Inception – movie review

Movies, Review | Elena Nola | July 17, 2010 at 10:57 am

Inception is probably the first movie of 2010 that movie lovers have been legitimately anticipating—that is,
looking forward to since that very first preview back in February.  Certainly I was.  Sometimes that anticipation
is a bad thing, as when your hopes are dashed against a mediocre production; sometimes it makes a movie even
better, when it meets or exceeds all of your expectations.  Inception isn’t quite the latter but certainly isn’t
anything else.  Mostly, I think, what few preconceptions I had about the plot or scenario the movie would cover
turned out to be wrong, so I can’t call it what I expected, but the movie as it exists blew me away. 

The story of the film—and this is what surprised me—turned out to be one story with several layers, not several
smaller arcs as they tackled different jobs or something.  No, it’s just one job, and it is a big job.  A swan song
for DiCaprio’s character, who wants as payment for the job the client to use his political connections to clear
him of murder charges against his wife.  What they are trying to do is not extract information (which is their
usual line of work) but implant an idea that will then bloom from that subconscious/unconscious implantation via
dream into the flower of a conviction from the man himself, by his conscious mind’s reckoning.  They have to
create layers within layers in order to achieve this implantation, this “inception,” as they call it, and there is a
risk to all of them, going this deep, that if they die in the dream they do not awake but get cast into limbo
where the time dilation might well render them a lifetime before the dream comes to an end.

So here was the interesting thing about this set-up:  I wasn’t sold on the framing story, about DiCaprio trying to
get home to his kids via this shady corporate spying deal, and we never saw anything about the man they were
implanting with this inception to know if he was a villain or a victim.  I didn’t know who I should, in a moralistic
way, be rooting for—but by the time the action started, it didn’t matter.  I didn’t care whether I was in favor of
the mission’s execution; all I cared about was that within the parameters they were given, the objective was
immediate and exciting and tense to watch them try and accomplish.  The flashes back through the successive
levels of the dream ratcheted that tension higher and higher, as you saw each team racing within its time
dilation to beat both their clock and by extension the clock driving the entire structure.

Another thing that made the story not matter—I loved this conception of the dream world.  For me, one of the
only enduring ideas that stuck from my 13-year-old reading of The Wheel of Time books was the dreamworld his
characters could enter, where things were like and yet not like the real world.  I have a version of my parents’
road that I know as well as their real one, but yet it exists only in my dreams.  And we all have times when we’re
trying to tell someone about a dream, and we have to say things like “well, in the dream this made sense” or
“then we were just elsewhere, like you are sometimes in dreams,” and this movie played with those ideas.  The
world had its own physics, its own rules, and the dreamer would never notice it was odd until s/he awoke,
because in that dream those were the rules. 

The visuals were the final piece of this movie, and they were awesome.  From the scene early on with Ellen
Page’s character changing the physics of the world and creating streets that met at right angles along the x/y
plane instead of the y/z, to the sequence when they are in a rolling van in one dream and the physics of that
physical change affect the next level down so as the van rolls they are engaging in this fight that ranges from the
hallway floor to its ceiling, to the sudden rearing of new buildings in the landscape or their equally sudden
crumbling…this movie had some awesome things to look at.  So if you’re someone who likes visuals—not special
effects, which were actually used sparingly in comparison to achieving the same effect, but better, via camera
tricks, but visuals—then this movie is worth seeing regardless of other considerations.

But I’ve spent all this time saying why the story didn’t matter without touching on whether it turned out to be
good.  It did.  It was a bit slow to get started, and you will leave the theater still thinking about it.  There is a
facile surface reading that you can take away and feel satisfied with.  If your mind can’t let go of the ideas that
were incepted early in the film, however, if you paid close enough attention to note them, then you will start
reevaluating everything.  I have gone through three layers of understanding so far, and this is only in the first 12
hours since I saw it.  I am planning to see it again already—I expect on a second viewing my theories will become
obviously right or wrong.  But on the first viewing, this film leaves you thinking.

