Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar: An epic disappears into a black hole

Interstellar, director Christopher Nolan’s latest beautiful colossus, is a little less than three hours long. As with most of Nolan’s movies, it’s not light on visual astonishments, this time adding to his IMAX palette sweeping panoramas of romantic farmland Americana, Kubrickian deep-space loneliness and (also Kubrickian) spiritual-temporal-dimensional freakouts. Eyeful after eyeful after eyeful.

The ears, though, are another matter.

Everything you hear in Interstellar basically goes like this: FFFFWOOOOOOOOOOOSSSHHHHH [garble garble, Uh oh!], “Science,” ORGAN CHORD! “No more okra, ever,” SSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHFFFFF “Lookout! Dust!” “The planet is dying, and you can believe it because I’m Michael Caine,” “Sorry,” “Go save Earth, pilot,” “Pilot and engineer,” “Sorry,” “Don’t leave us, Dad,” “Sorry, but I’ll see you later,” ORGAN CHORD ORGAN CHORD! “Do not go gentle into that good night,” ORGAN CHORD “Rage against the [garble, garble] ORGAN CHORDVVVVVVVVVVVVVWOOOOOOOOOOSSSSSSSSHHHH [garble garble], silence, robot joke, single Anne Hathaway tear, “Science science science,” robot joke, “Science!” KLANG, Matthew McConaughey sob, “Science science,” ORGAN CHORD! [garble garble “Look out!”] ORGAN CHORD KEY CHANGE! “Love,” “Science,” “Love,” “SCIENCE!” “Hey, aren’t you Matt D–,” SSSHHHHHHHHHWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOBBBBBRRRRRRRRRR, ORGAN CHORD, single Anne Hathaway tear, “Five-dimensional beings!” “Don’t you get it?” “Dad!” “Science,” “Eureka!” “Where am I?”

There really are long stretches when the characters — McConaughey as pilot-farmer-engineer-hero Cooper (Coop, they call him, sent with his crew into a wormhole to find a new planet for humanity), Hathaway as a Ph.D., Caine as Hathaway’s Ph.D. father, Jessica Chastain as Coop’s grown Ph.D. daughter back on Earth, assorted recognizable faces and voices — could be reciting Mad Libs, in which all of the prompts call for “noun you heard during SAT prep.” Like: “Let’s put the ship in a Newtonian orbit and fire the science rockets when you see Einstein kissing Hawking in the portal,” accompanied by the sound of Hans Zimmer throwing a box of old Philip Glass LPs at your head. At one point, someone really does chide Coop, “You knew about relativity!” as though telling him that he’s not getting a bathroom break until we get to Pluto.

Somewhere in a Pennsylvania multiplex this weekend, M. Night Shyamalan is going to watch this and then write in his little lockable diary, “Why is everyone still so mad at me?”

Staggering screenplay deficiencies in a Nolan storytelling high-rise are neither new nor, on their own, deal breakers. The ridiculous almost eclipses the sublime in The Dark Knight Rises, his mega-budget remake of Rocky III. And every character in his 2010 movie, Inception (co-written, like Interstellar, by Nolan and his brother, Jonathan), is at tiresome pains to explain the ironclad logic of the story’s dream world and the architecture governing it, even as those rules keep yielding to narrative convenience and whatever 65-mm wizardry Nolan feels like deploying at any given moment. It works; Inception is so stupidly convinced of its own cleverness — and so effortless in its sheer stupid scale — that you give in. I watch it a couple of times a year and I see more wrong with it every time, and I don’t care.

Interstellar, though, is about waking nightmares, not opium dreams: population implosion, mass starvation, the abandonment of human ambition in the face of extinction, lost faith in family, the ebbing will to love, the fading memory of Carl Sagan’s original Cosmos. These are ideas big enough for Nolan’s gigantic images, and there’s weight to the Earth scenes in the movie’s opening third, enough that you wish Nolan had burrowed into the issues on his mind rather than pestling them into a thin sci-fi paste. You don’t have to send a father to another galaxy to get at what the mere thought of passing time does to parents and children.

Once talk turns to rockets, though, the big ideas aren’t explored but simply mentioned over and over in words that are small, clumsily strung together and easily lost in a shock-and-awe sound design that often veers into punishment. Nolan feeds bluntly earnest koans about these matters to his characters, who are supposed to be brilliant and desperate, but what comes out of the actors’ mouths sounds at times like the Max Fischer Players doing Star Trek.

McConaughey taps into his inner star child enough to make the sale, but the rest of the cast is adrift. Poor Chastain has it worst, introduced with an appealingly bitter scene but swept at last into a problem-solving montage as convincing as a Mentos commercial. You expect her to look up from her chalkboard and say, “I’m doing physics,” yet the reality is worse: She launches a ream of paper over a metal railing and yells, “Eureka!” The hard-hatted workers below, now in their second or third generation of building science-y things in a concrete bunker while their families presumably go hungry on the Earth’s surface, take no note but keep blowtorching or hammering or whatever.

And then there are still 20 minutes left, and time seems to stretch out before you. But you knew about relativity when you bought your ticket.