The Christopher Nolan rip-off that took two decades to come to life: “A goofy B-movie”
In 2023, a mind-bending science-fiction thriller was unleashed upon an unsuspecting public. Instead of being embraced by critics and raking in box office returns, though, it was immediately tagged as a Christopher Nolan rip-off and sank without a trace.
The backstory to the film is arguably more interesting than the picture itself, though. You see, the director came up with the idea for it way back in 2002, when a Nolan sci-fi epic was but a twinkle in Hollywood’s eye. Unfortunately for him, though, its two-decade journey to the screen made him seem like a copycat.
In the 1990s, Robert Rodriguez was one of the most vital, innovative voices in independent cinema. Alongside contemporaries like Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith, he proved to cinephiles everywhere that a filmmaker didn’t need to wait for a Hollywood studio to give them the keys to the kingdom. Instead, they could simply make their own film by any means necessary, and if everything went to plan, it could give them a career in the business.
After bursting onto the scene with his no-budget debut El Mariachi, Rodriguez spent the rest of the ’90s climbing the Hollywood ladder with Desperado, From Dusk Till Dawn, and The Faculty. He then settled into a Spy Kids groove in the early 2000s. During this period, though, he first had an idea for what he described as a “Hitchcock thriller on steroids”. In fact, the title of the movie came to him before he even knew what the story would be, and he was inspired by a rewatch of Vertigo, which was restored for DVD in 2002.
Rodriguez realised that many of Hitchcock’s best movies had one major star in the lead, an abundance of plot twists, and enticing one-word titles, such as Psycho, Spellbound, and Frenzy. So, he pondered, “What’s another one-word title he would have come up with so it fits in that realm?” Suddenly, the word “hypnotic” flashed into his mind, and he thought, “That sounds cool. What does it mean?”
The director soon devised a story about a detective searching for his missing daughter who encounters a dangerous ‘hypnotic’ – someone who can hypnotise people by projecting elaborate fictional constructs into their brains. Unfortunately, as he would need to write the Hypnotic script on spec, he kept putting it on the back burner to work on paid projects instead.
Before Rodriguez knew it, 15 years had passed, and he still hadn’t put pen to paper. So, he finally pitched the idea to studios, and Studio 8 agreed to finance the film. In 2019, Ben Affleck was cast as the troubled detective, and the movie was finally shot in 2021.
When the first trailer debuted in April 2023, though, Hypnotic’s premise, visual style, and city-warping set pieces didn’t look nearly as innovative as they would have in the early 2000s. Instead, the trailer simply reminded anyone who watched it of a similar story of cities folding in on themselves and a reality that may not be all it appeared to be. In essence, people gave it the side-eye and muttered, “Hey, this looks just like Inception.”.
It must have hurt Rodriguez to see his long-gestating passion project, which he dreamed up long before Nolan made his hugely successful dream heist picture in 2010, so thoroughly dismissed as a rip-off. Nearly every single review of Hypnotic mentioned Inception in some way, with a few damning headlines being particularly scathing. Despite being called “Inception for dummies”, the ultimate insult must have been the accusations that Rodriguez copied Inception “in a goofy B-movie”.
No interviewer had the gumption to ask Rodriguez directly about the looming shadow cast by Nolan, and instead, he simply insisted to anyone who would listen that Hitchcock was the movie’s main inspiration. The film ended up making only $16million at the box office on a substantial budget of $65m, and pretty soon, the movie that took two excruciating decades to come to life was completely forgotten about.
Still, at least there was one significant saving grace for Rodriguez – the film was a family affair. After all, his sons Rebel, Racer Max, Rogue, and Rocket composed the score, co-wrote, worked on animatics, and edited the film respectively, while his daughter Rhiannon drew storyboards. Take that, Nolan!
