Interstellar

Christopher Nolan is Hollywood's most masterful huckster: a blockbuster auteur who uses incredible sleight of hand to elevate into art what other directors would leave as garbage. He is the king of making you think his films—the Dark Knight trilogy, the madly convoluted Inception, the oh-so-slick Memento—are smarter than they actually are. His are popcorn films, but damned if they aren't gourmet popcorn.

So it makes perfect sense that Nolan takes us to another galaxy with Interstellar. In space, nobody can hear you scream, "Wait, that doesn't make sense...but holy shit, did you see that?!"

The director, along with screenwriting brother Jonathan, has crafted a world where extremely complex space theory—for example, that time passes on some planets at a rate exponentially slower than on Earth—is explained with fleeting comments that are instantly accepted. Whenever something seems really, really out there, somebody conveniently finds a whiteboard and draws a bunch of squiggly marks. Bam! Equation! Now look at this wormhole!

And really, when a film looks this good, that's almost enough. It helps, too, that Interstellar is stocked with actors whose charisma endures, even as they're forced to spout robotically scientific gobbledygook. The plot finds former pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) raising his kids and crops on a blighted Earth, where all plant life is slowly going extinct. Constant dust storms pummel the land. The only form of food appears to be corn. Things aren't looking good for mankind.

Through seemingly paranormal prompting, Coop discovers a top-secret lab, the kind that Bond villains usually populate, complete with spaceships behind hidden doors. He's almost immediately enlisted by a speechifying Michael Caine to captain a space expedition: He must either find a new planet for the remnants of humanity to call home or—if time runs out—find a place to incubate a stash of embryos, thus preventing the extinction of mankind.

That's all a very long way of saying this is a movie in which McConaughey leaves his kids behind on Earth so that he, Anne Hathaway and some robots can go on a cool space adventure and visit places where frozen clouds hover above tundra and waves the size of skyscrapers threaten laid-back days at the beach. Meanwhile, back home, the rest of humanity (including Coop's now-adult daughter) runs around eating corn and trying to find a way to survive.

But this is a Nolan film, so nothing is simple—or quick to the point. At nearly three hours, the film piles on the twists, wonky physics, heartfelt speeches and pseudoscience, which, again, is totally fine, because we're hanging out with Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway in a psychedelic space fantasia. But Interstellar remains something of a slog, and could easily chop an hour off its runtime and remain an exhilarating piece of escapism.

Instead, it drags because of Nolan's insistence on overcomplicating things with indecipherable equations and endless exposition. Add a twist ending that's ludicrous and self-important to the point of hilarity and you've got a lot of strained goodwill. Again, this is a film about McConaughey and robots kicking it in space. Why so serious?

Critic's Grade: C+

Interstellar is rated PG-13. It opens Friday at most major Portland-area theaters.

WWeek 2015