Chris Nolan is an excellent director, and I think he does better with idea movies rather than plot movies—for as
much as I enjoyed the first of his Batman movies (I was the one person any of my friends knew who didn’t like
The Dark Knight), I think they are the least of his films.  He has a great cast that he’s working with here; there
were no real weak links, although Ellen Page was probably the weakest only because she wasn’t doing anything
we haven’t seen her do before.  Which could easily be said of DiCaprio, too, here, except we forgive him for it
because he’s just so damn charismatic to watch anyway.  Joseph Gordon-Levitt—off his 500 Days of Summer
backslide and back to his better form—Cillian Murphy (doing his usual naïf thing, too), Handsome Bob from
Rocknrolla (Tom Hardy), Tom Berenger, Marion Cotillard, Michael Caine, and John Hurt round out the rest of the
cast. 

My bottom line on Inception is this:  if you thought you wanted to see this movie, you do.  And if you weren’t
sure, imagine a mix of The Matrix’s reality-bending and reality-questioning and Ocean’s Eleven slick, complex
heist, and The Dark City’s mind games and Memento’s mood and fractured storyline, and you get some idea of
what this movie is.  Add in a dash of Plato (“A man’s mind, once stretched to encompass a new idea, can never
go back to its original dimensions”) and some hyberbolic space-time dilation, and I think it becomes obvious that
you can’t go wrong with this movie.  Expect to be caught in the moments.  Expect to be made to wonder. 
Expect to be made to think.  And expect to want to see it again.

Sedation, Injection, err Invictus sorry ‘Inception’, yes yes ‘Inception’! Well, we are not always as goofy when it comes to
remembering movie names. It’s just that after watching Christopher Nolan’s futuristic espionage thriller containing some
heavy dose of cerebral elements, we are tad too exhausted and mind-numbed. Interestingly, not because the film didn’t
work for us but because it forced our brain to work! If this line sounded complicated? Again, we just saw Inception.
On a serious note, Inception is actually a film that forces you to think, challenges you to keep up with its pace, leaves you
awed and speechless and makes you study its concept rather than just see it.

But then striving hard to comprehend what’s going on in front of you is not always pleasing. As much as it keeps you on your
toes for every second that you watch the film, thanks to its perplexing concept, this very asset somewhere starts waning as
Nolan keeps pushing the envelope until it all starts seeming bizarre as the film advances.

The story goes like this. Cobb (DiCaprio) is a troubled genius who works as an extractor of confidential information from
people’s minds while they are in their subconscious and dreaming stage. He has the ability to enter and read their minds
while they are dreaming. Nothing seems impossible for Cobb except for reconciling with his wife and children and battling
with his inner demons.

Considering it as the only way to get back with his kids again, Cobb takes up an intricate new assignment of ‘plugging’ an
idea into a person’s mind instead of stealing it. This precarious mission is however a mammoth task even for experts like
Cobb and his groupies as this involves studying the minutest details of their subject’s life and the people around him.
Besides, during constructing a way to reach the subject’s dream within a dream and then within that dream, one cannot
create a world based on his/her memories but just pure imagination. Plagued by his own memories Cobb finds it difficult to
dream without the interference of his own past and thus ropes in young architect Ariadne (Juno fame Ellen Page) to do the
needful. Initially apprehensive, Ariadne joins hands with Cobb and as starts working closely with the brooding genius gets
the hint of his personal crisis and its would-be hazardous effect on their assignment.

Intricately interwoven, menacingly fast and meticulously crafted... Christopher Nolan blatantly forces his audiences to sit on
the edge of their seats and ‘concentrate’ on what’s happening. You might not even blink once or dream of anything else but
focus on solving the puzzle he so smartly creates. The special effects are ground-breaking. The scenes where Ariadne and
Cobb enter the surreal world of dreams are superbly shot. Folding roads, people and streets turning upside down as they
defy gravity gives you goosebumps. The climax where Cobb confronts his past is mind-blowing. The background score adds
to the impact.

