My wife, no sci-fi fan, expressed an interest in this almost-three-hour "2001" wannabe b/c the physicist who came up with the original story idea, Kip Thorne, was a colleague of her dad's at CalTech. Good to know that the (quantum) mechanics of the plot are in accordance with current thinking, but the best scenes are the early ones, while we're still trying to figure out what's going on in this dys-something world, where an ex–hotshot pilot is growing corn with the help of a smart combine and today's Internet craziness (the Apollo landing was faked!) is the received wisdom of the future.

Later on, the Nolans come up with some nice relativistic plot twists—Anne Hathaway's dawdling for a few minutes on a high-gravity planet sets their schedule back by twenty-two years, Earth time—and the storyline is always intriguing, but not really all that involving, at least till the final scenes. The basic problem, IMHO, is too much sci and not enough fi; one of the main reasons that "2001" is still the gold standard is that Clarke and Kubrick don't try to explain away the mystery.

The A-listers in the cast all do fine; Mackenzie Foy as the 10-yr-old Murph is perfect, though I was sorry that Bill Irwin (TARS the robot) was just doing a voice-over. Hans Zimmer's score may make you feel at times like a rat that's built its nest in a huge pipe organ, but it's also quite effective toward the end, when McConaughey's character reconnects with his estranged daughter from the depths of a black hole.

In short, "2001" it's not, but, despite a few scenes where time seems to come to a standstill (the frozen Matt Damon planet, e.g.), "Interstellar" is still pretty entertaining and occasionally thought provoking as well