This review is late. After all, Interstellar debuted seemingly eons ago and most of those who are going to see it in theaters have already done so. If you are on the fence about the possibility, let me implore you. Get thee to a theater. Interstellar demands a large screen, high quality sound, and popcorn drizzled with awe.

The film opens in the near future and the world is growing desperate. A crop blight, that feeds on nitrogen, has destroyed wheat and okra, and corn appears to be on the ropes. In short, the world is struggling to feed itself, and as the blight grows, the oxygen supply is diminishing. America’s heartland is arid and dusty. Government resources have shifted toward feeding the masses. Militaries are essentially defunct and infrastructures are sliding toward ruin. The best minds, privately, so as to avoid panic, believe that after one or two generations, humanity will suffocate and cease to exist.

Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is a farmer who trained as an astronaut, doing his best to survive as a single father of high school boy, Tom, and a young girl, Murph, with whom he as a powerful bond. Assisted by his father in law (John Lithgow), Coop’s tribe faces the future with a grim determination. Cooper preaches the possibility of betterment and adaptation. He is optimistic about the human ability to “lick” any problem, especially with necessity nipping at its heels.

Through circumstances, Cooper reunites with some of his former NASA colleagues and he is brought into the truth of humanity’s doom and the hope that might exist. Professor Brand (Michael Caine) reveals the existence of a wormhole near Saturn. With probes, and eventually humans, the remnants of NASA has determined the wormhole leads to a distant galaxy that contains reachable, and potentially habitable, planets. The wormhole compresses the journey, but the pressure of time hovers over Interstellar as the film’s primary antagonist.

There exists, then, two plans to save humanity. First, find a planet and repopulate it with astronauts and thousands of fertilized eggs, which can be grown outside of a womb. Second, solve the problem of how to generate enough power to launch a space station into orbit that is large enough to sustain some of earth’s present population. This is a problem of energy and the pull of gravity. Anyone with some conception of physics understands the latter option seems hopeless, at least outside of a fundamental breakthrough.

Cooper is chosen to fly a spacecraft, along with a team of astronauts, to investigate the most promising planets and to collect information from both the wormhole and a black hole that lurks somewhat near the wormhole’s exit. The other astronauts are Brand (Professor Brand’s daughter, played by Anne Hathaway), Doyle (Wes Bentley), Romily (David Gyasi), and TARS (voiced by Bill Irwin), a snarky robot who manages to be the film’s most humorous character. The group knows the mission is likely suicidal and only Cooper has significant human ties that might bind him to earth. His decision to leave his children, in the slim hope of saving them, forms the emotional lattice across which the remainder of the film is draped. Not only does he wish to save them, he hopes to see them again, if only to live out the remaining few years of life on earth.

Interstellar, directed by Christopher Nolan, and written by Nolan and his brother Jonathan, is more science fiction than space opera. It is closer in spirt, obviously, to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and to Zemeckis’ Contact rather than Star Wars or Guardians of the Galaxy. 2001, which seems to form the foundation of Interstellar, at least visually, is clinical, the product of raw intellect. Kubrick, undergirded by Arthur C. Clarke’s remarkable book, dissects humanity and his actors bear strong resemblance, at least in tone, to HAL, that film’s super-computer. This is all deliberate and serves a purpose for the film.

If Kubrick and Clarke infused 2001 with humanity’s intellect, and the possibilities and limits of reason, Nolan and Nolan seek, deliberately, to inject Interstellar with a soul. Though dressed in science fiction (of which the science is actually strong, from what little I can tell), Interstellar beats with a heart full of love and relationships, the more intangible elements of humanity. Not merely engineering problems to be solved, Cooper and Brand (the astronaut) look at decisions, at least in part, as products of the heart that the mind has difficulty overriding. Cooper, Brand, and Murph (played as an adult by the compelling Jessica Chastain) are people, not automatons with skin. Interstellar is, more than anything, about how humans need one another, be they fathers and daughters, husbands and wives, lovers or friends. This is a testament not only to words on a page, but to the actors who managed to manifest them in powerful ways.

Interstellar is beautiful. It is awesome, a word that my generation perverted but one that surely applies here. The space scenes are staggering and rival anything ever filmed. Though Gravity was a lovely and harrowing portrayal of the earth’s exosphere and near space, Interstellar burrows into our imaginations and it reveals spacescapes that are plausible, inspiring, and frightening.

Much could be written, and likely will, about Interstellar‘s worldview. It is not a purely modernistic construction, which generally dominates science fiction, nor is it nihilistic, theistic, or pantheistic. It respects and places too many hopes in science to be post-modern, and though it sometimes skirts the possibilities of humanism, it is an unfulfilling version that is put forward. Perhaps most importantly, Interstellar tries to discern what it means to be human. Though it does not lapse into a supernatural explanation for who we are, it defines us based on characteristics that are more likely the purview of poets rather than physicists. Cooper sums up the film fully when he laments, “We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars, now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.”

Christopher Nolan seems most concerned with raising our view of who we might be–not obsessed with the now, but defined by the hope of what we may become. In this narrow way, Interstellar is an ode to an America that used to exist. This seems an odd way to explain a film made by a Brit, but Nolan placed his film not in the rolling hills of England, but the cornfields of Middle America. It is America that once led the world in exploration and Nolan knows it. His film reflects it and it prays for a future where we will consider the possibilities of tomorrow. We are, in the world of Interstellar, most fully human when we love and when we strive for a better life, not only for ourselves, but for all of us. In this sense, Interstellar is an indictment of the isms that shield our gaze from the night sky and the wonder that resides there.

Final Grade: 3/3 Eggheads