Don’t read this if you haven’t seen Inception, or The Prestige.

Because I totally just saw it again, and I’m totally about to spoil it. And The Prestige.

When we first saw the movie on opening night, the movie ended with a very loud, unanimous groan from the audience. Did the top fall over? Did the top fall over!?

Upon viewing the movie again, and discussing it with a lot of different people, I’ve decided that it did. And didn’t. And that it doesn’t matter.

Here’s what we know: Cobb returns home after a long time being away from his children. To determine whether he’s awake or dreaming, he spins a top. However, before it topples, he walks outside to greet his kids. He doesn’t wait to see what the top does. We, the outside observer, watch the top for a moment as it starts to waver — and then the movie cuts immediately to black.

There’s a great deal going on in this movie, and it can be bent in several different ways:

The top falls. In this interpretation, you take the movie at face value. Cobb and his team successfully pull off the inception, Saito makes the important phone call, and Cobb returns home for the first time in a long time. He doesn’t wait to see what the top does because he’s eager to go be with his children… but it doesn’t matter. Within a few minutes he’ll come back inside and it will be immediately obvious whether the top is spinning or not. It’s obvious the top is about to fall; it’s wobbling quite a bit before the cut, and once a top starts to wobble it’s pretty much done.

The top doesn’t fall. Cobb is still stuck in Limbo. Whether the entire film is a dream, or whether he doesn’t return from one of the previous dream spaces from the mid-point of the movie, he hasn’t made it back. It’s possible Saito or Yusef still have him under. Or that he got lost during one of his nightly excursions. Or that he and Saito simply never made it back with the rest of the team. Or that no one on the team made it back. Perhaps Saito was too far gone to return with Cobb, so Cobb decided to cut his losses and spend as much time in Limbo with his children as possible. In this scenario, he’ll come back inside to find the top still spinning — but he won’t care, because that’s what he’s expecting.

The top is a red herring. Cobb doesn’t use the top as a totem at all. He still spins it, and it’s clear he has an emotional attachment to it, but it doesn’t function like the rest of the team’s totems do. After all, a totem only works if nobody else can re-create it in a dream. Anyone who knows the purpose of the top can make it fall over when it’s not supposed to, thereby making Cobb believe he’s awake when he’s not. Cobb is very open about what the top is for, rendering it useless as a totem. Which means Cobb either uses something else as a totem, or he operates without one.

The real meaning of the ending, I’m convinced, is that all three of these things are correct. The movie supports all of them in different ways, and from different angles. Some folks felt cheated when the ending cut away, but if it didn’t there’d be nothing to discuss. “The top fell — he’s home. Happy ending.”  “The top spins perfectly — he’s dreaming. Downer ending.”

What happens at the end isn’t what makes Inception interesting — but rather how the movie is constructed. It’s a rare film that can be cast in an entirely different light based solely on the final few seconds.

Compare it to the very end of The Prestige. Angier has been making clones of himself in order to set up an elaborate revenge scheme to trap his rival Borden. The last few lines of narration inform us, “You don’t really want to know. You want to be… fooled.” Just before the cut, we see a water tank with one of Angier’s many dead clones inside.

What if we hadn’t been shown the water tank? Could The Prestige have been interpreted differently? Could the events of the movie have led us anywhere but the conclusion we were shown in the final cut? I don’t think it would have. It would have promoted more discussion, sure. The ending would have been hidden, but it wouldn’t have been ambiguous. We didn’t have to see the clone in the tank to know that’s what Angier had been doing, because there’s only one thing Angier could have been doing in order to make the plot of the movie work.

So that’s why I’ve decided I like Inception better than The Prestige. Though, let’s be clear: I don’t like either as much as The Dark Knight.

Bottom line is, Chris Nolan is the best director in Hollywood right now. I can’t wait to see what he serves up next.