I confess that I had huge expectations for this movie.  Not because director Christopher Nolan is the darling of comic fans for his “Dark Knight” trilogy, but because it seemed to mark a return to hard science-fiction: the prime importance of space travel to the survival of the human species.  I’ve been an advocate for space exploration my whole life and agree wholeheartedly with the film’s premise, that we must move off of this world — soon — or we will be doomed to perish upon it.

What I was not expecting was a film so deliberately inspired by, yet antithetical to, 2001: A Space Odyssey, the landmark film of the genre — which also happens to be, in my humble opinion, the most overrated film of the 1960s.  I enjoyed the important differences from Kubrick’s film; Interstellar is warm with feeling and emotion, has strong characters and narrative and is as personal a movie about the fate of the Earth as can be, where Kubrick’s film is (except for the prehistoric beginning) cold, clinical, sterile and turgid.

The similarities to Kubrick’s film are what distressed me.  Both films provide visual representations of concepts that can never be accurately rendered, which I find ineffective, no matter how original the photographic techniques involved.  The music is either cacophony or misguided.  Science and scientific method are hammered home as the only viable way forward — and then are discarded at key moments.  The one area where Interstellar is light years ahead of 2001 is its view of human nature; in Kubrick’s film the most human character is the computer, HAL 9000.

Certainly Interstellar has merit.  Its perspective of Texas turning into a dust bowl may well be on target, and sooner than we think.  But what about the rest of the country?  We never get the larger scope, only what the NASA scientists relate to Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a former astronaut who evidently needs no new training at all to pilot the spacecraft being sent to find a new world for mankind to inhabit.  Nolan skips the transitional material, all the preparation needed to mount such adventures, but that was at least some of the fun of the old sci-fi movies.  That fun is absent here, despite a wisecracking robot.  It’s all earnest dialogue regarding the problems of the mission, saving the world, or regret about leaving it.

The personal drama works pretty well, especially out in space.  McConaughey is very good, and Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Wes Bentley, David Gyasi, Mackenzie Foy, Ellyn Burstyn, John Lithgow, Topher Grace, Michael Caine, Casey Affleck and Matt Damon all have their moments.  Nolan does an especially nice job on the ice planet, where the future is imperiled by the basest of human instincts.  Although there is a lot of cool stuff, mind-blowing concepts of space and time, strong acting and the most pure ambition I’ve seen in a film in a while, I just never really connected with it.  It was more spectacle than immersive experience, despite everyone’s best efforts.  I think it is due to the movie’s narrative, which I feel is too restrictively focused; I found myself wondering about other people in other places. And I would not have made the same choices that the astronauts do, given their circumstances, so that bugged me too.  I applaud the ambition and conviction of Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan (who wrote the thing), but as much as I wanted it to, it just didn’t connect well with me.  ☆ ☆ 1/2.  13 November 2014.