However, having said it all, the fact that once Cobb and gang enter their subject’s (Cillian Murphy, impressive) deep layered
dreams (dream within a dream), the story loses clarity. You see the gang getting transferred to various worlds from under
water to amidst snow...leaving you in a state of utmost confusion. To top it all, Leo’s parallel track with his wife (Marion
Cotillard) adds to the convolution, driving the film to obscurity. However, the sheer novelty and originality of the concept
overshadows the drawbacks eventually.

Leonardo DiCaprio as the brooding man who needs help himself is supremely effective. His character and backgrounder
bears an uncanny resemblance to his role in Shutter Island. Ellen Page holds her own even in front of a seasoned actor like
Leo. Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Cobb’s right hand Arthur is stoic as needed. Cillian Murphy does his job well and Michael Caine
does a guest appearance.

If dreams fascinate you, solving puzzles grip you and if you don’t mind forcing yourself to study a film, ‘Inception’ is a must
watch. The film is a cerebral challenge thrown at its viewers by Nolan who has taken complex story telling to new heights in
this one.
Plot
Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), alongside pointman Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) are on an extraction mission
within the mind of powerful businessman Saito (Ken Watanabe); a form of corporate espionage through dreams.
Extractors enter their mark's dream, with architects constructing the world, all sleeping in close proximity
connected by a sedative administering device. Cobb carries a spinning top which spins unceasingly or topples to
determine whether he is dreaming or awake, respectively. The mission is aborted when Saito reveals he is
auditioning the team to perform the act of inception: using dreams to implant an idea.

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 their new architect. Due to the plan involving multiple dreams
within each other and stronger sedatives, death will not awaken the person but send them into limbo, where their
mind will be stuck for an indeterminate amount of time. Cobb's mind is continually haunted by his deceased wife
Mal (Marion Cotillard), who sabotages his missions, and he reveals to Ariadne that he spent years in limbo with her
as they constructed a world together. After waking, Mal remained convinced that they were still dreaming and
committed suicide, incriminating Cobb in her death so that he would also. Cobb refused and was forced to flee the
U.S. and his children to avoid murder charges. In return for the mission, Saito promises to clear the charges and
reunite Cobb with his children.

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 his dream, a rainy downtown area, and kidnap him. However they come under attack by
his trained subconscious projections, and Saito is badly injured. Eames changes into Peter Browning (Tom
Berenger), Fischer's godfather, to extract information from him. They then enter a van and sleep into the second
dream, a hotel, where the team makes Fischer believe 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 deeper into
Fischer's subconscious, a snowy mountain fortress, which Fischer must break into to reveal the planted idea. To
wake and protect the team, a member stays behind at each level with timed kicks: Yusuf driving the van off a
bridge, Arthur smashing an elevator containing the bodies upwards and Eames with explosives in the mountain
fortress.

Fischer is killed by Mal and goes into limbo, so 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 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 then 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 top to test reality, but is distracted by the reunion.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1375666/synopsis

The movie starts with Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) washed up on a beach. He is injured and seems delirious. He opens his
eyes once and sees two kids playing on the beach. Some men with guns (they appear to be guards) take him to an old man,
telling the man that Cobb was alone and carried only a pistol and a small brass top. The old man tells Cobb that he
recognizes the top, saying, "You remind me of someone... a man I met in a half-remembered dream. He was possessed of
some radical notions."

The scene shifts to Cobb, Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Saito (Ken Watanabe) having a quiet dinner in the same room as
the previous scene. Cobb is proposing to Saito that he should hire him and Arthur (his business partner) to protect himself
from "extraction," which is the process of stealing secrets from a person during a dream, when his or her mind is most
vulnerable. Cobb tells Saito that he is the most skilled extractor there is and that he can train Saito's mind to defend itself
against other extractors, but Saito will need to let Cobb into his mind completely. He mentions that extractors often steal
information from subconscious hiding places, such as a safe, and Saito glances at a safe across the room. Saito seems
uncertain and a little suspicious and leaves, saying he will consider the proposal. Cobb and Arthur leave the room and Arthur
says Saito suspects something is wrong -- that, rather than trying to protect Saito from extractors, Cobb and Arthur are
actually there to perform extraction on him.

