Saito reveals that he is in fact auditioning the team to perform the most challenging act of all: "inception" or entering dreams in order to implant an idea. Saito promises that if the mission is successful, he will have murder charges against Cobb cleared so Cobb can return to the U.S. and be reunited with his children. The target is Robert Fischer Jr. (cillian murphy), son of Saito's terminally ill corporate rival, Maurice Fischer (pete pastlethwaite). The objective is to convince Fischer Jr. to break up his father's empire. Cobb recruits Eames (tom hardy), a forger who can change appearance inside dreams, Yusuf (dileep rao), a sedative chemist, and Ariadne (ellen page), a student architect to design dream worlds. While training, Ariadne learns that Cobb and Mal had experimented in "limbo", a world of unconstructed dream space, for a seemingly indefinite time. Mal had come to accept limbo as reality, and when Cobb brought her out of limbo, she became insane and committed suicide; Cobb was charged for her murder and forced to flee the country.
To assure that Fischer Jr. believes he had conceived of the idea himself after inception, Cobb's team plans to engage in a three-layered dream-within-a-dream, each initiated by another team member while inside another dream. Because of the use of a more potent sedative to complete the job, death within the dream will not wake the sleeper but send them to limbo; to avoid this, they arrange to create a series of "kicks"—such as falling from a height—that will awaken the sleepers from that dream back up to the previous one and eventually to reality. They plan to coordinate the kicks across the different timescales of each dream using music played to the dreamer, which can be heard by those in the dream. The dreamer of each layer will stay behind to protect the sleepers from subconscious projections and synchronize the kicks.
When the elder Fischer dies in Sydney, Saito buys the airline that Fischer Jr. is flying with and the team share the flight with Fischer Jr back to Los Angeles and drug him. They enter Yusuf's dream, a rainy downtown area, and kidnap Fischer Jr.. However, they come under attack from Fischer Jr's trained projections, and Saito is badly injured. Eames changes into Peter Browning (tom berenger), Fischer Jr's godfather, to suggest to Robert the false idea that Robert's father had created a second will locked in a vault, concepts meant to cause Robert to reconsider his relationship with his father. The team then enters a van and is sedated into Arthur's dream, a hotel, where the team convinces Fischer Jr. that the kidnapping on the first layer was orchestrated by Browning, and that he must enter his godfather's mind to determine his motives. They then enter a third layer, dreamt by Eames, where Fischer Jr. must break into a snowy mountain fortress to reveal the planted idea.
On this level, Fischer Jr. is killed by Mal before Cobb can stop her, and goes into limbo; Saito eventually succumbs to his wound and also enters limbo. Time is short as Yusuf has already initiated his kick by driving the van off a bridge, and Arthur, forced to work in freefall, prepares the kick in the hotel layer. Ariadne and Cobb decide there is enough time to follow Fischer Jr. down into limbo and confront Mal. Cobb refutes Mal's attempts to have him stay in limbo, as he comes to terms with himself. He reveals that he knew inception was possible as that is how he forced Mal to leave limbo by implanting the idea of questioning her reality in her after the two lived a virtual lifetime in the dream world. However, the idea grew out of control, and Mal killed herself, unable to accept reality as real. Cobb tells Mal that he knows her to be an imperfect projection of the real Mal. Enraged, Mal stabs him with a knife, but Ariadne is able to shoot her. Ariadne reluctantly agrees to wake to the previous layer by throwing herself and Fischer Jr. off a building, while Cobb stays to locate Saito.
Fischer Jr. and Ariadne return to the mountain fortress layer. In the final room of Fischer Jr's own subconscious, Fischer Jr. is successfully tricked into believing that his father wanted him to make his own choices. Fischer Jr. and the remainder of Cobb's team are woken out of the layers by the planted kicks, and return to Yusuf's dream. Meanwhile, Cobb discovers Saito has been waiting for decades and tells him that they need to return to reality. Saito's recollection of Cobb leads him to conclude that he is dreaming, and he reaches for a gun. Cobb then awakes on the plane, finding both his team and Fischer Jr. alive and well. Cobb enters the United States and finally returns home to his children. He spins his totem to test reality, but is distracted by the reunion.
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