Thank god... I wasted like 3 minutes thinking about that ending.. but now I know.. great movie..

finally...i can sleep now =)

erm, what cryptic ending? it just got cryptic after reading this.

can someone explain it further please?

Yeah can someone detail the endign a bit better. I watched a nonperfect version from the interwebz and couldn't tell exactly what happened as the stupid thing got a bit blurry then.

I know he started his top and then walked out to his kids. Did the top stop/continue? Why is it cryptic?

Isn't it obvious?  If he was still dreaming he'd still be in that weird limbo level dream.  As far as I understood the movie and the concept once you got to that level you either stayed there or you woke up, no moving to a happy/better dream middle ground.

ah thanks. I thought I saw it starting to fall, so I think it fell and he was home. THough I can understand the other viewpoint.

...and what he is saying in the OP is that the character walked away from the top because it doesn't matter if it fell or not. Real life is solely your perception. If you're there, its real.

I don't know.  The way I understood limbo from the movie was that it wasn't like his other levels.  It was more of a prison/sad level.  The level where he dremt of his children was a higher level I thought.  Maybe I just assumed that since limbo was portrayed so ugly and deteriorated in the movie.

Either way I assumed the top was going to fall :p

Well, look at Saito's limbo. He was massively rich, lived to old age and...owned an island, or something.

I'm not sure what was up with Fourth Level Limbo, though, with Mal and the collapsing buildings. Was that Cobb's limbo?

HA! Take that people who were trying to convince me the whole movie was actually a dream!