Manipulating or “editing” peoples brains in dreams and in broad daylight is not something we’re familiar with as of yet. There are no machines sophisticated enough to enable us enter and “edit” not just our dreams but dreams of other people. This goes against the very basic concepts of Science and Human existence. Perhaps in the future groundbreaking research will advance enough for us to be able to tap into the world of the dream.
The human brain is vulnerable in the dream state because your conscious defenses are lowered making your thoughts liable to theft. Cob(Leonardo DiCaprio) and his team are specialists in extraction, stealing information from targets while they’re in a dream state. His team is made up of himself, Arthur, Ariadne and others.
To understand the beginning of this movie, you need to see the end. The movie starts out when Cob a very skilled extractor, no “the best” extractor infiltrates Saito’s dream in a plot to steal information from him for the organization he works for. Their cover is blown and Saito realizes he is dreaming when a projection of Cob’s dead wife, Mal, turns on them in his dream. They wake up and he tells Cob he let them into his mind because he was testing him to ascertain if he really is the best and that he failed. What he doesn’t know is that even the reality he just woke up to is another dream. A dream within a dream.
To hide from Saito and his own organization, Cob and his team split up. When Saito catches Cob, he does one last job, inception(planting an Idea in someone’s mind), on Fischer’s mind to get him to dissolve his father’s empire which he will soon become the CEO of. For doing the job Saito makes some calls to acquit him of the alleged charge of murdering his wife so that he can go home to his kids. Is cob really the best extractor? Even for someone as skilled as he is, is inception even possible?
Cob recruits and trains Ariadne, their new architect after Saito killed the old one. He hires other professionals like a chemist too. The architect creates and designs the world of the dream, Cob and Arthur bring the subject into the dream and the subject(host) fills the dream with projections from their subconscious. He teaches her some basic things she should know about the job. In the dream world, our mind functions faster and time feels slow and gets slower the deeper into the dream we go. 5 minutes in the real world is an hour in the dream world. To separate reality from a dream, each member in the team has totems.
They sedate Fischer on a 10-hour plane flight. In the dream for this job they have to create several dreams within a dream to plant the Idea from it’s most basic level all the way up to the top to give him a complete story(Idea) on why he should dissolve the company. To their surprise his subconscious is trained to protect his mind even in a dream so it attacks them and Saito is hurt. Cob lets them in on a critical piece of information he withheld from them that if they die in this dream, instead of waking up like in a normal case, their mind will be lost in a limbo possibly till the end of time. Saito dies. Once again Mal kills Fischer and they have to follow his mind in limbo to get him back in order that their minds are not lost with him in limbo.
They get Fischer but Cob stays behind to find Saito . He finds Saito an old man in limbo and convinces him that world is not real and that he needed to come back to reality to honor their agreement. They wake up to reality in the plane and Saito makes the call. Cob goes home to his kids. He spins his totem which should stop after a while to confirm he is not dreaming. At the movie ending, the totem is still spinning. Is Cob awake or still in a dream?
