Halfway through Christopher Nolan’s thoughtful but ultimately unfulfilling “Interstellar,” a spacecraft speeds into a wormhole, where four astronauts face a series of possible outcomes.
The movie could have gone several ways, too — and it is heartbreaking to watch this ambitious story choose the wrong one and get lost in space.
The four travelers are led by Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a farmer on a dying Earth who is caring for his teenage son (Timothée Chalamet), 10-year-old daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy) and father-in-law (John Lithgow).
It’s not quite 100 years in the future, and an environmental “blight” — left vague — has choked the dusty planet for a decade. The only crop left is corn, and soon that, and humanity itself, will die.
When Cooper and young Murphy look for the source of an energy anomaly, they come upon a much-downsized NASA, led by Dr. Brand (Michael Caine), an aged scientist who was once Cooper’s instructor.
Brand has found a wormhole near Saturn, and previously sent 10 now-missing manned crafts into it seeking planets to colonize. Three sent signals back.
Cooper, Brand’s scientist daughter Amelia (Anne Hathaway), two fellow astronauts (David Gyasi, Wes Bentley) and some clunky robots are sent into the unknown to find the source of the signals. There’s a chance Cooper’s team may return, though the wormhole’s time-space rift means decades will pass on Earth while they barely age. So Murphy grows up to become a scientist herself, as Cooper, flying urgently between possible new planets, receives dire, long-delayed Skype messages he can’t reply to.
A lot happens in “Interstellar,” to say the least. There are black holes, big ideas, quantum physics and quiet scenes filled with emotion. Some of it is undeniably engrossing, and anyone who likes smart sci-fi will appreciate its echoes of “Forbidden Planet,” “Silent Running” and others, especially “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
But the film eventually feels like garbled signals sent across cinematic history. The film’s heart — basically, that love can conquer the infinite — falls short, perhaps because Nolan (“The Dark Knight,” “Inception”) is one of our smartest filmmakers, but not our warmest. The most affecting moments in his previous films were between Bruce Wayne and his butler.
Last year’s “Gravity” did a lot of what “Interstellar” aims to do, and in half the time.
McConaughey is a solid anchor, even as the film abruptly rushes to get Cooper from terra firma to the cosmos, as if Nolan looked at his watch and realized he had to get the show on the road. Foy and Jessica Chastain (as the older Murphy) lend subtle depth. But Hathaway strikes a too-wry note, and Bentley is so disposable he’s like a doomed, red-shirted extra on “Star Trek.”
Yet even as “Interstellar” becomes a beautiful mess, its wannabe-deep impact will hit everyone differently. We need far-reaching artists like Nolan, since, as they say, Earth without art is “eh.”
For all its faults, you may still want to go along for the ride. There are far worse fates.
jneumaier@nydailynews.com
Catch “Joe Neumaier’s Movie Minute” throughout the day Thurs. – Sun. on New York’s WOR 710 AM and at wor710.com.
