Inception is a 2010 science fiction action heist film which was written, co-produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan. The film features an international ensemble cast starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Dileep Rao, Tom Berenger, andMichael Caine. DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, a specialised corporate spy and thief. His work consists of secretly extracting valuable commercial information from theunconscious minds of his targets while they are asleep and dreaming. Wanted for murder and unable to visit his children, Cobb is offered a chance to regain his old life as payment for a task considered to be impossible: "inception", the implantation of an original idea into a target's subconscious.[5]
Development began roughly nine years before Inception was released. In 2001, Nolan wrote an 80-page treatment about dream stealers, and presented the idea toWarner Bros. The story was originally envisioned as a horror film inspired by concepts of lucid dreaming and dream incubation.[6] Feeling he needed to have more experience with large-scale films,[7] Nolan opted to work on Batman Begins (2005), The Prestige (2006), and The Dark Knight (2008). He spent six months polishing the script for Inception before Warner Bros. purchased it in February 2009.[8] Filming spanned six countries and four continents, beginning in Tokyo on June 19, 2009, and finishing in Canada in late November of the same year.
Inception was officially budgeted at $160 million, a cost that was split between Warner Bros and Legendary Pictures.[3] Nolan's reputation and success with The Dark Knight helped secure the film's $100 million in advertising expenditure,[3] with most of the publicity involving viral marketing. Inception premiered in London on July 8, 2010, and was released in both conventional and IMAX theaters on July 16, 2010.[9][10] A box office success, Inception has grossed over $800 million worldwide and is currently one of the highest-grossing films of all time.[4] The home video market also had strong results, with $68 million in DVD sales.
Inception received wide critical acclaim, with numerous critics praising it for its originality, cast, score, and visual effects.[11] The film received eight Academy Awardnominations including Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, Best Original Score and Best Art Direction and won the awards for Best Visual Effects, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing and Best Cinematography.
Plot
Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his business partner Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) perform illegal corporate espionage by entering the subconscious minds of their targets, using two-level "dream within a dream" strategies to extract valuable information. Dreamers are awakened either by a sudden shock (a "kick"), or by dying in the dream. Each of the extractors carries a totem, a personalized small object whose behavior is unpredictable to anyone except its owner, to determine whether they are in another person's dream. Cobb's totem is a spinning top which perpetually spins in the dream state. Cobb struggles with memories of his dead wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), who manifests within his dreams and tries to sabotage his efforts.
Cobb is approached by the wealthy Mr. Saito (Ken Watanabe), Cobb's latest extraction target, asking him and his team to perform the act of "Inception"; planting an idea within the person's subconscious mind without them knowing. Saito wishes to break up the vast energy conglomerate of his competitor, the ailing Maurice Fischer (Pete Postlethwaite), by planting this idea in his son, Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), who will inherit the empire when his father dies. Should Cobb succeed, Saito promises to use his influence to clear Cobb of the murder charges for his wife's death, allowing Cobb to re-enter the United States and reunite with his children. Despite Arthur's insistence that inception is impossible, Cobb accepts the job and assembles his team: Eames (Tom Hardy), an identity forger; Yusuf (Dileep Rao), a chemist who concocts the powerful sedative needed to stabilize the three-layered shared dream required for inception; and Ariadne (Ellen Page), a young architecture student tasked with designing the labyrinth of the dream landscapes. Saito insists on joining the team as an observer and to ensure the job is completed. While planning the inception, Ariadne learns of the guilt Cobb struggles with from Mal's suicide and his separation from his children when he fled the country as a fugitive.
The job is set in motion when Maurice Fischer dies and his son accompanies his father's body from Sydney to Los Angeles. During the flight, Cobb sedates Robert Fischer, and the team bring him into the shared dream. At each stage, the member of the team who is "creating" the dream stays behind to generate the "kick", while the other team members fall asleep within the dream to travel further down into Fischer's subconscious. The dreamers will then ride a synchronized series of "kicks" (the van plunging off a bridge, a fall between hotel rooms, and a collapsing building) back up the levels to wake up to reality. In the first level, Yusuf's dream of a rainy city, the team successfully abducts Fischer, but they are attacked by projections of Fischer's 'militarized subconscious', which have been trained to hunt and kill extractors, and Saito is mortally wounded. Due to the potency of Yusuf's sedative, however, dying in the dream will send them into Limbo, a deep subconscious level where they may lose their grip on reality and be trapped indefinitely.
Eames temporarily takes the appearance of Fischer's godfather Peter Browning (Tom Berenger) to suggest that he reconsider his opinion of his father's will. Yusuf remains on the first level driving a van through the streets, while the remaining team members enter Arthur's dream, taking place in a corporate hotel. Cobb and Eames turn Fischer against Browning and persuade him to join the team as Arthur runs point. They descend to the third dream level, Eames' dream, a snowy mountain fortress designed by Ariadne. Fischer is told that it represents Browning's subconscious, but the team is really accessing Fischer's subconscious. Yusuf's evasive driving on the first level manifests as distorted gravity effects on the second, forcing Arthur to improvise a kick using an elevator shaft, and an avalanche on the third.