Arthur then points out a woman in the crowd and asks Cobb, "What is she doing here?" Cobb tells Arthur to proceed with
the job and then approaches the woman, whom he calls Mal. She is standing on a balcony and asks Cobb, "If I jump, would I
survive?" He replies, "A clean dive, perhaps," and asks what she is doing there, to which she responds, "I thought you might
be missing me." Cobb says he does miss her but can't trust her anymore.

In the next scene, Cobb and Mal (Marion Cotillard) are alone in a room. She asks him, "Do the children miss me?" and he
replies, with a look of sadness, "I can't imagine." Cobb then makes Mal sit in a chair. He ties a rope to the leg of the chair and
climbs out of the window, down the side of the building, and back into the room where he, Arthur, and Saito had spoken
earlier. He opens the safe, takes out a yellow envelope, folds it, and puts it in his pocket. He is about to replace it with a fake
envelope, but just then Saito and Mal enter the room with guns. He slides his gun across the table toward Saito and Mal, and
Saito orders him to put down the envelope as well. Cobb asks Saito if Mal told him the truth or if he knew all along, and Saito
replies, "That you are here to steal from me, or that we are actually asleep?" The scene cuts to Cobb, Arthur, and Saito
sleeping in another room; they are all hooked up to a sleep machine in a briefcase, and a fourth man is monitoring them.
Outside the house they are sleeping in, mobs are rioting and getting closer.

Back in the dream, Mal brings in Arthur and holds a gun to his head. Cobb tells her there is no use threatening him because
they're dreaming. Mal responds that while killing someone in a dream just wakes them up, pain is in the mind and is
perceived as real, even in a dream. She shoots Arthur in the leg and he screams in pain. Cobb dives across the table for his
gun, shoots Arthur in the head, and makes a run for it. Arthur wakes up back in the house. In the dream, Saito opens the
envelope and is enraged to find blank pages. He yells at his guards to catch Cobb while an amused Mal watches. All hell
breaks loose, with fighting and gunshots and buildings crumbling. As the dream collapses around him, Cobb stands in
another room reading the papers in the real envelope, which are stamped "confidential."

Back in the sleep house, Arthur tells the monitor, Nash (Lukas Haas) to wake up Cobb. Nash plunges Cobb into a bath full of
water. Water pours through the walls in the dream in sync with the bathwater in the real world, and Cobb and Saito both
wake up. Saito asks how the extraction team found this secluded apartment of his, which is apparently a "love nest" he
shares with a married woman. Cobb implicates the woman and Saito says, "She would never." They struggle for a few
moments, and Cobb says Saito didn't put all his secrets in the safe -- there was one important piece of paper left out -- and
says he needs them for the men who hired him. Cobb realizes that Saito knew what they were up to all along and asked why
he allowed them into his mind at all. Saito responds that it was an audition for another job, and that he and Arthur failed,
Cobb protests, saying that he and Arthur successfully extracted every bit of information that was contained in Saito's safe,
and Saito says, "But your deception was obvious."

Cobb then says that his boss will not accept failure and tries to force Saito to reveal the needed information by throwing him
face down on the carpet and threatening to shoot him. Saito laughs as he strokes the carpet and realizes that it feels
different from the one in his real apartment. They are still dreaming -- a dream within a dream. Saito is impressed but also
confused. He thinks he should be able to control the dream, but Cobb reveals that it is not Saito's dream -- it is Nash's, the
dream architect. As the rioting mob from outside finally breaks into the house, all four of them wake up on a train, hooked
up to the same sleep machine that was being operated in the shared dream. Cobb, Arthur, and Nash awake first, and Arthur
chastises Nash for getting the carpet wrong, since it was his job as architect to design the dream. They unhook themselves
from the sleep machine, pack up the briefcase, and leave the train. Saito wakes up with only a teenage kid in his
compartment; the kid had been monitoring the group as they slept.

In the next scene, Cobb is in his apartment. He spins the brass top and puts a gun to his head. When the top wobbles and
falls, he puts the gun down, looking shaken but relieved. Then his phone rings. It's his two children, who are in the U.S. with
their grandmother. They ask when he is coming home, and he says he doesn't know; they also ask if their mother is with
him, and he says sadly that she isn't. It is revealed that Cobb is on the run from American authorities for an unspecified
reason, and that he can't return to his kids because of that.

