inception

Plot

Dominic Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), along with point man Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), is on an extraction mission within the mind of a powerful Japanese businessman Saito (Ken Watanabe); a form of corporate espionage through dreams. Pain is felt in dreams, but death results in awakening. Cobb carries a totem in the form of a spinning top which originally belonged to his deceased wife Mal (Marion Cotillard), to determine whether he is dreaming or awake, which spins at a uniformly fast speed or topples, respectively. The extraction fails due to the intervention of Mal, whose memory haunts Cobb's mind and sabotages his missions. Saito reveals that he is in fact auditioning the team to perform the act of inception: using dreams to implant an idea. He promises to have murder charges against Cobb cleared so that he can return to the U.S. and visit his children, in return for the mission's success.

The target is Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), son of Saito's terminally ill corporate rival, Maurice Fischer (Pete Postlethwaite). The objective is to convince Fischer to break up his father's empire. Cobb recruits Eames (Tom Hardy), a forger who can change appearance inside dreams, Yusuf (Dileep Rao), a sedative chemist, and Ariadne (Ellen Page), a student whom he and Arthur train as an architect to design dream worlds. When the elder Fischer dies in Sydney, Saito and the team share the flight with Robert Fischer back to Los Angeles and drug him. They enter Yusuf's dream, a rainy downtown area, and kidnap Fischer. However, they come under attack by Fischer's trained subconscious projections, and Saito is badly injured. Due to the strength of the sedatives and multiple dream layers, death will result in the person going into limbo, a world of unconstructed dream space, for a seemingly indefinite time. Cobb reveals to Ariadne that he spent 50 years with Mal in limbo, where they shaped their own world and lives. After waking, Mal had remained convinced she was dreaming and committed suicide, attempting to persuade Cobb to do so by incriminating him in her death, but he instead fled the U.S. and the murder charges.

Eames changes into Peter Browning (Tom Berenger), Fischer's godfather, to extract information from him, with little success. The team then enters a van and are sedated into Arthur's dream, a hotel, where the team convinces Fischer that the kidnapping on the first level was orchestrated by Browning and that he must enter his godfather's mind to determine his motives. They in fact enter into a third level, dreamt by Eames,^[11] where Fischer must break into a snowy mountain fortress to reveal the planted idea. To wake and protect the team, the member dreaming each level stays behind at that level, being assigned the triggering of synchronized kicks: Yusuf driving the van off a bridge, Arthur crashing an elevator carrying the sleeping team members (which turns out to happen in a zero gravity sequence), and Eames detonating explosives in the mountain fortress' foundation. Music played into the dreamer's ears is used to help synchronize the kicks by signaling to the dreamer on each level when a kick on the previous level is about to take place.

Fischer is killed by Mal and goes into limbo. Ariadne and Cobb follow him down and confront her. There Mal attempts to convince Cobb to stay in limbo by making him question reality, referring to events that occurred while he was awake. Cobb reveals that he had originally planted the idea in Mal's mind to wake, making him indirectly responsible for her suicide. She attacks him, but Ariadne shoots her. Cobb remains in limbo to locate a now dead Saito, while Fischer and Ariadne return to the mountain fortress where he comes to the conclusion that his father wanted him to be his own man. Cobb eventually locates an aged Saito and tells him that they need to return to reality. He suddenly wakes on the plane to find everyone up and well. Saito honors their arrangement; Cobb enters the United States and finally returns home to his children. Cobb spins his totem top to test reality, but is distracted by the reunion.