Inception

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 increasingly fast 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 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, persuading Cobb to do so by incriminating him in her death, but he instead fled the U.S. and the murder charges...More>>