Cobb and Arthur decide to lie low for a while, thinking their employer, Cobol Engineering, will not be pleased about the
botched job. Cobb plans to go to Buenos Aires and Arthur back to the U.S. Upon hearing that, Cobb says with a touch of
bitterness, "Send my regards." But before they leave, Saito catches up with them with his men and offers a proposal. He
wants Cobb to carry out "inception" -- planting an idea in someone's mind rather than extracting one. Arthur immediately
responds that inception is impossible because "true inspiration is impossible to fake." Even if one plants an idea in someone
else's mind, he says, the subject will know the idea is foreign. Cobb counters that it is possible, but extremely difficult.
However, he does not want to take on the mission; he insists he can find his own way to resolve things with Cobol
Engineering. He and Arthur start to leave, but Saito calls after Cobb, "Wouldn't you like to go home to America? To your
children?" He promises that if Cobb succeeds, he will make sure all the charges against him are dropped. Cobb asks how
complex the idea is that Saito wants him to implant, and Saito tells him it is simple enough: His main business competitor is
an old man who is very sick, and his son is about to take over his father's company. Saito wants the son to break up his
father's empire. Cobb agrees out of desperation to see his children again.

To assemble a team, Cobb goes to Paris to meet Mal's father, Miles (Michael Caine), who is a professor at a university. He
asks Miles for a good architect. Miles resists at first, telling Cobb he needs to "come back to reality." But when Cobb says this
job is the only way for him to get back to his children, Miles agrees to help. He introduces Cobb to Ariadne (Ellen Page),
saying she will make a better architect than even Cobb was. Cobb asks Ariadne to audition by drawing mazes for him, then
takes her into a dream (without telling her he is doing so) and shows her that in a dream, you can actively design your
environment. He explains that an architect creates a dream world, the team brings a subject into that world, and the subject
fills it with their subconscious. In this particular dream, Ariadne is the designer and the people around them are projections,
or "shades," of Cobb's subconscious.

Ariadne asks what happens when you start to alter the physics of the environment, and experiments by folding the street in
on itself. Cobb warns her that too much change alerts the subconscious to the foreign nature of the dreamer and draws
potentially dangerous attention from the projections. She looks around and sees the projections on the street staring at her.
Then she creates a bridge from memory, which Cobb recognizes as a place where he used to spend time with Mal. He
worriedly tells Ariadne that she should never recreate places from memory because it can bring out unwanted parts of the
subconscious -- instead, she should always imagine new places. Suddenly all the projections, including Mal, converge on
them, and Mal stabs Ariadne. Cobb and Ariadne wake up in the workshop where they had been sleeping, and Ariadne walks
out, saying she won't open her mind to Cobb when his subconscious is so tormented and dangerous. Cobb tells Arthur she
will be back -- now that she has experienced the pure creation of constructing a dream world, reality will no longer be
enough for her.

Cobb then travels to Mombasa, Kenya to find a forger/imitator, Eames (Tom Hardy). He talks to Eames about inception and
Eames tells him that he once tried it; he failed, but agrees that it can be done. Cobb is soon spotted by men working for
Cobol Engineering, and Eames creates a diversion to allow Cobb to escape. Cobb nearly gets caught, but Saito comes to his
rescue at the last minute (he says he has to oversee his investments) and he, Cobb, and Eames drive away safely. Next,
Eames directs Cobb to Yusuf (Dileep Rao), a chemist. Cobb explains that he wants to create a three-layered dream -- a dream
within a dream within a dream -- and Yusuf says the only way to make that stable is to use a powerful sedative. He shows
them its effectiveness by bringing them into another room where a group of men are sleeping. Yusuf reveals that these men
have lost track of what is real, and the dream has become their reality. He also tests the sedative on Cobb himself, and a few
minutes later, Cobb awakes very shaken from a dream about Mal. He convinces Yusuf to join the team.

