Detective Chinatown director Sicheng Chen's film shows what Christopher Nolan's Inception and Oppenheimer could have been if they had been conceived from an uncritical angle.

British filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s work, both past and recent, deserves even greater acclaim than Chinese director Chen Sicheng’s ambitious but saccharine and largely dull “Decoded,” an adaptation of Mai Jia’s 2002 novel of the same name. A cradle-to-grave portrait of fictional character Rong Jinzhen (Haoran Liu), a prodigious orphan turned 1940s government asset, the film chronicles how his unique skills ultimately helped pave the way for China to develop its own nuclear weapons program.

While the scale of its task and its global implications may immediately draw comparisons to Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” the moniker “Decoded,” as “China’s answer” to the recent Best Picture Oscar winner, must come with the caveat that it’s a toothless film when it comes to moral ambiguity. This is not a dissident work of art created to question the pursuit of such weaponization, but a state-sponsored effort in which patriotism is glorified throughout—literally, to the very last frame. The idealized concept of a sovereign country and the duty to defend it propels Jinzhen’s every move.

From a young age, Jinzhen learns the art of dream interpretation from his enigmatic guardian. His genius combines that esoteric talent with an innate ability for complex mathematical thought. Although he can understand mind-boggling equations à la A Beautiful Mind, he believes the keys to solving numbers lie in his dreams. Only by turning off a light switch can Jinzhen know whether what he sees is an experience that occurs while he is conscious or not, a device reminiscent of the spinning top in Nolan's Inception.