14 DAY TRIAL // “Inception,” directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Cillian Murphy and Tom Hardy, is hailed as one of the biggest accomplishments of modern cinema, not only for its stunning visual effects but also because of a story that is as original as it’s brilliant. As for that last part, the audiences may have been duped into thinking so, because there’s a comic strip that tells the exact same story as “Inception,” Comic Book Movie points out.
It’s called “Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck,” it has been created by Don Rosa and has a strip called “Dream of a Lifetime” that is exactly as “Inception.” If the similarity is not pure coincidence, then this means that Nolan’s film is not as original as he and the movie studio wanted us to believe – not to mention that it’s basically a rip-off for not giving proper credit. There is also the possibility that all similarities be purely coincidence, though chances of that happening are not looking that good since the two stories are almost identical, except that one is with ducks and the other with people.
“Film critics and fans proclaim that Nolan’s latest film, Inception, is this generation’s 2001: A Space Odyssey – a sci-fi epic so rich with stunning visuals and boundless imagination that it transcends ‘film’ to the level of visceral ‘experience.’ No film has revolved around the concept of using a contraption to allow multiple dreamscapers to enter into a victim’s dream to extract his secrets for financial gain. This concept is undoubtedly original and unique, right? Don Rosa – the writer of the Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck – might emphatically disagree. In the Scrooge McDuck story, ‘Dream of a Lifetime,’ the Beagle Boys – a gang of canine criminals that historically try to steal from McDuck – use a contraption to enter into Scrooge McDuck’s dream while he’s sleeping to try to ‘steal’ the secret combination to McDuck’s vault of goodies,” the e-zine notes.
What follows is an enumeration of all the similarities between the two plots – and they are quite a few, to be honest. This would go to show that Nolan was no exactly honest when he said that his script was original (save from a few ideas also found in other films like “Matrix,” “The Thirteenth Floor” and “Dark City,” which he acknowledged in past interviews). In other words, he stole the idea from a comic strip and passed it as his own – unless he came up with the idea for his script and movie without even being aware that he’d seen it before, perhaps when he was younger. The possibility of that is rather far-fetched, some believe.
“Did Nolan ‘borrow’ from Don Rosa's story about Scrooge McDuck? Or is it a coincidence? Or is it possible that two films exist featuring heists that take place in a subject’s dreamscape? Of course Nolan did not borrow from stories about Scrooge McDuck, Nolan is ethically and creatively better than that. Nolan is today’s most original and imaginative director. Although... Memento was based off of his brother’s story, Memento Mori. The Prestige was based off of the novel, The Prestige. The Batman movies were based off of, well, the Batman comic books. Insomnia was a remake of the movie, Insomnia. Inception was based off of the comic book story, Dream of a Lifetime from the Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck. I’m joking about the last one. Sort of,” Comic Book Movie concludes by saying, leaving the question up for debate.
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