The team decides to create a three-layered dream, with the idea being planted on the third level. The target is Robert
Fischer, Jr. (Cillian Murphy), a multibillion-dollar oil company heir. Fischer's father is dying and he is preparing to assume
control of his father's vast empire. His godfather is Peter Browning (Tom Berenger), a key part of the empire. Saito wants
Cobb to plant the idea in Fischer's head to split up his father's company. Because he wants to verify that the team completes
the job, Saito will accompany them into the dreams.

While preparing for the job, Ariadne learns that Mal is Cobb's deceased wife and sees a bit of his past when she sneaks into
a dream he is having alone. Cobb is tormented by his memories of Mal and his children. In his dreams, he sees his children
from behind, but they always run away before he can call out to them and see their faces. Ariadne realizes that the reason
Cobb cannot design dreams himself anymore is because his subconscious will bring Mal in as a spoiler. Ariadne tells him he
should warn the other team members of the risk they're taking by entering dreams with Cobb. But Cobb says if Ariadne
doesn't tell him the details of the dream architecture, Mal won't know them either. He also admits that the reason he can't
go back to the U.S. is that the authorities think he killed Mal. Ariadne falls silent, stunned by this news, and Cobb thanks her
"for not asking whether I did." Later, Arthur tells Ariadne about totems, which are objects extractors use to tell whether they
are awake or dreaming. Cobb's is the brass top; if he is dreaming, it never stops spinning. Arthur has a loaded die, and
Ariadne carves a customized chess piece.

The team assembles to discuss strategy. Yusuf explains that as they go deeper into the dream, their minds will work faster
and time will seem to slow down. With the sedative, 10 hours in the real world will give them one week on the first level of
the dream, six months on the second level, and 10 years on the third level. Their wake-up mechanism is called a kick: the jolt
received when suddenly falling or hitting a surface in the dream. He says the sedative leaves inner ear function intact so the
dreamers will be able to feel the kick.

Meanwhile, Eames observes Fischer, his father, and Browning. He discusses with the team Fischer's bad relationship with his
father and suggests an emotional basis on which to convince Fischer to buy the planted idea. Cobb says positive emotion is
stronger than negative, so they need Fischer to have a positive feeling about breaking up his fathers company. They decide
to try to repair Fischer's relationship with his father and make Browning -- who wants the company to continue -- out to be
the bad guy. They will do this by convincing Fischer that his father loved him and wanted him to create something for
himself, not follow in his fathers footsteps.

When Fischer Sr. dies, the team decides to execute the plan on a 10-hour Boeing 747 flight from Sydney to Los Angeles,
aboard which Fischer Jr. is carrying his father's coffin. Saito buys the airline and all the seats in the first class cabin, so the
only passengers in that section are the team, Fischer Jr., and the airline stewardess (who is in on the plan and monitors the
team as they sleep). Arthur steals Fischer's passport and hands it to Cobb, who returns it to Fischer and uses it as a
conversation opener. Cobb makes small talk with Fischer and then slips a powerful sedative into his drink. The team
members quickly hook themselves and Fischer up to the sleep machine and enter the dream.

The first level is Yusuf's dream. It is raining heavily. Arthur, Saito, and Eames kidnap Fischer and take him to a warehouse,
while Cobb and Ariadne follow in another car. On the way, Cobb's subconscious brings a freight train right down the middle
of the road and gunmen ambush both cars. Cobb tries to explain that Fischer might have been trained against extraction and
these are his defences. The team manages to reach the warehouse, but Saito is shot in the chest. When Eames tries to kill
him to put him out of his misery, Cobb stops him, saying the sedative they all took will not allow them to wake up until it
wears off. If they die in the dream, they will go into limbo, an extremely deep dream level, which could mean eternity to a
mind stuck there. By the time a person in limbo wakes up, their mind could be scrambled and their sense of reality lost. The
team is frightened by these unforeseen risks, but Cobb tells them the only way to get out is by continuing with the mission --
if they stay where they are, the projections will kill them before the sedative wears off.

