Sorry, but Paprika did this better.

Rating: 3/10 (29 May 2017)

After finishing Satoshi Kon's, "Paprika", I thought I would give a look see at a film that was inspired by Paprika that I have heard from many people as being amazing...but to me, it was just a massive disappointment. I can try and not compare the two films, but that would be rather impossible given they both use the same ingredients, but have completely different recipes to making their films.
First thing I notice about the film are the characters. The actors are great, but the characters they are given are just bland and uninteresting. Having bad characters is worse than having a bad plot to me. They were very one-dimensional and felt rather emotionless. Paprika's character felt more human and were very easy to understand and/or feel for. Dom Cobb was a character I couldn't possibly care for in this regard.
Next is the plot. While both films took completely different directions of the same concept, Inception felt incredibly convoluted and far-fetched to take any of it seriously. The "M. Night" twist at the end also never helped with the ending. While Paprika also felt convoluted in certain scenes, such as the end, it was very forgiving because of the direction. Paprika used a more surreal approach to dreams that made it rather fun and engaging to observe. Inception was rather stiff and took itself too seriously, making the convoluted aspects all the more jarring.
Lastly are the presentation of the dream world. Inception had a dream world that was incredibly unimaginative and felt very flat and boring. The dream world in Paprika takes the cake for clearly being more bizarre and overall lacking any cohesion, similar to our own dreams...being extremely chaotic, nonsensical, and just surreal, altogether.
Overall, Paprika's focus on the more bizarre elements of dreams and the humanization of characters portrayed the theme of their respective movie better as the plot didn't interfere with the tone of the movie, which wasn't made to be too serious. While Inception is by no means a terrible movie, it is just grossly overrated for trying to be "smart", "serious", and "thought provoking", though ends up being pretentious and shallow.
This was a film that screamed, "Hey look, we are so smart and philosophical, we are the best movie of the decade."