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Interstellar

5/10

Stars: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Michael Caine, Jessica Chastain, Casey Affleck, Mackenzie Foy, Matt Damon, David Gyasi, Wes Bentley, John Lithgow, Topher Grace, Ellen Burstyn

Director: Christopher Nolan

A pretentious, very talky sci-fi epic, as bum-numbing as it's bewildering. Vaguely in the footsteps of 2001 (with a walking, talking computer voiced by Bill Irwin), it posits a future where life on earth has become almost untenable.

Blight has killed off wheat, dust storms ravage the land, and only dust-smothered corn crops remain - but for how long?

Farming is about the only occupation left. For Cooper (McConaughey), a former NASA pilot, it's anathema, although his son has taken to life on the land; but when Coop and his bright-spark daughter Murph (Foy, later Chastain), who shares his love of astro-physics, stumble on a mysterious facility bossed by Dr Brand (Caine) and his boffin daughter (Hathaway), Coop finds himself dragooned into leading a mission to find a newly-discovered 'wormhole' near Saturn that may lead to a new and inhabitable world.

Alongside him are Hathaway and two others (Bentley, Gyasi), who are clearly destined to fall by the wayside out there in space.

The planets they do find prove pretty inhospitable, although they do discover a slightly deranged Damon on one, as the survivor of a previous mission.

The spaceship's chatty computers add to the dialogue-heavy scenario and, although there are some minor excitements towards the end it's a long time to wait.

How McConaughey remains the same age throughout, despite visiting a planet where years pass in an hour, is another matter, although it has something to do with a third dimension wrapped inside a fifth dimension, by which time the film had gone mystical on us and my brain had frazzled out. The movie's nearly three hours long, but seems more like six.

David Quinlan

USA 2014. UK Distributor: Warner Brothers (Warner/Paramount co-production). Colour by FotoKem.
170 minutes. Widescreen. UK certificate: 12A.

Guidance ratings (out of 3): Sex/nudity 0, Violence/Horror 1, Drugs 0, Swearing 0.

Review date: 02 Nov 2014