When Leonardo DiCaprio washed ashore at the beginning of Inception, I thought that Jack had survived the sinking of the Titanic. But if he had, it would only be to drown in the subconscious depths that this movie layers on. Don’t get me wrong: This new film, written and directed by Christopher Nolan, is artful and enjoyable—thought-out, if rarely thought-provoking. I liked it; and it’s nice to go into a summer movie without being impaled by sequels and Happy Meal prototypes. But if Inception is a mind fuck, it’s sex with a virgin brain.

Although this is the latest model in the dude-this-blows-my-mind-pass-me-the-joint mold, and it’s meant to whirl like a dervish in the viewers’ brains, enticing ’em to scamper back to the theater to reverse engineer its backed-up cranial plumbing, I didn’t find it too hard to follow—and that’s a compliment. Nolan fluidly hopscotches from one nightmare to the next, dragging his mottled dream team in tow. DiCaprio heads up this rather esoteric bunch. For high-income clients, he and his gangly assistant, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, will climb over the mental membranes of unsuspecting schmucks, and purloin secrets from their subconscious. Is this legal? Is this common? Does John Q. Public know that his dreams are no longer private? You might need to rock Nolan’s dream boat to get any concrete answers. Perhaps the closest we get to a clue comes when Cobb (DiCaprio) recruits Ellen Page to be an “architect” of mental states after her predecessor is vanished—presumably tortured to death by a Japanese bigwig named Saito (Ken Watanabe). (Her job is to design the topography of the dreams that Cobb dips into, and I’m sure someone will draw a soggy parallel between it and to film direction.) Under Michael Caine’s tutelage—he makes hardly a cameo, unfortch—she seems to have learned the basics of Cobb’s trade; but she’s about as aware of the specifics as the Ivy Leaguers were of the C.I.A. when they were harvested to staff its first generation.

Saito’s brain is the first we see hacked; but whatever they retrieved from it must not have been too vital to his conglomerate—he becomes Cobb’s next client. The plan now is not the usual retrieval, but “inception”: planting an idea in subconscious soil. Apparently, though, this is risky business; ideas metastasize like cancers, and eventually wrack the whole brain—for all intents and purposes, warping the victim’s personality. Their mark is a preppy named Fischer (Cillian Murphy, posed in stock photos like a Ralph Lauren model); he’s the inheritor of his cold-fish father’s business empire, and rival industrialist Saito wants to see that kingdom as divided as Lear’s. (Cobb & Co. are like trust-busting privateers, even if Nolan doesn’t frame them that way.) Over the course of an international flight, they break into the yuppie’s soul, and face off not only with an army of superegotistical white blood cells, but also Cobb’s own demon—his late enchantress of a wife is down there waiting for him.

It’s also down there that Nolan gets to show off his kickass blockbusting skills. He ups the ante, widening the ambit of slumberland to dreams within dreams—and that only accounts for the goings-on in Fischer’s noggin. Cobb caroms through the synapses on his own guilt trip, with Page accompanying him, acting as an in-house analyst. In the world above, we’ve already bounced between continents. (It’s an open secret of good summertime moviemaking that one should dazzle the audience with exotic locales, titillating their inner tourist—particularly at a time when real tourism budgets are strapped.) The world below isn’t quite what it could be, though. We get a rainy day in New York (?), a five-star hotel, and what looks to be the ninja bivouac from Batman Begins situated on the ice planet Hoth. There’s also the decomposing remains of a comatose limbo that Cobb once cohabited with his wife (Marion Cotillard)—don’t ask me who their real-estate agent was—which is finely imagined, if curiously. Of why they’d choose to build a Mies van der Rohe nightmare for themselves, with a skyline of identical obelisks, I have no idea. I heard some guy bitching about Inception on one of the entertainment-industry channels, and he compared it to Mulholland Drive. In truth, Nolan’s dreamworlds have nothing on David Lynch’s intuitive dreamscapes, or the feeling one gets even from Lynch’s lesser movies; but this is a thriller first and foremost, and, considering that, some of his visuals—M. C. Escher stairwells, Gordon-Levitt curb-stomping through zero-G hallways, and cities folding on themselves like board games going back into the box—are very impressive.

