Are you dreaming or are you awake? Is this a dream within a dream? These are some of the shockingly relevant questions posed by Christopher Nolan’s monumentally boring and mostly humorless new psychological sci-fi thriller Inception. The more pertinent question might be whether you’ll cheering or snoring. This is a movie that strives with every carefully calculated frame, new revelation, and wisp of a grand idea to wow. Inception is a puzzle piece all right and a muddled, over-explanatory one at that. It’s also affirmation that Nolan is the new David Fincher: a director of decidedly macho-boy entertainment in which little things like emotions simply don’t register. Much like Fincher turned the fascinating Zodiac story into a fruitless slog utterly detached from any emotion while constantly showing off how cool he is, Nolan takes the interesting subject of dreams and hamstrings himself at basically every turn by his incessant self-seriousness and faux cleverness.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb in a role so pompously talky you’ll wonder how Nicolas Cage didn’t land it. He’s a specialist who extracts secrets from clients as they sleep under the guise of protecting their secrets. The fresh challenge he faces is that of inserting ideas into the subconscious when a Japanese businessman named Saito (Ken Watanabe) wants to destroy a fierce competitor. The plan is to make the son Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy) dissolve his dying father’s corporate empire by penetrating his subconscious in an elaborately designed dream world (gee, whatever happened to good old fashioned violence, corruption, outright theft, or smarter business practices?). Cobb also happens to be a fugitive unable to see his two children, which Saito promises to change for him if he is successful.

With a lot riding on the completion of the job, to say the least, he assembles his all-star team including Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Arthur. the man responsible for researching their targets. and Ellen Page as Ariadne. the college-student architect who designs the locations. They will board a plane with Fischer on the ten-hour flight to his father’s funeral during which he’ll be drugged and wired to their dream gadgetry. In the orchestrated dream reality they will kidnap him and get him to break into his dad’s safe. The whole set-up is just a con of course to inject the idea of destroying his father’s legacy into Fischer’s head. And oh yes, to complicate things with a soapy side-story, Cobb has several bizarre encounters in his dreams with his beautiful wife (Marion Cotillard) which might threaten to compromise the mission in ways that nobody else on the team is aware of except for the duly concerned Ariadne.

Inception is only mindblowing in its silliness and misfired storytelling. Most glaringly, Nolan doesn’t achieve anything like a convincing dream state. I’ve seen that defended on the grounds that the dream has to be as close to reality as possible in order to complete missions, but even as the dreams are going haywire there’s nothing imaginative about them; like everything else in the movie, it’s brutally prosaic. Instead Nolan’s idea of the shadowy, elusive realm of dreams is pointlessly ostentatious destruction with placid shots of blocks exploding (look: the Parisian cafe, motorcycles, and dishes burst into a million perfect pieces!) and urban landscapes collapsing onto each other. Nolan doesn’t exhibit any rhythm: the movie isn’t as challenging on an intellectual level as much as it is confusing on a moment-to-moment intuitive level. With jarring scene transitions and a pretentious matryoshka design, the only option Nolan has to propel Inception forward is clunky dialogue to try to verbally lay everything out.

The flat, unceasing academic discussion about the neuroscience and chemistry of dreams gives off the impression that this is a movie that has been index carded to death, not dreamed up. There’s no joy in any of it. The aspects of dreaming delved into like the sense of plunging or that odd way you never quite know how a dream began are mind tickling and familiar. But Nolan doesn’t let us revel with him in that wonder about the curious mystery of dreams, his lecturing condescends to us like we’ve never dreamed before. Where other directors have explored the nebulous land of dreams with haunting, mesmerizing results from Fellini to David Lynch and Michel Gondry, Nolan sees it as a dry equation. For him dreaming and closing your eyes might as well be the same thing.

Nolan’s impressive cast bring hip performances to the table. DiCaprio’s performance is more than competent, but it’s a little stock and I think less than the performance he gave in Shutter Island. Joseph Gordon-Levitt (500 Days of Summer), consistently terrific in a number of indie movies over the last five years, gives a too cool for school turn here. His acting is a little stiff and frankly annoying, but he makes enough of a mark that it may very well signal that he could do leading work in big Hollywood movies. Marion Cotillard (Public Enemies) and Ellen Page (Juno) bring some feminine weight to the male world of Nolan, while Pete Postlethwaite as the dying Fischer does what he’s very good at: showing up everybody else (even when the actor playing his son is the excellent Cillian Murphy). A disappointingly underused Michael Caine and a misused Ken Watanabe round out the cast, though I really don’t get the impression that timeless performances, rightly or wrongly, were his priority.

Nolan may think he’s expanding the boundaries of cinema, but blowing everything up doesn’t a prolific pioneer make. The basic outline of the screenplay is fairly trite stuff that calls to mind The Matrix and countless other sci-fi pictures. When Cobb and his team finally pounce into the dream world to plant the idea in Fischer’s mind, it quickly resembles a standard heist movie. As brainy as it purports to be, it’s the silly nature of Inception that really hurts (the dramatic climax with a slow-motion van dive into water, for instance, is unintentionally hilarious). The scheme to implant the idea of internally dissolving a father’s business is unbelievably dumb. Who would possibly go through such labyrinth trouble to screw over a dying person’s legacy? And why stop there? Why not imprint the idea of handing over all of the senior Fischer’s business empire to Saito? By the time they got around to implanting a reminder to buy eggs and milk and that "Led Zeppelin rules" I really lost patience (okay, so I’m joking, that doesn’t actually happen, though it may as well). The mechanics of altering dreams and dealing with other people in a mutually sedated dream state struck me as totally absurd too. Suspension of disbelief is one thing, but I balk at being asked to expel it entirely. Another director might have been able to get away with that kind of silliness, but Nolan treats everything with such a dreary oppressiveness that it’s juiceless and barely involving and does nothing to conceal its intellectual thinness. Inception is brittle candy for the Comic-Con crowd, not a masterpiece. Nolan has everything to prove but little to say.