20 Suspiciously Similar Movie Scenes You Never Noticed

8. Paprika/ Inception

It was well known that Christopher Nolan was inspired by Paprika when he decided to create Inception. Both films deal with how dreams in our subconscious affect reality and vice versa, and the general similarities between the two have been discussed at length elsewhere. To distill those similarities somewhat, in Inception when anyone enters into another person's mind they bring all of their emotional baggage, which can in turn manifest in the dreams of the dreamer, and of course, Cobb himself is hiding mental scars that can endanger the team. At one stage, Ariadne enters his brain in order to find his secrets, which is represented as a ride in elevator with each floor representing a different memory that Cobb is trying to repress from manifesting.

In Paprika, the heroine enters the subconscious of her colleague Detective Konakawa to help with traumatic memories that haunt his dreams, and like in Inception, the two of them enter an elevator with each floor representing another layer of the host's subconscious. Konakawa's memories are intertwined with his love of film and the floors represent different genres of film, and he and Paprika travel to the 17th floor, in which Konakawa is hiding a painful memory he doesn't want to confront.

Both Paprika and Inception analyze cinema as a shared dream. Paprika's approach is to place the audience in a more imaginatively surreal and metaphorical dream world, while Inception is more of clinical analysis neatly wrapped in an action movie. Both films can be enjoyed for what they are without one being a direct rip-off of the other. This one particular scene however is undoubtedly taken directly out of Paprika and spliced into Inception. The fact that Christopher Nolan has seen Paprika and the unique nature of scene points towards taking an ingredient from someone else's recipe.