Former dream architect Dominick
"Dom" Cobb and business partner
Arthur perform corporate espionage using an experimental military-
developed machine to infiltrate the subconscious of their targets and extract information while dreaming,
their latest target being Japanese
businessman Saito. Tiered dream within a dream strategies are used and dreamers awaken by a "kick" or by dying in the dream. If the
dreamer is the one who dies, the
dream "collapses". Each extractor
carries a totem, a small object the
behavior of which is only
predictable to its owner, used to determine whether a dreamer is in
someone else's dream. Cobb's totem
is a spinning top that perpetually spins in the dream state. The
extraction fails due to Mallorie "Mal"
Cobb, Cobb's deceased wife, whose
memory projection sabotages the
mission. Saito reveals, after Cobb's
and Arthur's associate sells them out, that he was actually auditioning
the team to perform the difficult act
of inception: implanting an idea into
a person's subconscious while they
sleep. Saito wishes to break up the energy conglomerate of his ailing competitor Maurice Fischer, by
planting the idea in his son and heir
Robert Fischer to disintegrate his
father's company. Should Cobb
succeed, Saito would use his
influence to clear a murder charge against Cobb, so he can return to the
United States and his children. Cobb
accepts the offer and assembles his
team: Eames, a conman and identity
forger; Yusuf, a chemist who
concocts the powerful sedative for a stable dream within a dream
strategy; Ariadne, an architecture
student tasked with designing the labyrinth of the dream landscapes; and Arthur. Saito accompanies so
that he knows whether or not Cobb
and his team succeeded. When the elder Fischer dies in
Sydney and his body is flown back
to Los Angeles, the team share the
flight with Robert Fischer and Cobb
sedates him, bringing him into the
shared dream. At each stage, the member of the team generating the
dream stays behind to initiate the
"kick", while the other members
sleep within the dream to travel a
level deeper. In the first level, Yusuf's
rainy downtown dream, the team abducts Fischer. However Fischer's
trained subconscious projections
attack and severely wound Saito.
Eames temporarily takes the
appearance of Fischer's godfather,
Peter Browning, to suggest Fischer reconsider his father's will. Yusuf drives the team in a van as they are
sedated into Arthur's dream, a hotel,
where the team recruit Fischer,
convincing him his kidnapping was
orchestrated by Browning. In the
third dream level, a snowy mountain fortress dreamed by Eames, Fischer
is told they are in Browning's
subconscious, but they are really
going deeper into Fischer's. Yusuf,
under assault by trained projections,
initiates his kick too soon by driving off a bridge, sending Arthur's dream
world into zero-gravity and causing
an avalanche in Eames' dream.
Arthur improvises a new kick using
an elevator that will be synchronized
with the van hitting the water, while the team in Eames' dream races to
finish the job before the new round
of kicks. Due to the effects of heavy sedation
and multi-layered dreaming, death
during this mission will result in
entering Limbo, dream space of
unknown content where the
dreamer could be trapped. Elapsed time in each dream level is roughly
twenty times greater than in the
level above it; in Limbo, the deepest
level of all, 24 hours of outer-world
time would be experienced as about
half a century. Cobb reveals to Ariadne that he spent "fifty years"
with Mal in Limbo constructing a
world from their shared memories
whilst seemingly growing old
together. After returning to the
waking world, Mal remained convinced she was still dreaming
and committed suicide, trying to
persuade Cobb to do so by
retroactively incriminating him in her
death. He fled the U.S. and left his
children behind, ostensibly in the care of his father-in-law. Saito succumbs to his wounds, and
Cobb's projection of Mal sabotages
the plan by killing Fischer, sending them both into Limbo.[14] Cobb and Ariadne enter Limbo to find Fischer
and Saito, while Eames remains on
his dream level to set up a kick by
rigging the fortress with explosives.
Cobb confronts his projection of Mal,
who tries convincing him to stay in Limbo. Cobb refuses and confesses
that he was responsible for Mal's
suicide: having convinced her to
leave Limbo by using inception to
plant the idea in her mind that the
world they had been living in for fifty years was not real, and hence
the need to kill themselves in order
to return to the real world, once
back in the real world she continued
to believe dying would wake her.
Mal attacks Cobb but Ariadne shoots her. Through his confession, Cobb
attains catharsis and chooses to remain in Limbo to search for Saito.
Ariadne pushes Fischer off a
balcony, bringing him back up to
the mountain fortress, where he
enters a safe room to discover and
accept the planted idea: that his father wishes him to be his "own
man", and that splitting up the
conglomerate might not be a radical
notion. All of the team members except
Cobb and Saito ride the
synchronized kicks back to reality:
Ariadne jumps off a balcony in
Limbo, Eames detonates the
explosives in the fortress, Arthur blasts an elevator containing the
team's sleeping bodies up an
elevator shaft, and the van in Yusuf's
dream hits the water. Cobb
eventually finds an aged Saito and
the two remember their arrangement, presumably killing
themselves and awakening to
outer-world reality on the airplane.
Saito honors the arrangement and
Cobb passes through U.S. customs once the plane lands in Los Angeles.
Before reuniting with his children,
Cobb tests reality with his spinning
top, but he turns away to greet them
before observing the results. As he
plays with his children, the camera pans to the spinning top, at which
point the film ends.