Ariadne's Thread
(Spoiler Alert)

I knew I'd love Inception, because I really liked The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan's* previous film, and Nolan had assembled a great cast for it: DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt (from (500) Days of Summer), Tom Hardy (from RocknRolla), Marion Cotillard (from Public Enemies), Ken Watanabe, Cillian Murphy, Tom Berenger, and Ellen Page who plays Ariadne.

In Greek mythology, Ariadne was the daughter of king Minos of Crete. According to the legend

Minos attacked Athens after his son was killed there. The Athenians asked for terms, and were required to sacrifice seven young men and seven maidens every nine years to the Minotaur. One year, the sacrificial party included Theseus, a young man who volunteered to come and kill the Minotaur. Ariadne fell in love at first sight, and helped him by giving him a sword and a ball of red fleece thread that she was spinning, so that he could find his way out of the Minotaur's labyrinth.

Inception is in part about the labyrinths of our dreams that the mind creates. And the plot is quite a labyrinth. DiCaprio's character Cobb leads a crew who performs corporate espionage by entering a targeted person's dreams and stealing the corporate secrets hidden away in their mind. At the beginning of the film Cobb's crew are attempting to steal a secret from Watanabe's character (named Saito), an executive of a large energy corporation, but they are unsuccessful and he catches them. Saito's corporate rival is sick and about to die thereby leaving the ginormous conglomerate in his son's hands. Saito offers Cobb a deal: if instead of stealing a secret from his rival's heir's mind (extraction), Cobb can plant an idea (inception) - specifically to break up the company, Saito will pulls some strings so Cobb's criminal record will be erased and he can return to his home country again.

Cobb agrees and assembles a new crew for the job: Gordon-Levitt's Arthur who was in the original crew; Tom Hardy's Eames who has the ability to change his appearance in the dreamworld in order to influence the target; Yusuf, a maker of specialized sleeping drugs**; and Ellen Page's Ariadne who is the "architect" of the crew.

Once the crew is in the target's dream, a dream architect can alter the environment.  Specifically they create a sort of mental labyrinth to keep the subject's unconscious mind occupied while the crew goes about its task. The crew needs this done because all of the people in the subject's dream are "projections" of her/his subconscious/id and they became hostile if they sense interlopers are tampering about in their dream.

So the bulk of the movie is a caper flick, with the crew attempting to implant an idea in the heir's mind. But his mind has been trained to have tougher defenses than normally would be the case and doesn't make it easy for the infiltrators. Plus there are other complications involving Cobb and his wife Mal played by Marion Cottilard.

Two things come to mind. 1) I'd be interested to read what the Lacanian film buff Zizek thought of the movie. His reading of the Matrix was fun. 2) imagine a Sci-Fi story where "inception" teams would enter targets' dreams and implant ideologies.

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* He is Generation X's film auteur. It's weird to realize he's a couple weeks older than me.
** The crew needs specialized drugs so that they can "go meta" and enter a dream within a dream.