How Much Do You Want To Know About Inception? Plot Details Are Leaking Out

OK, the title should clue you in, but there are spoilers to follow for Christopher Nolan's Inception.

It's mostly first act stuff, and I expect a lot of these details are things you'll be given by official marketing soon enough. But a few of the things might actually be spoilers. Other web writers are already bitching on Twitter about the fact that these details are out in the wild, so here's some advice that should really be obvious if you're reading movie news on the web: if you don't want to know anything about Inception, don't read anything about Inception. I'll agree that part of the movie's charm at this point is the fact that we know so little about it, so consider yourself warned.

InContention posted a piece today that got the talk going about Inception's plot, but in truth almost all of this info has been on the web since May, in a post on gaming message board NeoGAF. Some of this might not be quite right, and it seems like the info that InContention has came from the same place as the original GAF post. Anyway, here you go. The basic story info, which isn't as spoilerish, first:Leonardo DiCaprio's 'CEO type' character is a guy who can dive into people's dreams to implant or extract information. The tool used isn't a big machine, but something that can be injected, and is therefore portable. Ellen Page, Tom Hardy and Joseph Gordon Levitt play members of DiCaprio's team. She's a 'dream architect'. The roles of the two guys are less certain, but the fact that Joseph Gordon-Levitt is fighting two guys in the trailer is interesting, if they are in fact working together.

OK, so that's the setup. A full trailer will probably tell you most of that. So far I'm thinking less of The Matrix than of the film Dreamscape and prose fiction like Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. But I like it, and I love the idea that this 'sci-fi' isn't futuristic.

Now, here are the potential real spoilers:

Cillian Murphy plays a businessman who is about to take over a company, and DiCaprio is charged with going into his head and inserting the idea of splitting that company into smaller parts. Meanwhile, DiCaprio's character is being blackmailed by Ken Watanabe, and there may be something going on there with DiCaprio's wife, played by Marion Cotillard. Trapped in a dream, Cotillard commits suicide to attempt to return to the 'real' world, where DiCaprio is charged with her murder.

Some of these details are less clear. (The orginal GAF post, for example, tagged Watanabe as the businessman that InContention says is played by Murphy.) But it's an intriguing setup, and we still don't know much about how the pieces fit together.