Christopher Nolan has always been an ambitious filmmaker. From his debut, Following, to Memento to his Dark Knight trilogy, he has always elevated what would otherwise be mere genre flicks in the hands of lesser auteurs. Interstellar has ambition in spades and succeeds for the most part. But at near three hours in length, Nolan just cannot pull his 2014: A Space Odyssey completely together. 

Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a pilot turned farmer, joins a space mission to save humanity, whose days on an increasingly dusty Earth are numbered. Professor Brand (Michael Caine) has discovered a wormhole that will allow man to travel farther afield than ever before. Perhaps the planetary answer to our dilemma exists light years away. All Coop, Brand’s daughter (Anne Hathaway) and a couple of other scientists (Wes Bentley and David Gyosi) have to do is find the planet and get back before everyone dies. Sounds simple enough. 

Nolan and his sibling/constant collaborator, Jonathan, have built a sturdy space vehicle that orbits somewhere between an episode of Fox’s “Cosmos” reboot and Kubrick’s 2001. The film impresses more as science than as fiction and, early on, remains too earthbound. Once the film takes off, it becomes an extremely intense outer space adventure. We’re not talking Gravity intense, but Interstellar’s two tensest sequences will have audiences on the edge of their seats. 

As has been the case over the past year or more, McConaughey continues his renaissance, though Interstellar is really less a place to show off acting chops than one for Nolan and crew’s tremendous, practical effects and design. This cerebral sci-fi adventure does find time for a handful of effective moments of humanity, and McConaughey and Jessica Chastain, as Cooper’s grown-up daughter, Murph, certainly ensure these scenes achieve their emotional impact. 

Interstellar probably will not have the legs of Nolan’s last non-Batman film, the superior Inception, but it ought to be seen, criticized and discussed at length. Not many blockbusters deserve such praise.