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Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his
partner Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) perform an illegal corporate
espionage by entering the subconscious minds of their targets, using
two-level "dream within a dream" strategies to "extract" valuable
information. Each of the "extractors" carries a "totem", a personalized
small object whose behavior is unpredictable to anyone except its owner,
to determine if they are within another person's dream. Cobb's totem is a
spinning top which perpetually spins in the dream state. Cobb struggles
with memories of his dead wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), who manifests
within his dreams and tries to sabotage his efforts.
Cobb is approached by the wealthy Mr. Saito (Ken Watanabe), Cobb's last
extraction target, asking them to perform the act of "inception", planting
an idea within the person's subconscious mind. Saito wishes to break up
the vast energy empire of his competitor, the ailing Maurice Fischer (Pete
Postlethwaite), by suggesting this idea to his son Robert Fischer (Cillian
Murphy) who will inherit the empire when his father dies. Should Cobb
succeed, Saito promises to use his influence to clear Cobb of the murder
charges for his wife's death, allowing Cobb to re-enter the United States
and reunite with his children. Cobb assembles his team: Eames (Tom Hardy),
an identity forger; Yusuf (Dileep Rao), a chemist who concocts the
powerful sedative needed to stabilize the layers of the shared dream; and
Ariadne (Ellen Page), a young student architect tasked with designing the
labyrinth of the dream landscapes. Saito insists on joining the team as an
observer and to assure the job is completed. While planning the inception,
Ariadne learns of the guilt Cobb struggles with from Mal's suicide and his
separation from his children when he fled the country as a fugitive.
The job is set into motion when Maurice Fischer dies and his son
accompanies his father's body from Sydney to Los Angeles. During the
flight, Cobb sedates Fischer, and the team bring him into a three-level
shared dream. At each stage, the member of the team who is "creating" the
dream remains while the other team members fall asleep within the dream to
travel further down into Fischer's subconscious. The dreamers will then
ride a synchronized system of "kicks" (a car diving off a bridge, a
falling elevator, and a collapsing building) back up the levels to wake up
to reality. In the first level, Yusuf's dream of a rainy city, the team
successfully abducts Fischer, but the team is attacked by Fischer's
militarized subconscious projections, which have been trained to hunt and
kill extractors. Saito is mortally wounded during the shoot-out, but due
to the strength of Yusuf's sedative, dying in the dream will send them
into limbo, a deep subconscious level where they may lose their grip on
reality and be trapped indefinitely.
Eames takes the appearance of Fischer's godfather Peter Browning (Tom
Berenger) to suggest that he reconsider his opinion of his father's will.
Yusuf remains on the first level driving a van through the streets, while
the remaining characters enter Arthur's dream, taking place in a corporate
hotel. Cobb turns Fischer against Browning and persuades him to join the
team as Arthur runs point, and they descend to the third dream level, a
snowy mountain fortress dreamed by Eames, which Fischer is told represents
Browning's subconscious. Yusuf's evasive driving on the first level
manifests as distorted gravity effects on the second and an avalanche on
the third.
Saito succumbs to his wounds, and Cobb's projection of Mal sabotages the
plan by shooting Fischer dead. Cobb and Ariadne elect to enter limbo to
find Fischer and Saito. There, Cobb confronts his projection of Mal, who
tries to convince him to stay with her and his kids in limbo. Cobb refuses
and confesses that he was responsible for Mal's suicide: to help her
escape from limbo during a shared dream experience, he inspired in her the
idea that her world wasn't real. Once she had returned to reality, she
became convinced that she was still dreaming and needed to die in order to
wake up. Through his confession, Cobb attains catharsis and chooses to
remain in limbo to search for Saito; Eames defibrillates Fischer to bring
him back up to the third-level mountain fortress, where he enters a safe
room and discovers and accepts the idea to split up his father's business
empire.
Leaving Cobb behind, the team members escape by riding the kicks back up
the levels of the dream. Cobb eventually finds an elderly Saito who has
been waiting in limbo for decades in dream time (just a few hours in real
time), and the two help each other to remember their arrangement. The team
awakens on the flight; Saito arranges for Cobb to get through U.S.
customs, and he goes home to reunite with his children. Cobb uses his
spinning top to test reality but is distracted by his children before he
sees the result. |
