Cob (Leonardo di Caprio) and Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) are dream thieves. Their business is a new kind of corporate espionage: infiltrating the mind of a target during sleep and extracting valuable secrets. But when a mission against Saito (Ken Watanabe) goes wrong, he makes them an offer they can't refuse. They must undertake a job for him, against his business rival, Robert Fisher (Cillian Murphy). But the job is not extraction, but its opposite: not to steal an idea, but to plant one. Inception.

It is said to be impossible, but Cob is perhaps the only one in the world who has ever succeeded. He assembles a crack team, including architect Ariadne (Ellen Page), forger Eames (Tom Hardy), and chemist Yusuf (Dileep Rao). The stakes get higher, as the mission turns out to be not what they expected, and secrets from Cob's past emerge, especially the haunting shadow of his former wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard).

The laws of physics in the dream world are fascinating: the elongated sense of time, the subconscious populating the world. There are moments of wonder, like when Ariadne first tries manipulating dream matter to shape the dreamscapes, turning walls into bridges.

It's hard to live up to epithets like "best movie of the year", and I think I should have tried harder to ignore the hype. My expectations were set high, and while the twists and turns were intriguing, none of them was shocking enough or brilliant enough to be exceptional. It was mindbending, but not mindblowing. Maybe you only get one Inception in your lifetime, and I think mine was The Prestige, which did pack an emotional punch for me. It probably didn't help that I had trouble connecting with Cob, who I found not terribly sympathetic, while the secondary characters were more engaging.

But Inception was nonetheless an excellent film: tightly scripted, well acted, and thought provoking. Part heist movie, part science fiction, Inception asks the question: how do you really know whether you're dreaming or awake?