Nolan's 'Interstellar' a trippy, twisty tale of saving humankind

Christopher Nolan shoots for the stars in his wildly ambitious, visually explosive sci-fi epic “Interstellar.”

And he succeeds, relativity speaking.

In “Interstellar,” Nolan — one of the smartest and most daring filmmakers of his generation — has created nothing less than his own personal “2001: A Space Odyssey,” a mind-expanding, imagination-challenging excursion into alternate galaxies where we skip through the fourth dimension and plunge headlong into the fifth.

“Interstellar” is trippy, daring stuff that demands repeat viewing to totally absorb the many layers of scientific theory employed in the execution of this dense and sometimes abstract narrative.

(Theoretical physicist Kip Thorne is credited as an executive producer for providing Nolan and his screenwriter brother, Jonathan Nolan, with technical and astronomical advice.)

Yet, stripped to its essence, “Interstellar” works like an update to the 1951 sci-fi classic “When Worlds Collide,” about relocating humans to a nearby hospitable planet before the Earth ceases to exist.

“Interstellar” takes us on a breathless adventure through wormholes and black holes to find that hospitable planet while telling a powerful, parallel love story about a little girl and her departing father, who promises he will return to her, but with this strange caveat: They might be the same age when he does.

In the not-so-distant future, Earth has become a global Dust Bowl with some sort of crop blight wiping out all grains but corn. Armies apparently no longer exist, and humanity seems be headed for extinction.

A widower farmer named Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) keeps growing what he can on his rural homestead. He wants a future for his 15-year-old son Tom (Timothee Chalamet) and his precocious 10-year-old daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy), But with nitrogen increasing and oxygen decreasing on Earth, the future doesn't look promising.

Not until Murph and Cooper stumble upon a secret NASA base hidden underground.

There, Dr. Brand (Michael Caine, Nolan's go-to actor for paternalistic wisdom) informs Cooper that NASA has been working on two plans to save the human race.

Plan A transports massive numbers of people through space, if Brand can figure out a mathematical problem in time.

Plan B settles for a small number of humans moving to a new planet.

Turns out that Cooper isn't just a farmer, but “the best pilot” Brand has ever known. (Really? Cooper is the best pilot Brand's ever known, yet NASA never thought about contacting him for a mission?)

It also turns out that someone, or some thing, has placed a time/space-rifting wormhole near the planet Saturn in an apparent attempt to help humans venture into other galaxies to find a new home.

No time for investigating that.

Cooper, Brand's scientist daughter (Anne Hathaway), two other researchers (Wes Bentley and David Gyasi) and a surprising and personable robot named TARS (voiced by the underappreciated performer Bill Irwin, who puts a spry spin on Douglas Rain's iconic HAL from “2001”) take off to go down the wormhole in search of a new Earth.

“Interstellar” is a treasure trove of narrative twists, astonishing special effects (no green screens were used, just real physical effects), unexpected emotions and brain-blowing concepts of how the universe might be working.

The cast includes John Lithgow, Casey Affleck and Ellen Burstyn providing key supporting characters. Jessica Chastain seethes anger and internal struggle as an adult Murph, who's waited a lifetime for Dad to make good on his promise to return. (In one of the movie's sobering moments, the crew figures out that for every one of their hours, seven years pass on Earth, making literally every second of their mission count.)

After testing us with dream theory dramatics in “Inception,” Christopher Nolan (who also directed the “Dark Knight” trilogy) shows us here what he's capable of achieving: nothing less than a magnificent big-screen epic brimming with imagination, intelligence and humanity, a visionary work of such scope and density, we walk out of it dazed and amused, maybe even curious to know more about quantum physics than we cared to know before.

For as “Interstellar” shows, the only thing more confounding and complex than quantum physics is human nature.

“Interstellar”

★ ★ ★ ★

<b>Starring: </b>Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Michael Caine, John Lithgow, Wes Bentley, Jessica Chastain, Bill Irwin, Casey Affleck, Ellen Burstyn

<b>Directed by: </b>Christopher Nolan

<b>Other: </b>A Paramount Pictures release. Rated PG-13 for language and violence. 169 minutes