Chris Nolan’s masterpiece Inception is much more than just your regular summer blockbuster, full of gunfights (there are plenty), explosions (there are a few), and ground breaking special effects (they abound) – it’s a thought-provoking investigation into the nature of dreams and the subconscious.
The film’s premise is that with the right skills and equipment, people can share each other’s dreams, building dreamscapes and populating them with their subconscious. While this can be put to a variety of uses, the more common one is “extraction” – a form of espionage where the subject’s subconscious is encouraged to put secret knowledge into a secure place like a safe or vault. The extracting team can then break in and steal that knowledge.
Cobb (Leonardo DiCapprio) leads a team of professional dreamthieves on a mission to do the reverse: to plant a thought that will change the subject’s behaviour in a specific way. This is a much harder task as it must be done in such a way that the subject believes it is their own idea, and not something foreign which can be rejected.
Of course, the difficulty is compounded because Cobb brings personal problems to the job. These problems can’t be avoided and will have a very profound effect on Cobb and everybody else in the dreamscape around him.
This is your spoiler warning: I intend to discuss some specifics beyond the jump.
