Interstellar: sprawling, ambitious, plunges audiences into the unknown

“Interstellar” asks us to take a leap of faith. It’s a sprawling film with a runtime of nearly three hours. We cross galaxies, rifts in time and rifts between people. We exit the three-dimensional universe and enter the bewildering fifth-dimension. The dialogue is wordy, and the enormity of its theoretical science, intimidating. Here is a space odyssey worthy of all the “rage” — both the good and the bad.

Earth is withering away, its bounties depleted, its crops laid waste by blight. There is little demand for engineers and astronauts — perhaps even less for poets and filmmakers. Now, Earth needs farmers. But a wormhole has formed near Saturn. The possibility that inhabitable planets await the human race on the other side brings Cooper (Matthew McConaughey, TV’s “True Detective”), a family man and ex-astronaut/engineer, out of retirement. Cooper casts off from Earth, bound for the wormhole, with a crew of experts that most notably include Amelia Brand, played by a determined Anne Hathaway (“Les Misérables”).

Christopher Nolan directed “Interstellar,” and revised the original screenplay by frequent collaborator and brother, Jonathan Nolan, and some of their telltale errors show. The sentimentalism is sometimes retch-worthy. Its pacing is uneven. Its plotholes are ghastly. And characters tend to muse and jabber at ill-timed moments to provide necessary exposition. This leaves you one of the most flawed films of the year, and one of the most memorable.

As critics would point out, director Nolan stages his films like a magic trick. In many ways, this patented mode of storytelling is inadequate to handle this film’s subject material. It creaks with age; we’ve seen it all before.

Nolan is known for enclosing his characters (and audience) in a maze of twists and turns; you can see how noir has influenced his work. He establishes a series of rules that create walls between his characters and their goals, and makes great use of the “play-within-a-play” scheme that makes us cognizant of his artifice.

But the rules that govern “Interstellar” somehow seem even beyond the reach of a cinemagician like Nolan to wield. They are the laws of science. Gravity, extra-dimensional physics, and wormholes must be confronted. Time becomes a pressing issue and a valuable resource.

Time, as Brand explains, cannot be reversed or stopped, but stretched and squeezed. Never has Nolan confronted reality and the Relativity of Time as boldly as in “Interstellar,” where things literally spin out of orbit. Even astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, a notorious grump when it comes to scientific inaccuracy, has gushed about “Interstellar” on Twitter and in interviews.

But like “Inception,” the maze of “Interstellar” collapses. Order breaks down. You step outside of space; you step outside of time. Film is a lens of experience, and through this lens, Nolan allows us to see and think about the rules that govern our lives and create our mazes.

And still I have yet to mention the pure spectacle of “Interstellar”: the clementine surface of Saturn, a space station sailing round a wormhole, the blinding event horizon of a black hole. Nor have I mentioned its inspired production design and the best wisecracking robot in years — TARS, voiced by a very funny Bill Irwin. TARS’s blocky LEGO strikes one as regressive, reminiscent even of the grittiness of “Blade Runner,” which is one of Nolan’s favorite movies. TARS and the wry remarks of the screenplay as a whole punch up the film nicely. The performances are admirable, and Hans Zimmer (“The Amazing Spider-Man 2”) has composed his most electrifying score yet.

“Interstellar” panders to the cineaste, who wants to inspect the film, and it panders to the casual moviegoer, who came for the spectacle. For this compromise, which is Nolan’s staple, the movie suffers. It buckles ponderously. But I can’t fault ambition. Rarely do movies stretch as desperately, as hopefully as this one. Here is a film that will have you pacing into the night, confronting time, love and the unknown. I still have yet to sleep a full night since seeing it.