“Interstellar” is three hours long and you feel every minute of it. It’s an epic about the race against time to save humanity from a dying earth. We go from sickly cornfields to scraped-together spaceships in the outer reaches of space to uninhabitable planets to a virtual hall of mirrors that violates the laws of physics.
Matthew McConaughey stars as a promising engineer turned corn farmer who is the closest thing the Earth has to a competent astronaut after famine made pretty much everybody have to focus on corn farming. Humanity’s only hope is to relocate everyone to a new planet on the other end of a wormhole. McConaughey and a small crew are sent on a mission to check out the three most promising candidates. The mission will take decades and he has to leave his family behind. And then it turns out that his family may have been the key to saving humanity all along.
The movie on Earth is pretty bland, though McConaughey proves that his Oscar last year was no fluke. But of course it’s in space when things get really intense. The characters find themselves in one situation after another where you can swear they’ll never make it out, and yet there is that sliver of hope thanks to McConaughey’s absolutely believable resilience and intelligence.
Speaking of intelligence, in a way that’s the movie’s biggest problem. I couldn’t keep up with all the science talk, especially when it came to time manipulation. Like the species, I was lost and needed McConaughey’s relatability to rescue me. But even then, it was clear that “Interstellar” was doing everything it could to accomplish something important and amazing.
Two and a Half Stars out of Five.
“Interstellar” is rated PG-13 for some intense perilous action and brief strong language. Its running time is 169 minutes.