Cant watch Tenet? Now is the perfect time to revisit Inception

Director Christopher Nolan's hotly anticipated new film Tenet is finally playing in select theaters. But not everybody is able to watch it—New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco are all major US markets where theaters remain closed. If you're not among those lucky enough to live near a reopened theater where the film is showing—and you're not keen on driving for four hours to find an open theater—now is the perfect time to revisit what is arguably Nolan's masterpiece: the mind-bending thriller, Inception, which marks its tenth anniversary this year. The film grossed over $829 million globally and was nominated for eight Oscars, winning four. (It lost the Best Picture Oscar to The King's Speech.)

(Spoilers below, because it's been ten years.)

Nolan first submitted his treatment for a horror film involving "dream stealers" to Warner Bros. back in 2002, but decided he didn't yet have sufficient experience as a director to do justice to what he envisioned, which he knew would require a large budget. "As soon as you're talking about dreams, the potential of the human mind is infinite," he told the New York Times in 2010. "And so the scale of the film has to feel infinite. It has to feel like you could go anywhere by the end of the film. And it has to work on a massive scale."

So he made Batman Begins (2005), The Prestige (2006), and The Dark Knight (2008), until he felt confident enough to revisit his old treatment. While writing the script, Nolan found inspiration in Blade Runner (1982), The Matrix (1999), and the works of Jorge Luis Borges, particularly the short stories "The Secret Miracle" and "The Circular Ruins." The former features time slowing down to forestall a death; the latter is about someone constructing a person in his dreams and beginning to question his own reality. Both elements play crucial roles in Nolan's fictional world.

Inception is a master class in elaborate world-building. Nolan originally wrote the script as a heist film, before deciding against it, telling the Los Angeles Times that the story relied too heavily "on the idea of an interior state, the idea of dream and memory" for a straightforward heist framework to really work. But those heist elements do provide a useful scaffolding for the intricate plot.

Leonardo DiCaprio (Titanic, The Revenant) stars as Dom Cobb, an "extractor" who conducts corporate espionage for his clients by infiltrating a target's subconscious via a shared dream world. Cobb is an American in exile, wanted in the United States for allegedly murdering his wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard, The Dark Knight Rises); their two children live with his father-in-law and former mentor, Professor Stephen Miles (Michael Caine, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight).

An impossible dream?

A Japanese businessman named Mr. Saito (Ken Watanabe, The Last Samurai, Godzilla) hires Cobb for a uniquely difficult and dangerous mission: not just stealing information from the target's subconscious, but actually implanting an original idea and making the target think it was his own—the "inception" of the title. In exchange, he will make Cobb's banishment from the US disappear so he can go home again.

So Cobb puts a team together, starting with his longtime associate, Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Looper), who is skeptical that inception is even possible. Eames (Tom Hardy, The Dark Knight Rises, Mad Max: Fury Road) specializes in forgery and identity theft—he has the ability to impersonate other people within a dreamscape—and thinks it's possible, just extremely difficult. Yusuf (Dileep Rao) is a rogue pharmacologist, recruited to engineer just the right combination of drugs for the mission. Cobb recruits one of Miles' gifted graduate students, Ariadne (Ellen Page, The Umbrella Academy) as the "architect" of the dreamscapes. He himself is no longer able to safely do so, thanks to unwelcome dream intrusions by a psychological projection of Mal—the product of his own grief and guilt over her death.

The target is Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy, Batman Begins, Peaky Blinders), heir to a business empire that is close to achieving global dominance, to the detriment of Saito's own business interests. His father, Maurice Fischer (Peter Postlethwaite, Clash of the Titans), is on his deathbed. The goal is to implant the idea for Robert to voluntarily break up his father's empire, in favor of creating something of his own rather than merely inheriting what his father built.

Cobb and his team decide they must construct three separate dreamscape levels—a dream within a dream within a dream—each reaching deeper into Fischer's subconscious, for the scheme to work. (Each level has its own distinctive look, thanks to director of photography Wally Pfister.) One person will be the "dreamer" for each level, remaining behind as the others proceed downward, responsible for setting up a coordinated "kick" to awaken the other team members. (Edith Piaf's "Non, je ne regrette rien" serves as an auditory cue.) Things do not go quite as smoothly as they'd hoped when they put their plans into motion.

(Warning: Major spoilers below the gallery.)