His crew are Brand's daughter (Anne Hathaway), a pair of researchers (a wonderful David Gyasi and Wes Bentley) and a robot named TARS that looks like the monolith of '2001: A Space Odyssey' if it were a shape-shifting Transformer.

All they can send him are video messages. He's a dutiful, driven father stepping out to work, only in another galaxy. The parting from Murph, who resents the abandonment, is wrenching. The journey means Cooper will, under the best of circumstances, be gone for years. There will be no aliens poking forth from bellies or monument-blasting battles with extraterrestrials it's just about us humans. 'Interstellar' is a trip, for sure, but it's not a supernatural one. Much discussion of gravity and relativity follows, as Nolan (who co-wrote the script with his brother Jonathan and consulted with theoretical physicist Kip Thorne) tries valiantly to place his quasi-plausible sci-fi tale within the realm of mathematics and science. They enlist him to pilot a desperate mission through a wormhole to follow an earlier expedition that may have found planets capable of hosting human life. Large-scale dreaming has gone underground. Nolan shoots for the stars, literally and cinematically, when Cooper's curiosity (he and Murph tail a flying drone through the wheat fields) brings him to a secret NASA lair run by a Dr. Nolan - who shot in both 35mm and 70mm and prefers his films massive on Imax, but not, thank our stars, in 3-D - remains one of the few purveyors of DeMille-sized big-screen grandeur. The spirit of wonderment, too, has sometimes lacked in our movies. Now we just look down and wonder about our place in the dirt.' He seethes: 'We used to look up in the sky and wonder about our place in the stars. But Cooper, a former NASA pilot, still believes in science's capacity for greatness. Textbooks now read that the moon landings were faked.

In the imperiled climate, space exploration is viewed as part of the 'excess' of the 20th century. The rustic homestead, where Cooper and his father-in-law (John Lithgow) drink beer on the porch, recalls the Indiana home of 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' - an early hint that 'Interstellar' - moving and sentimental - will be more Spielberg (who was once attached to direct) than Kubrick. The film opens in the near future where a new kind of Dust Bowl, one called 'the blight,' brings crop-killing storms of dust upon the Midwest farm of engineer-turned-farmer Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) and his two children, the adventuresome 10-year-old Murph (Mackenzie Foy) and the 15-year-old budding farmer Tom (Timothee Chalamet). But if you take these for blips rather than black holes, the majesty of 'Interstellar' is something to behold. 'Interstellar' is overly explanatory about its physics, its dialogue can be clunky and you may want to send composer Hans Zimmer's relentless organ into deep space. But a celestial warmth shines through 'Interstellar,' which is, at heart, a father-daughter tale grandly spun across a cosmic tapestry. And it's one of the most sublime movies of the decade.Īs our chief large-canvas illusionist, Nolan's kaleidoscope puzzles have often dazzled more than they have moved, prizing brilliant, hocus-pocus architecture over emotional interiors. In 'Interstellar,' he slips into its very fabric, shaping its flows and exploding its particles. Since his breakthrough with the backward-running 'Memento,' Christopher Nolan has made a plaything of time.

Interstellar endurance ship interior