist, and for me formal experiments are their own reward. Nolan is also a formalist, which is why I like his movies so much.

Taking the last shot as a direct address to the audience makes sense to me, but I know that for many it would be a problem. If you take character and story as paramount, and experience awareness of the medium — as opposed to immersion — as a bad thing, then that last shot would be maddening. It breaks any immersion, reminding you that the movie is a movie and demanding that you take part in its completion. You have to explicitly interpret its significance, and it offers little guidance. This is why I can’t tell whether it’s good or not. The quality of the movie depends on the final touches, which are up to the viewer. This makes it unjudgable from anything approaching an objective stance, because the movie refuses to allow you one. All I can say is that I like the movie, as I interpreted it.

Oh, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt is the man.