After the macabre debauchery of Halloween and with the long winter nights setting in, what better thing to lift our hearts than another film from Christopher Nolan? Well, his latest offering doesn’t involve Batman or a tattooed amnesia sufferer out for vengeance, so let’s give it a shot…

Interstellar is a science-fiction epic about humanity’s quest to leave the exhausted Earth behind and strike out to the stars. We follow Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a Texan good ol’ boy engineer and ex-astronaut scraping together a rough farming existence with the help of his kids and father-in-law (John Lithgow). After discovering the existence of a secret installation housing the remnants of NASA, Cooper is told about the desperate plan to explore a potentially habitable system on the far side of a wormhole near Saturn.

Due to the need for his unique set of skills, Cooper has to make the heart-wrenching decision to join the expedition, leaving his family behind indefinitely. On their long trip, the expedition encounters hazardous new planets, the deleterious effects of relativity and the worst aspects of the human psyche.  Meanwhile on Earth, Cooper’s grown-up daughter Murphy (Jessica Chastain) and Professor Brand of NASA (Michael Caine) struggle to get the human race ready to leave for their proposed new home.

This is a film definitely worth seeing on the big screen. It’s a visual feast, clearly inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and reminiscent of more recent hard sci-fi such as Sunshine (2007) and Gravity (2013). Like a lot of Christopher Nolan’s previous work, it’s full of big ideas that are mostly executed well. I’m not sure whether I’ve got better at spotting the plot holes in Nolan’s films over time, or if he just doesn’t care about hiding them anymore, but if you were frustrated by story problems in The Dark Knight Rises, chances are you’ll blow a gasket here.

I did groan inwardly at the waffly dialogue about love transcending dimensions, but maybe that was included just so that I wouldn't feel I missed anything important during the action scenes. This may be a minor gripe, but during some exciting moments I couldn’t hear a word the actors were saying over the noise of the ship’s engines. I would blame the cinema, but given the debacle with Bane’s voice in The Dark Knight Rises, this might be another case of Nolan’s desire for verisimilitude overriding his consideration of the audience.

Some of the technical ambitions may have been misplaced, but the human element holds up very well. The famed ‘McConaissance’ continues apace, as McConaughey proves once again that he is a naturally charismatic screen presence, even when he keeps his shirt on. I defy you not to tear up a bit during a particularly moving scene where he watches his kids’ recorded messages after a short (but actually long – relativity sucks) trip near a black hole. 

Anne Hathaway is perfectly capable as fellow astronaut Amelia Brand, although she does get saddled with most of the aforementioned sappy dialogue. The cast on Earth (notably Chastain and Caine) keep you from missing the space action too much during their scenes, which is as much as we can hope for. A couple of actors show up later in the film to go admirably against type, and there are a couple of cool robots that are unlike anything I’ve seen in modern science fiction.

It may not be a perfect film, but we all know Nolan's potential to work outside of his superhero backlog and create more cerebral blockbusters like Inception. If you want to see intrepid space crews doing exciting things on hostile alien worlds, or you’re a fan of any of the films mentioned in this review, I highly recommend Interstellar.