Saito succumbs to his wounds, and Cobb's projection of Mal sabotages the plan by shooting Fischer, killing him.[12] Cobb and Ariadne enter Limbo to find Fischer and Saito. There, Cobb confronts his projection of Mal, who tries to convince him to stay with her and his children in Limbo. Cobb refuses and confesses that he feels he was responsible for Mal's suicide. Using inception to help her escape from Limbo during a shared dream experience, he inspired in her the idea that her world wasn't real. Once she had returned to reality, she became convinced that she was still dreaming and needed to die in order to wake up, writing a letter claiming that Cobb was threatening her to try and convince him to accept their dream state and commit suicide with her. Mal then stabs Cobb with a knife but Ariadne shoots her. Through his confession, Cobb attains catharsis and chooses to remain in Limbo to search for Saito. Eames defibrillates Fischer to bring him back up to the third-level mountain fortress, where he enters a safe room and discovers and accepts the idea to split up his father's business empire.
Leaving Cobb behind, the team members escape by riding the kicks back up the levels of the dream. Cobb eventually finds an elderly Saito who has been waiting in Limbo for decades in dream time (just a short time in real time), the two help each other to remember their arrangement, and the team awakens on the flight. Cobb passes through U.S. customs, and reunites with his children at home. He uses his spinning top totem to test reality, but is distracted by his children before he can see the result.
Cast
- Leonardo DiCaprio as Dominic "Dom" Cobb, a professional thief who specializes in conning secrets from his victims by infiltrating their dreams. DiCaprio was the first actor to be cast in the film.[13] Nolan had been trying to work with the actor for years and met him several times, but was unable to convince him to appear in any of his films until Inception.[14] According to Hollywood Reporter, both Brad Pitt and Will Smith were offered the role.[15]
- Ellen Page as Ariadne, a graduate student of architecture who is recruited to construct the various dreamscapes, which are described as mazes. The name Ariadnealludes to a princess of Greek myth, daughter of King Minos, who aided the hero Theseus by giving him a sword and a ball of string to help him navigate the labyrinth which was the prison of the Minotaur. Nolan said that Page was chosen for being a "perfect combination of freshness and savvy and maturity beyond her years".[16]Page said her character acts as a proxy to the audience, as "she's just learning about these ideas and, in essence, assists the audience in learning about dream sharing".[17]
- Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Arthur, Cobb's partner who manages and researches the missions. Gordon-Levitt compared Arthur to the producer of Cobb's art, "the one saying, 'Okay, you have your vision; now I'm going to figure out how to make all the nuts and bolts work so you can do your thing'".[18] The actor did all of his stunts but one scene and said the preparation "was a challenge and it would have to be for it to look real".[19]
- Ken Watanabe as Mr. Saito, a businessman who employs Cobb for the team's mission. Nolan wrote the role with Watanabe in mind, as he wanted to work with him again after Batman Begins.[20] Inception is Watanabe's first work in a contemporary setting where his primary language is English. Watanabe tried to emphasize a different characteristic of Saito in every dream level – "First chapter in my castle, I pick up some hidden feelings of the cycle. It's magical, powerful and then the first dream. And back to the second chapter, in the old hotel, I pick up [being] sharp and more calm and smart and it's a little bit [of a] different process to make up the character of any movie".[21]
- Marion Cotillard as Mallorie "Mal" Cobb. As the film's main antagonist, she is a manifestation of Dom's guilt about the real Mal's suicide. He is unable to control these projections of her, challenging his abilities as an extractor.[14] Nolan described Mal as "the essence of the femme fatale," and DiCaprio praised Cotillard's performance saying that "she can be strong and vulnerable and hopeful and heartbreaking all in the same moment, which was perfect for all the contradictions of her character".[22]
- Tom Hardy as Eames, a sharp-tongued associate of Cobb's. Eames uses his ability to impersonate others inside the dream world in order to manipulate Fischer. Hardy described his character as "an old,Graham Greene-type diplomat; sort of faded, shabby, grandeur - the old Shakespeare lovey mixed with somebody from Her Majesty's Special Forces", who wears "campy, old money" costumes.[23]
- Cillian Murphy as Robert Michael Fischer, the heir to a business empire and the team's target.[20] Murphy said Fischer was portrayed as "a petulant child who's in need of a lot of attention from his father, he has everything he could ever want materially, but he's deeply lacking emotionally". The actor also researched the sons of Rupert Murdoch, "to add to that the idea of living in the shadow of someone so immensely powerful".[24]
- Dileep Rao as Yusuf, the team's chemist. Rao describes Yusuf as "an avant-garde pharmacologist, who is a resource for people, like Cobb, who want to do this work unsupervised, unregistered and unapproved of by anyone". Co-producer Jordan Goldberg said the role of the chemist was "particularly tough because you don't want him to seem like some kind of drug dealer", and that Rao was cast for being "funny, interesting and obviously smart".[25]
- Tom Berenger as Peter Browning, Robert Fischer's godfather and fellow executive at the Fischers' company.[1] Berenger said Browning acts as a "surrogate father" to Robert, who calls the character "Uncle Peter", and emphasized that "Browning has been with [Robert] his whole life and has probably spent more quality time with him than his own father".[25]
Inception 
Theatrical release posterDirected by Christopher Nolan Produced by Christopher Nolan
Emma ThomasWritten by Christopher Nolan Starring Leonardo DiCaprio
Ken Watanabe
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Marion Cotillard
Ellen Page
Tom Hardy
Dileep Rao
Cillian Murphy
Tom Berenger
Michael CaineMusic by Hans Zimmer[1] Cinematography Wally Pfister Editing by Lee Smith Studio Legendary Pictures
Syncopy FilmsDistributed by Warner Bros. Pictures Release date(s) July 8, 2010(London premiere)
July 16, 2010(United States)Running time 148 minutes[2] Country United States
United KingdomLanguage English Budget $160 million[3] Box office $825,532,764[4]
Categories:
MOVIES