Matthew McConaughey, left, and Anne Hathaway, in a scene from the film, ‘”Interstellar,.”‘Interstellar’• Rating: PG-13 for some intense perilous action and brief strong language.• Running time: 2 hours, 45 minutes.
Since his breakthrough with the backward-running “Memento,” Christopher Nolan has made a plaything of time. In “Interstellar,” he slips into its very fabric, shaping its flows and exploding its particles. It’s an absurd endeavor. And it’s one of the most sublime movies of the decade.
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).
In the imperiled climate, space exploration is viewed as part of the “excess” of the 20th century. Textbooks now read that the moon landings were faked. But Cooper, a former NASA pilot, still believes in science’s capacity for greatness.
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. Brand (Michael Caine). Large-scale dreaming has gone underground. 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.