Christopher Nolan is the new Stanley Kubrick. That’s the gist of many of the rave reviews currently circulating in the American press in the wake of his new, brain-teasing sci-fi thriller. Nolan gained critical success early on with Memento, then hit the other kind of jackpot with the Batman franchise. Now, with Inception, which he wrote as well as directed, he seems to have the whole world at his feet.

Which is apt, because the central characters in Inception dabble in “pure creation” and, as a result, feel “like gods”.

To start at the beginning — which, naturally, is a false start — the film is set in a cut-throat future. Separated from his kids thanks to a crime he (possibly) didn’t commit, Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is employed by a corporation to steal ideas from people while they’re sleeping. His latest victim, Saito (Ken Watanabe), turns the tables and demands that Cobb plant an idea in the mind of Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), who is heir to a business empire that is on the brink of world domination. If Cobb can convince Fischer to break up this empire, Saito will pull strings so that Cobb’s “crime” is overlooked.

Cobb assembles a crack team, including unflappable boffin Arthur (Joseph Gordon Levitt), mischievous forger Eames (Tom Hardy) and earnest undergraduate Ariadne (Ellen Page). She is to be the team’s “architect”, creating a dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream that Fisher will at all times accept as “real”.

There are two problems. Fischer has been trained to resist brain infiltration. And Cobb’s own demons are running amok in the subconscious realm — a runaway train and a noirish dame (Marion Cotillard) seem to have it in for our man. Cobb insists he has things under control but, as Arthur deadpans, “I’d hate to see you out of control.”

Inception is the kind of information-packed movie that creates the painful/pleasurable sensation that there’s no time to think. There’s a whole new vocabulary to be mastered (“projections”, “kicks” and “totems”). Your ears are bombarded, and not just by Hans Zimmer’s indignantly doom-laden score, but by in-jokes, such as the playing of Edith Piaf’s Je Ne Regrette Rien, which was sung by Cotillard in La Vie en Rose. Your eyes, if they are to catch clues like the design of a certain passport stamp, would be advised not to blink.

The ideas that Nolan is toying with are deliciously meta-textual. Key characters are suffering from what literary critics like to call The Anxiety of Influence, the fear that they are someone else’s creation and that original thought is impossible. Which begs the question, how original is Inception itself?

Nolan’s narrative borrows from such other navel-gazing gems as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, Soderbergh’s Solaris and Richard Linklater’s Waking Life. It flat-out plunders The Matrix, the guilt-laden Don’t Look Now and everything Philip K Dick has ever written. It’s got a wee bit of Citizen Kane in there, too.

But none of that gets in the way of enjoyment. Nolan’s young cast are alert to nuance, the banter is spry and the visuals and special effects are so beautiful that they deserve to be hung in a gallery — my favourite involved a man’s face emerging from water in a twisted, slo-mo howl.

So why didn’t I come out of this movie feeling like my mind had been blown? There’s too much exposition and some of the one-liners are lame (“Downwards is the only way forward!”). The real problem, however, lies deeper. A crucial scene in which Cobb and his nemesis have their last encounter is woefully lacking in resonance, emotional or otherwise. Cobb’s great “crime” turns out to be a non-event. Cobb tells Ariadne that for an idea successfully to take root it has to be “fully formed and fully understood”. The concept at the heart of Inception is neither.

Nolan, it seems to me, has more in common with Spielberg than Kubrick. An ambitious, energetic, technical story-teller, he’s perfectly in step with the public imagination. It’s his fans who are confused, lost in the happy daydream that he’s one step beyond.