(2010) How can you tell if you're in a dream or in the waking world? Ask yourself if you can remember how you arrived where you find yourself; if you can't, you're dreaming. ("To affirm that I perceive is to deny that I am dreaming or, in other words, it is a sufficient and necessary motivation for my affirming that I am not dreaming." - Jean-Paul Sartre)

Everyone you encounter in a dream is a projection of your subconscious, unless an extractor has entered your subconscious to steal a valuable secret from among your memories. Writer/director Christopher Nolan's existentialist psy-fi mystery/thriller (deftly meshing psychology with intense, sometimes zero-gravity, action and multilayered plot) is itself a thief of cinematic memories from other movies, but along the way this film with his other works have planted seeds into the minds of the audience, spawning an enormous consequence of popularity for more of his complex, perplexing pictures.

"The dream is not fiction taken for reality, it is the odyssey of a consciousness dedicated by itself, and in spite of itself, to build only an unreal world," wrote existential philosopher Sartre in The Psychology of Imagination: "The dream is a privileged experience which can help conceive what a consciousness would be which would have lost its 'being-in-the-world.'"

Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio, with Cobb being the same name as the protagonist in Nolan's first film, Following) and his newly assembled team - point man Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), partner and researcher of targets before extraction; dreamscape architect Ariadne (Ellen Page, with the mythological name of King Minos's daughter who guided Theseus out of the Minotaur's labyrinth with her thread); expert forger Eames (Tom Hardy), possessing the protean ability of changing his appearance within dreams, such as when he transforms himself into the gorgeous female Blonde (Talulah Riley) in the company of Mr Charles; and the sedative chemist Yusuf (Dileep Rao) - are endeavoring to use deception in order to perform an inception of an idea into the mind of Robert Fischer Jr (Cillian Murphy).

Employing a promise of freedom from prosecution back in the US to Cobb, Saito (Ken Watanabe), formerly a target of a psychic heist and impressed by the experience, recruits the corporate spies to prevent his rival, young billionaire Fischer, from inheriting his father's empire and becoming a monopolist of energy for the world; the Japanese industrialist accompanies Cobb's team into Fischer's dream world.

Trained by his professorial father-in-law (by my labeling him as such may cause some readers to argue he's actually Dom's father - either way, why couldn't he bring Cobb's children to France? - resulting in yet another spiraling argument into a basement without a logical ladder out), Miles (Michael Caine), in mind navigation, Cobb contradicts Arthur's assertion that inception isn't possible ("The dreamer can always remember the genesis of the idea. True inspiration is impossible to fake"), insisting that he's previously successfully accomplished implanting an idea, which took hold, into someone's mind.

Cobb teaches quick-study Ariadne, Miles's student at a university in Paris, how the process works: "You create the world of the dream, you bring the subject into that dream, and they fill it with their subconscious." What he won't reveal to the others, though Ariadne's learns of it from her excursions (the mental imagery opens and folds up into a fantastic topography as she and Dom explore the possibilities of her designs, using mirrors and Escheresque stairways of Penrose's steps) through Cobb's subconsciousness in preparation for their mission, is the haunting presence of the memories of his dead wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) locked inside his mind.

Cobb can't return to his young children, Phillipa and James, because the authorities have reason to believe he murdered his wife. (Curiously, in his third consecutive picture - previously Revolutionary Road and Shutter Island - DiCaprio has played a character with a deceased wife.) Mal makes a bad habit of making an appearance during his extraction work, upsetting the delicate operations; she wants him back inside the innerworld they created for themselves before her demise (though she's unaware of being dead).

The team must descend three levels into Fischer's subconsciousness (a dream within a dream within a dream), taking Robert along (the young tycoon has been drugged during a ten-hour flight from Sydney to Los Angeles), in order to convince himself of an alternative interpretation of his father's final intentions.

On the first level, after kidnapping Robert, they enter Yusuf's dream: the Arab chemist, driving a van through traffic while desperately attempting to evade the unexpected militarized defenders of Robert's mind (making the mission more dangerous as he'd been trained against such incursions) with the others sedated and seat-belted in the back. On the second level inside a hotel where Eames impersonates Robert's godfather and co-executive Peter Browning (Tom Berenger) to soften the young man's resistance, they enter Arthur's dream - while the point man attends to their unconscious bodies and prepares the "kick" with explosives to pull them back - descending to the third level (Eames's dream), where the team must enter a heavily guarded fortress in a wintery environment.

There is yet a fourth level of limbo beneath these. At each level below the one above, one's sense of time expands by a factor of ten. In most scenarios, if one of the extractors dies, the person's corporeal being awakes abruptly; but at the deeper levels for this mission, death will result in falling into limbo, leaving the individual's physical body in a permanent coma.

For reference, as a means of determining whether or not he's dreaming, Cobb keeps a totem, a tiny top he'd fashioned for Mal: if he spins it and it continues to rotate, he knows he's in a dream. At the beginning of the movie (as in Pulp Fiction, this scene is actually the beginning of the conclusion), when he's found washed up on a shore and brought face-to-face with a wizened Asian man, all he has on his person are a pistol and the totem.

When Saito proposes the mission with the promise of allowing Cobb to return to his children without risk of imprisonment, he acknowledges that he can't provide anything more than his word as guarantee: "Don't you want to take a leap of faith? Or become an old man, filled with regret, waiting to die alone!" Mal also took a leap of faith, but Dom refused to follow.

"[T]here is an element of suspension in all modes of reality," wrote the German psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers in Way to Wisdom: "world systems represent merely relative perspectives; … knowledge has the character of interpretation; … being is manifested in the dichotomy of subject and object - our whole characterization of the knowledge to which man can attain - implies that objects are mere appearances …"

Continuously Cobb, who has become the hunter of elusive reality, must make hard, timely choices - "the instant of choice is very serious," according to the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard: "because there is danger afoot, danger that the next instant it may not be equally in my power to choose…" (the weight of the universe resting on his shoulders) "Therefore, it is important to choose and to choose in time" - each of which may mean his end or that of his companions. "Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed," believed Sartre, "because it involves all mankind." The explosive climax and subtle finale are both a hell of a kicker.

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