When Ariadne confronts Cobb about him being the real cause of the freight train, he confesses that he can't seem to keep
Mal out of his dreams. He tells Ariadne how Mal died: The two of them were experimenting with dreams within dreams, and
they got stuck in limbo. They spent 50 years building a world for themselves, and when they finally got back to reality, Mal
continued to believe it was a dream and that dying was the only way to wake up. On their anniversary, Mal called Cobb to a
hotel room, where he found her sitting on the window ledge, about to jump. She told him she had sent a letter to their
attorney saying that Cobb had threatened her life, in an attempt to force Cobb to jump with her. Cobb refused and she
jumped to her death. With the authorities chasing him, ready to imprison him for Mal's murder, Cobb left his children and
fled the country.
The scene cuts back to the dream, where Eames impersonates Browning and screams like he is being tortured. Arthur and
Cobb, wearing masks, tell Fischer there is a safe in his office and demand the combination. Fischer insists he doesn't know
the combination, but when he hears Browning (really Eames) scream, he asks to speak to him. Browning/Eames tells Fischer
that the safe contains his fathers last will, which would dissolve the empire if Fischer chose to use it. Fischer asks why he
would want to dissolve the empire and forfeit his inheritance, and Browning responds that Fischer's father loved him and
wanted him to build something of his own. Fischer says his father didn't love him, telling Browning/Eames that his last word
to him was disappointed. Fischer's defences start closing in on the warehouse. The team decides to leave in a van and enter
the second level of the dream. Yusuf is to drive the van for a certain amount of time and then drive it off a bridge. The fall
from the bridge will be the kick to wake up the team.

The second dream is Arthur's. It is a restaurant in a hotel, and Eames -- who is impersonating a young woman this time -- hits
on Fischer at the bar. Eames leaves when Cobb approaches, and Cobb tells Fischer he is his security officer. He tells Fischer
that someone is trying to access his mind and that he, Cobb, is there to protect him. He convinces Fischer that he is
dreaming because he can't remember how he got to the bar, and the weather and gravity keep shifting. (Meanwhile, back
on the first dream level, Fischer's defences are chasing the van; Yusuf is driving it with the rest of the team asleep in the
backseat.) Fischer's own mind then projects Browning as the man behind his kidnapping; his projection of Browning tells him
that the empire is all he ever worked for and that he cant let Fischer destroy it by invoking the will in the safe. Cobb (who
keeps seeing his children in the dream and has to stop himself from following them) tells Fischer he should enter Browning's
dream and extract his secrets, and so -- with Fischer now unknowingly assisting in his own inception -- the team gathers in a
hotel room and enters the third dream level. Arthur stays behind on the second level to distract Fischer's projections and to
administer the kick when its time for the team to wake up.

The third level (Eames's dream) is set in snowy mountains, where the safe is in a heavily guarded fortress. Cobb tells Fischer
to break into the fortress and open the safe, where he will find his father's will. Eames and the rest of the team attempt to
draw the guards away.

Dream level 1: Yusuf drives the van off the bridge. The team misses that kick, but a second one will come when the van hits
the water. 10 seconds left.

Dream level 2: Because the van in the first level is in free-fall, there is zero gravity in the hotel. A floating Arthur ties the
sleeping team together, preparing to improvise a kick. 3 minutes left.

Dream level 3: Fischer is struggling to get to the safe. The wounded Saito sets off some last-minute explosions to fend off the
guards; then he dies. 60 minutes left.

After a long struggle and shootout in the snowy fields surrounding the fortress, Fischer finally reaches the safe. But just then
Mal appears as a projection of Cobb's subconscious. Cobb and Ariadne see Mal but Cobb hesitates to shoot her, because he
can't convince himself that she isn't real. Mal shoots Fischer. Cobb then shoots Mal, but it's too late. Everybody gathers
around Fischer and Cobb says it's all over -- they've failed, because with Fischer dead, there is no way to implant the idea in
his mind. But Ariadne says there's still a way -- they must follow Fischer into limbo, implant the idea there, and then
improvise a kick to get out of limbo. They know Fischer must be in Cobb's limbo -- the world he built with Mal -- because Mal
is a projection of his mind.

