Because It Matters If It's Real.

I love the movie Inception. I think it is better than the Matrix… and I have been a Matrix fan for a long time… (the first movie only… really)

The first time I watched Inception, however, I was not so enamored… not until a couple minutes after the movie.
That was when I realized the whole movie answers a question that a creepy looking old guy gives somewhere near the beginning:

"They come to be woken up. The dream has become their reality. Who are you to say otherwise, huh?"

In the most powerful quote in the movie to me, Cobb, the main character does "say otherwise". Talking to his mind's projection of his beloved, though dead, wife, he says:

"I wish. I wish more than anything. But I can't imagine you with all your complexity, all you perfection, all your imperfection. Look at you. You are just a shade of my real wife. You're the best I can do; but I'm sorry, you are just not good enough."

Real matters. Cobb does not love his mind's image of his wife, we should not care simply for what the world is to us, but for what it truly is. Our worlds do not, should not, cannot, be completely our constructions, our "dreams" our eternal "limbo" of creating our own comforts and desires.

We live in a real world, and I love this movie because it strikes a resonant cord in my mind: Truth exists, it can be known, it matters.

However, the movie also shows a flip side to the whole bargain: Faith is part and parcel of knowledge. Cobb can "know" that he is in the real world… but to know that he has to accept it. He can test it, he does test it, but he has to believe it too. His wife chooses to believe a lie, and she takes her own life. He chooses to live with that pain, to not try to escape reality, but to face it down with all its imperfections and all its brokenness.

This is why I love the movie Inception. This is how they make you cheer for a hired gun who messes with people's minds and steals from where no man should go. Cobb is screwed up… the ideas of inception and extraction are screwed up… but in the area of of the question "does reality matter?" -- I think the movie has its head screwed on just right :-)