D: Christopher Nolan. S: Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan. P: Emma Thomas, Christopher Nolan, Lynda Obst. Cast: Matthew McConnaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Ellen Burstyn, Michael Caine, Casy Affleck. UK dist (DVD/Blu-ray): Warner.

Despite an unintelligible lead performance, a desperate air of self-importance and enough sentiment to set Shirley Temple’s teeth on edge, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar is not without flashes of interest – though hardline SF fans may find themselves reaching for the safety catch on their blasters more often than not. In common with most genre fare these days, Interstellar is an unruly mélange of influences: the most obvious source is, of course, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), with a sugary dusting of Carl Sagan’s Contact (1997) for good measure, though a later plot twist (lifted from James Cameron) is one influence that might have been better left suppressed. Nolan’s Hollywood career has seen him move from smaller-scale, intimate arthouse fare to sprawling, ever-longer CGI-fests; with Interstellar, Nolan wants to have his cake and eat it, describing an epic scale space-quest from a humanist angle – an ambitious prospectus only partly fulfilled.

Earth, the near future. Global conflict has left the world depleted in resources, subject to freak dust storms and pernicious crop blight. Ex-astronaut and widower Cooper (Matthew McConnaughey) has been obliged to turn his native ingenuity to farming, cannibalising parts from leftover spy drones to build a fleet of GPS-driven combine harvesters. He lives a quiet but contented life with his 10-year-old daughter Murph, teenage son Tom and father-in-law Donald (John Lithgow), his dreams often haunted by the crash which brought his NASA career to an end. Murph has been complaining of a poltergeist in her room, tossing objects at random onto the floor; during a severe dust-storm, however, Cooper realises the phenomenon is not a ghost but a strange gravitational anomaly. It is, more specifically, a message – coded in binary, and giving precise geographic coordinates.

Cooper and Murph travel to the location given by the coordinates and discover it’s a secret base run by what’s left of NASA. The agency must now operate covertly, given the sensitive nature of public funding after the global food crisis. Fifty years ago, they discovered a wormhole in the vicinity of Saturn – and probes have confirmed it’s a gateway to another galaxy, with a number of planets that might sustain life. (The wormhole is a fabricated artefact; someone, it seems, put it there for us to find.) The crop blight, we learn, will extinguish all plant life in less than a generation, condemning humanity to starvation or suffocation. Our only hope lies in finding a new Earth, through the wormhole – and to that end, kindly NASA chief Dr John Brand (Michael Caine) has been sending lone astronauts through this portal to survey the worlds beyond.

To his daughter’s bitter dismay, Cooper is selected to pilot the next mission through the wormhole; he and three other crewmembers (including Brand’s own daughter [Anne Hathaway]) will take the two-year trip to Saturn, enter the new galaxy and check on the pioneers’ progress. Should a suitable world present itself, they will travel back through the wormhole to bring back the good news to Earth; by then, Brand predicts that by then he will have figured out a way to transport the population of Earth through the wormhole to safety. (Plan B, should their return to Earth be unfeasible, is to remain in the new galaxy and establish a human colony there, using a large gene bank kept on ice.) Though Coop’s son accepts that he may not see him again for many years, he agrees to maintain the farm in his absence; for Murph, however, the thought of separation is unbearable, and she and her father part on bad terms.

The first stage of the mission proceeds without mishap. Emerging though the wormhole into the alien galaxy, they find the first of the planets in orbit around a huge black hole. And here their problems begin: for to enter the immense gravitational well of the black hole will produce severe time-dilation effects. For each hour spent on that planet, the people back on Earth will age seven years. Acutely aware of his waiting family, Cooper devises a solution: leaving one of the crew in orbit outside the gravitational field, the rest will descend in a shuttle, pick up the marooned astronaut (if he’s still alive) and nip back to the ship. But events do not go according to plan. The planet’s surface is an endless, lifeless ocean, riven with vast tidal waves – totally unsuitable for human life. Tragedy strikes, and when the survivors reach the mothership they learn they have badly underestimated the time-dilation factor. In the short time they spent on the surface, more than twenty years have passed – and the crewman they left behind is now middle-aged. Cautiously, the crew turns to the remaining planets on the list…

Interstellar is an oddly underwhelming experience, with a promising buildup underserved by the final act. With the arrival on the second planet, things start to go badly wrong. Running short of inspiration, Nolan can contrive nothing more interesting than simply to replay the paranoiac-saboteur angle from The Abyss (1988), with astronut Matt Damon running amok for no other reason than to drive the plot into a rigidly-predetermined course. This lengthy diversion is weak and contrived, not to mention confusing: the topography of the planet is baffling, rather than intriguing, while the later revelation that “it has no surface” simply makes no sense at all. (What’s holding up the landmass, then – wishful thinking?) This entire interlude exists solely to inject a spot of dramatic conflict into a stagnating narrative – and, of course, to send Cooper on his final Kubrickian journey over the event horizon. The Borgesian labyrinth he finds inside the black hole turns daft very fast, and the conclusion is no more than expedient sophistry dressed up as paradox. And though the coda contains a germ of genuine pathos, it’s quickly thrown away on a gung-ho Pioneers To The Stars recruitment ad.

McConnaughey delivers a near-incoherent performance, in a sibilant whisper devoid of consonants; the effect is of a man whose tongue was removed before shooting. His unique line deliveries make the film rather more enigmatic than necessary, but from what I could grasp he’s a likeable hero with an urgent timetable we can all comprehend. The parallel timeline angle is interesting, with the focus shifting between McConnaughey’s increasingly-futile mission and his now-adult daughter Murph’s (Jessica Chastain) corresponding discoveries on Earth, working at NASA on Dr Brand’s equations. In what amounts to little more than an extended cameo, Michael Caine is fine – if under-used – as the twinkly-eyed boffin (though I could have done without the Dylan Thomas recital). Some humour is supplied by the mission’s brace of robots, ambulatory Ikea shelving units with sarcasm circuits; the film might have benefited from more of their presence. Technical credits are good, if not exceptional; understatement is Nolan’s watchword here, and the film pointedly avoids anything so vulgar as sensationalism. Which brings us to another problem: grandeur deficiency.

While Interstellar may not be as idiotic as Prometheus (2012), nor can it match that film for spectacle. Nolan is so busy underplaying everything, he forgets to conjure any awe. Gargantua, the black hole, is rather beautifully conceived – a glowing fishbowl of light, the dying embers of a collapsed star – but there’s a curious absence of menace; the attitude is one of matter-of-fact detachment, defusing the enormity of the situation. Nor is there any real sense of the bleak majesty of space, its awful indifference to life and death; here it’s just a distance to be covered, more boring than frightening.The dust-storms on Earth are well-realised, but again devoid of threat; they don’t seem dangerous, just inconvenient. The colossal tidal waves on the first alien world are initially alarming, true, but quickly prove to be less devastating than we assumed. Thanks to a poor choice of camera angles, it takes a while to register that the landmass on Matt Damon’s ice-world is actually some sort of floating promontory, teetering miles above the surface. This lackadaisical attitude to spectacle is puzzling and, ultimately, highly frustrating, robbing the film of its visceral impact. What we’re left with is a rather disappointing shaggy dog story, with gravity employed as a metaphor for love – an okay conceit for a 90-minute drama, but a pretty thin payoff for a three-hour Event Movie. Ultimately, Interstellar is a reasonably diverting way to kill an evening, but its ponderous length, derivative plot and third-act anti-climax make it an unlikely candidate for repeat viewings. Anyone expecting an “instant Classic” is in for a shock, despite what their DVD blurb may insist.