Two little words serve as our pop culture lodestone, powering internet traffic and dinner conversation alike: “ending explained.” Plug them into Google or YouTube and you’ll find everything from a video promising to tell you “what REALLY happened” at the end of 28 Years Later in a mere 40 minutes to “A Star Is Born ending explained: What happened to Jack?” published seven years after the Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper remake made the answer to that question quite clear.
We have an apparently insatiable desire to “get” movies, to view their themes and emotions as data points to be slotted into our brains alongside our passwords and weekend plans. Maybe that’s because we so often reduce movie analysis to jigsaws made of tropes, or maybe it’s just because no one wants to admit that they walked out of Jurassic World Rebirth wondering where all those dinosaurs came from. Regardless, no movie fueled the explainer industrial complex like Inception, which hit theaters 15 years ago today and prompted countless people leaving those theaters to argue about whether that spinning top was destined to fall over.
