In a rushed first mission, we learn the logistics and rules of the game. If you’re killed in the dream, you wake up. If someone outside the dream needs to wake you up, they can dunk you in water and that will shock your system into consciousness. If something happens to your body outside of the dream world, then that sensory information will find a way of leaking into your dream storyline. If, say, you were flipped upside down, then your dream world would spin upside down as well.
Once those new ground rules are in place, here comes that clichéd “last job” that Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) takes on, not for some quick bucks but for the chance to clear his name. His wife is dead, the cops think he did it, and he’s been forced to flee his children and his country, reduced to a life of crime overseas. If he can do this last job – plunge into someone’s brain and plant an idea – then his employer will help him clear his name and head hoe.
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So the plan is hatched. To plant the seed, they will knock out young businessman Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy) while flying across the ocean and tunnel down into his psyche. They get him to board a plane, drug him in first class, and plunge in. One level down we find the more frantic action; there are shootouts and hostages and foot chases through darkened hotel hallways. It’s the dream level that most closely resembles an exciting Hollywood action movie.
It’s here where Cobb informs his team of one important caveat: To accomplish this lengthy mission, they were forced to use so much sedative that if someone dies in the dream world, they won’t wake up. Instead, they’ll be wiped away to what they dub a limbo land – the bottom rung of our subconscious where dreams can stretch on for eternity. Until the end of time, the murdered team member will wander a psychic purgatory.
Increasingly terrified of all the men with guns down in this dream world, Cobb and company toss Fischer – the dream version of Fischer – into a van, and drug him again. This time they plunge down into a second dream level – a snow-bound mountain where a secret vault’s been created for Fischer to crack. It’s a vault that has been designed to plant that covert idea into Fischer’s subconscious.
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But by the time we get down this far, things are going seriously wrong. Blood has been spilled, people are dying, and the whole team has missed its first signal to jump back to reality. So the rush is on to get out of here, even as a few members of the team are slipping down one level – killed in dream #2 and falling down into the limbo land that Cobb knows so well. It was down here where he and his wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), once experimented with long-term dreaming – a multi-decade existence in limbo that Mal became so addicted to that she could never readjust to the real world.
Mal is the subplot that propels the film’s deeper emotional themes. She keeps appearing in Cobb’s dreams, much to his dismay, keeps threatening to destroy their missions, keeps sending Cobb into emotional spirals where the pain of his wife’s death is made fresh again.