But even if Hans Zimmer’s obdurate soundtrack is usually little more than a foghorn blast (aside from the eerie bars reserved for Cobb’s foreign-accented wife, the chatelaine of his withering fantasy); and even if the linchpin of the connubial subplot hasn’t even the logic of a Lynchpin; and even if the roles assigned to the ladies (the savior and the bitch) may give pause to some feminists—that isn’t what I want to take issue with. There’s an icky insensitivity in much of Nolan’s work—and it may be more deeply unconscious than anything in this movie. I like many of his films; they’re a cut above your average multi-million-dollar brand-name spectacle. (That is, if you’re able to plug your ears to, or titter heartily at, his transparently aspirational dialogue.) His reputation is predicated on his predilection for themes like justice or obsession or guilt; but they are interlarded rather than immanent: They stick out of the narrative like keys on a map. This sort of obviousness is easy to overrate—but even that is a minor flaw. Inception is very much Freudian slippery—and this bothers me, at least, because so much is slid away.

For instance, Watanabe (the saving grace of Letters from Iwo Jima) is perfectly cast; the dignity and weight he brings to his role sweeps under the rug not only the fact that he’s a bushido cliché, but also the notion that Watanabe’s honor is yin to the yang of Saito’s obfuscated deviousness. Sure, it’s his goons who dispose of Page’s predecessor, but aren’t they just following his orders? It’s standard-issue for a Nolan film—ever-lauded for so-called moral complexity—that Cobb’s crew is utterly unconcerned about their fallen comrade; they just move on. It’s a little insulting that we aren’t expected to care, either. Nolan is shockingly cuddly with corruption. When Cobb agrees to take on Saito’s assignment, it’s in exchange for a pardon; we know he’s been falsely accused of murdering his wife, but a warrant’s still out for his arrest in the States. All it’ll take for him to get off the hook is one measly phone call to the authorities from Saito, who’s also been instrumental in duping Fischer—he bought out the airline that the victim is flying on, and all of its flight crew, to boot. I’ll never trust a stewardess again. To the director, these actions seem like nothing more than cogs in his plot machine; to me, they’re rather fishy.

And then there’s the matter of the whole procedure, which is the crux of the film. It’s no wonder that the details surrounding it are left so high up in the air that they seem almost designed to flit away from all but the most skeptical viewers. Cobb’s men are supposedly the good guys, but they’re basically rapists-for-hire. So much fuss is made about Cobb coming to terms with the truth about his wife; but poor Fischer is given a false resolution to his daddy issues, and it seems to be played off as a token of the team’s benevolence. So what if it tarnishes the reputation of a family friend (Tom Berenger) that Fischer’s been turned against? There’s a lot of collateral damage in slumberland. Murphy is a fine actor, and he gives an affecting performance—broken down from years of lilting in old pappy’s shadow—for which Nolan has reserved some of the better dialogue. But Fischer’s given short shrift—and Nolan’s all sunshine and rainbows about that. We’re not meant to step back and look at the global significance of this little mind game. Saito wants the Fischer empire to downsize to prevent it from becoming a monopoly—so selfless of him, truly. Clap. Clap. Nolan must be a blessed innocent to take this industrialist at his word, and not even question whether Saito merely intends to do some empire-building of his own. But, of course he wouldn’t! He’s a decent enough fella because he’s committed to unshackling Cobb, right? Right…?

As much as I enjoyed this movie, I’d never trust Nolan with my stock portfolio—and certainly not my kids. I just can’t buy into all this puffery about Inception being “ingenious” or “transporting” or anything like my idea of a “dream movie.” And it’s a gazillion degrees away from being an “intellectual overload”—unless you’re prone to headaches. (A mess like Synecdoche, New York may have been more worthy of that mantle, and that’s precisely because it was overloaded.) Nolan is like an upscale J. J. Abrams, but that scale doesn’t rise too high—and, as much as I don’t want to spoil anyone’s fun (I had it, too), I think people are exercising themselves unduly by climbing it. It may be amusing, and maybe a little trippy, but Inception—coming a decade after The Matrix, and five after The Twilight Zone—isn’t even that original. C’mon, people. This didn’t even leave me with the tingle that Shutter Island did, despite the continued solidity of DiCaprio’s acting. Only one scene here came close to the emotional bonanza of the Scorsese film, and that was its simplest: when, at the end, Cobb cradles his wife as she shrivels to oblivion in the intimacy of a formless void. A black hole is the perfect metaphor for where most of Nolan’s emotional currents end up. My dislike of The Dark Knight is all too well documented, but Inception is wounded by the same failings. Nolan mines for human material where there is none—in pulp—and yet seems oblivious to it in its natural habitat. He’s in his own dreamworld, and I wish someone would wake him up.