At this point in his career, Christopher Nolan is just as respected as Alfred Hitchcock was at the height of his fame. Audiences and critics likewise adore his movies; in response, the movies themselves are artistically ambitious while still providing enough fanfare for the popcorn crowd.

One could say that Interstellar is Nolan's Marnie. Marnie followed Hitchcock's seminal The Birds, while Interstellar comes in the wake of the billion-dollar The Dark Knight Rises. Nolan's reign as filmmaking royalty world may not be over, but Interstellar is most certainly his first failure. It's an interesting failure. But no matter how interesting a failure is, a failure is a failure all the same.

Like young adult authors and tweenaged girls, Nolan is interested in the apocalypse, or, at least, the beginnings of one. The year the film is set in is unknown, but if it's in our future or in our past, the Earth is clearly in bad shape. A worldwide Dust Bowl is underway, but rather than a few tumultuous years of drought, it's been decades. The only food humanity can live on is corn as most animals have died and all other plants have been ravaged by disease.

The second we meet Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), we get the sense that he will be our savior. A former NASA pilot and engineer, he is one of the few people who still believes that the moon landing was real. He is one of the few left that believes that society can do better than its agrarian values.

Suddenly, a strange binary pattern appears in the thick dust of his daughter's room. Cooper is startled to find that the pattern codes for a set of mysterious coordinates; coordinates, we later find out, to a secret NASA installation.

The head honcho of the organization, Professor Brand (Michael Caine), reveals that there has been a discovery of a wormhole orbiting Saturn. The wormhole, it seems, leads to other dimensions. If you haven't put two and two together yet, this could mean that humanity has the chance to immigrant to another planet and ultimately survive. It doesn't take Cooper long to sign on as the pilot for Endurance, an experimental spacecraft whose mission is to record the data of earlier, similar expeditions. Cooper, however, is plagued by guilt: while he may be the one and only hope for humanity, he is forced to leave his family, no easy feat for a man who gave up his career for his personal life.

While I can appreciate Interstellar's deft balance of intimate humanity and accuracy in its science, nothing can hide the fact that, overall, it's a messy, self-indulgent project. At nearly three hours, the audience is forced to sit through a bevy of side-plots, uninteresting dialogue, unbelievably unbelievable plot twists, and endlessly drawn out scenes that are most likely supposed to make the film feel "epic."

Nolan has proved to be uncompromising in his visions before (The Dark Knight Rises was similar in both length and ambition), and usually, this wouldn't be a bad thing. But after a while, Interstellar begins to feel like the series Lost: at first, it's compelling, but as it moves along, it completely flies off the rails. By the time the film is finished, we're left with a series of questions and a lot of, frankly, stupid answers.

There seems to be one too many clues left behind, and when they're solved, it's a little less cerebral and a lot more Nancy Drew. It's as if all of our potential questions were written down only to be addressed in a preposterous manner. The cast, though working their hardest, sometimes give performances that are strained in their emotion (Matt Damon's role is completely unneeded and gives the film its worst scenes).

If Interstellar was done as a straight science fiction thriller, like Gravity, it could have been much better. It has all the makings for one: a top-notch cast, a terrific premise, and ingenious art direction. Yet, Nolan tries to pack in any extra details that he can. At its closer, the film resembles a parfait filled five inches past the brim of the cup. It's clear that he wants our minds to be blown, but my mind was simply not blown.

I was instead dumbfounded by the idea that Interstellar has been getting good reviews and has been making so much money. It's so overdrawn in everything it does that the once promising feeling of awe is thrown away with a thud and a bang. Nolan is an excellent director, but even the best of 'em can sometimes get carried away: this is Nolan's failure, and while it may not be apparent now, its shelf-life is nowhere near Memento's economic thrills or The Dark Knight franchise's genius.

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