Humanity goes house hunting in 'Interstellar'

"INTERSTELLAR" director Christopher Nolan says that his new sci-fi extravaganza is inspired by the movie high he got as a kid watching "Star Wars" and "2001: A Space Odyssey."

Certainly, it's possible to love both movies.

Loving them both at the same time, well, that's another matter.

Imagine, for instance, what Kubrick would have done with an Ewok - jettisoned it into space the first chance he got, so we could watch it recede into a pitiless void.

To the stunned dismay of some, the rousing cheers of others.

Which is to say, there's something irreconcilable about the two visions, as we discover in Nolan's ambitious new gob-smacker.

"Interstellar" has some stellar moments, but you can feel Nolan off his game a tad as the movie opens in the Midwestern Corn Belt, depicted as a warped piece of Americana assembled from equal parts nostalgia and dystopia. A dust bowl is forming, and orphaned drones buzz by, disconnected from defunct military hubs.

In the not-too-distant future, humanity has become pessimistic and willfully ignorant, regressing to an agrarian society. Farming is the only important industry; children are taught in school that space travel was a hoax.

In such a world, astronauts are obsolete, so retired space jock Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) has turned to farming. His children are handy representations of his two selves - his son happily tills the soil, his daughter, Murph (Mackenzie Foy), hungers for instruction in science and physics, and goes with Dad to explore signals emanating from a facility nearby.

It's home to an underground organization of ex-NASA physicists, working out of view of the anti-science public, trying to save humanity by engineering our exodus to another solar system. Humans weren't meant to save the Earth, says lead physicist Prof. Brand (Michael Caine), they were meant to leave it.

All is in readiness. Brand's daughter (Anne Hathaway) will handle the physics. All they need is the right Right Stuff pilot to steer a spaceship through a time/space corridor that will take us to another corner of the universe, where a large sun exists with three Earth-like planets, already being evaluated for colonization by previous pioneers.

I was nagged by the notion that Nolan's view of what's around the corner doesn't make sense - would present-day net-addicts and technophiliacs, who worship smartphones like some new Baal, really turn from technology as a means of solving humanity's problems?

You don't have time to think about it. Soon we're in space, where Cooper rams his ship through a black hole like Ricky Bobby, of "Talladega Nights," and physics gives way to metaphysics - we learn of a mysterious "them" that seems to be inviting mankind to relocate, paving the way.

"Interstellar" hints at a benevolent unseen force, sometimes identified as love, at other times a "fifth dimension," and Nolan asks if we'd like to ride in his beautiful balloon.

Well, no.

The Nolan I prefer is the cynic of "Memento," the guy who suggested in "Inception" that ideas we take to be our own have been planted by corporate interests, the director who played so nastily with our terror fears in "The Dark Knight."

It's this Nolan who finally surfaces in the movie's tense midsection, when potential new worlds are explored, and the director reminds us that human colonies must be staffed, alas, with humans, and that we're always our own worst enemy.

To be fair, Nolan has always tempered his darkest moments with parables of human decency - the bridge scene in "The Dark Knight Rises," the ferry scene in "The Dark Knight Returns."

Here, this instinct swells into something sentimental as we explore the mysterious across-the-universe connections between Cooper and his now-grown daughter, played as an adult by Jessica Chastain.

The movie's best idea is that father and daughter, in different corners of the universe, are aging at different rates - becoming contemporaries.

This is both sad (there is always the possibility that even if Cooper succeeds and returns, his children will have lived out their lives) and necessary - only a grown-up Murph has a chance at making sense of the data being retrieved from the mission, and devising a way to save those on Earth.

A good idea, and delivered by Nolan with typical ingenuity and lucidity. And panache - the movie's black holes, worm holes and multiple dimensions are great fun to gawk at. Every new sci-fi vision needs an AI robot, and "Interstellar" has a good one.

Still, you may feel as though you've become your own father by the end of "Interstellar," which at 165 minutes feels both rushed and overlong (an explanation of black holes is literally a back-of-the-envelope calculation).

Don't say Nolan didn't warn you.

He calls mankind's prospective new star Gargantua, and he's named Coop's ship the Endurance - implying, correctly, that stamina will be required to appreciate this gargantuan production.

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