In Contention‘s Kris Tapley‘s hasn’t read the script for Chris Nolan‘s Inception, but a source has so KT has decided to pass along a second-hand synopsis of the plot. He says he can’t be 100% sure of the particulars because WB publicity won’t comment “but it all seems fairly legitimate to me.”

The Big McGuffin, he says, is that some kind of ability/technology used by a team of shady espionage operatives led by Leonardo DiCaprio‘s “Cobb” to nefariously dive into people’s dreams and extract information.

Leo’s team members (this will eventually become a kind of Mission Impossible-like TV series with operatives hired each week to solve a problem by mind-scanning this and that “mark”) include Joseph Gordon-Levitt‘s Arthur, Tom Hardy‘s Eames and Ellen Page‘s Ariadne, a college student studying in Paris.

Jacob’s team, says Tapley, “creates” the dreams and Ariadne is an “architect” or “engineer” of sorts. I’m already lost. If Team Leo is diving into people’s dreams and extracting info, how and why would they want to create dreams? Wait…perhaps they don’t just steal information from people’s minds but implant information of their own? Information that is (a) designed to manipulate and (b) may or may not be false?

Jacob’s team enters this and that dream via some kind of injection, and the technology can easily be transported in a suitcase, Tapley says. “In one scene (featured briefly in the trailer?), the team actually enters a person’s dream while on an airplane,” he writes.

Cillian Murphy stars as Fischer, “a business-type who is soon to become the head of a company. Jacob’s team is attempting to insert an idea into Fischer’s mind to compel him to separate the company into two smaller companies.

Ken Watanabe plays Saito, a character who’s blackmailing Jacob. Aside from Watanabe there is no classic villain in the story, but Cobb’s wife (Marion Cotillard) causes some trouble.

“Cobb and wife at some point find themselves stuck in many levels of a dream and she tries to convince him to stay in that world, that it is much better than real life. However, Cobb wants to return to his children and the real world.

“This plot point is a bit unclear, but I’m told that Lisa commits suicide in the dream in order to return to the real world. When Cobb himself returns, he is charged with his wife’s murder and has to flee with his children.

“The film will not be typical sci-fi fare at all,” Tapley conveys. “It’s set in the present-day real world” but with “virtually all of the ‘action’ scenes taking place in the dream environment. This should go a long way toward explaining the ‘Your mind is the scene of the crime’ tagline that accompanied the trailer. Ultimately it seems like a grounded, more tangible blend of Minority Report and The Matrix.”