Eames stays behind as the monitor on the third level, and Cobb and Ariadne enter a fourth level, limbo. This is the world
Cobb and Mal built and inhabited for 50 subjective years. They enter one of the houses Cobb and Mal built and find Mal
sitting in the kitchen. Mal accuses Cobb of abandoning her, telling him he had promised they would grow old together. She
tells him this is reality and that he should stay here with her and their children. Cobb tells Mal that she isn't real and that he
has to get out of limbo to get back to their real children, whom she left by killing herself.

Mal tries to convince Cobb to stay by making him question what is reality. She says, "You keep telling yourself what you
know. But what do you believe? What do you feel?" He responds, "Guilt," and explains to Ariadne the truth behind Mal's
death. The brass top was originally Mal's; she had locked it away in a safe. When they were stuck in limbo together, Mal
believed it was reality. To convince her otherwise, Cobb performed inception on her -- he broke into the safe, left the top
spinning there, and planted the idea in her mind that this world (limbo) was not real. Mal finally agreed to come back to
reality. She and Cobb lay on the train tracks, and when they died, they woke up back in their house after decades in limbo.
But the idea Cobb planted, that her world was not real, stayed in her mind and came to possess her. She killed herself in real
life, thinking it was still a dream and that death was the only way out. This is how Cobb knew inception was possible -- he
had already done it on his own wife.

Now, Cobb tells his projection of Mal that she is not real and that he has to get back to the real world, where their children
are. He tells her that even though she doesn't remember it, they did grow old together when they were in limbo. Now he
has to let her go. Cobb tells Ariadne to find Fischer and push him off the balcony as an improvised kick. Cobb must stay to
find Saito, who is somewhere in limbo after dying in the third dream level. Ariadne pushes Fischer off and then jumps
herself, warning Cobb not to lose himself with Mal.

Dream level 3: Eames uses a defibrillator to revive Fischer, who wakes up and goes into the vault inside the fortress. He finds
his dying father lying in a hospital bed. His father whispers, "disappointed," and Fischer says he knows he is disappointed
that Fischer couldn't be like him -- but his father corrects him, saying he is disappointed that Fischer even tried to be like
him. He wants him to be his own person. Fischer opens the safe beside the bed, takes out the will, and turns back to his
father, who has just died. He begins to cry. Outside the vault, Ariadne wakes up from limbo.

Dream level 2: Arthur has pulled everyone into an elevator and uses explosives to send it into free-fall, providing the next
kick.

Dream level 1: The van hits the water, providing the final kick. Everyone wakes up except Cobb, and they swim to the
surface. Ariadne explains that Cobb stayed behind to find Saito. Arthur thinks he will be lost there, but Ariadne insists he will
be all right. On the shore, Fischer tells Browning (Eames) that he will break up his fathers company.

Back in limbo, there is a repeat of the opening scene, with Cobb washing up on the shore and being taken to the old man. It
is Saito, and though he has only been there for a few minutes of real time, it has been many years in limbo. Cobb shows him
the top and says he is there to remind Saito of "a secret he once knew but chose to forget" -- that this world is not real. He
tells Saito to come back to reality so they can be young men again, and convinces him to honour their arrangement. Saito
takes the gun in his hand.
Then everyone is waking up on the plane as it lands in Los Angeles. No one speaks at first. Cobb gives Saito a long, sharp
look, and after a moments hesitation, Saito picks up the phone and makes the call to get the authorities off Cobb's back.
Everyone disembarks. Cobb goes through security and customs without a hitch. He sees the other team members collecting
their luggage. Miles is there to welcome Cobb and takes him to his old house, where he sees his children playing in the
backyard.

Cobb spins the top to see if this is real or another dream, but just then the children turn and see him and run toward him,
shouting, "Daddy!" Without looking to see if the top has fallen, Cobb goes outside to hug them. The camera focuses on the
top. It is still spinning but wobbles slightly, as if it were about to topple. Then the screen goes black and the credits begin,
leaving open the question of whether Cobb's long-sought homecoming is reality or a dream.