Interstellar aims for the science fiction pinnacle of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but plummets into a meteoric thud. Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight Trilogy, Inception) is desperately reaching for Stanley Kubrick greatness and achieving Robert Zemeckis mediocrity in Contact. It's no small bit of irony that both films star Matthew McConaughey, his southern drawl, and the transcendent bond between a father and chip off the old block daughter. While 2001 painted space exploration with an antiseptic brush of technology and vision, Interstellar is a jumble of melodrama and contrivances. The love conquers all theme may have worked with a smarter script and execution, but it sadly falls flat here.

Interstellar takes place in a not too distant future where a "blight" is wiping out all of the crops on Earth; while simultaneously deoxygenating the atmosphere. So it's starvation or suffocation for mankind. McConaughey stars as Cooper, a former NASA pilot turned corn farmer. He's got a spunky daughter called Murph (Mackenzie Foy) who's a math and science whiz. The pair stumble upon a secret NASA project led by Professor Brand (Michael Caine). He informs Cooper that humanity's time on Earth is in the final act. But a stellar reprieve may save us all. It seems that a yet undiscovered benevolence has put a wormhole to another galaxy near Saturn's rings. This gate through space time leads to twelve worlds. Prior expeditions a decade earlier has narrowed the search to three possibly habitable planets. Cooper decides to leave his beloved family behind and command the expedition. He rockets off with a team led by Brand's daughter (Anne Hathaway), and an extremely sarcastic robot called TARS.

I had many issues with Interstellar, but first let's discuss what was good. The journey through the wormhole, insert Einstein and relativity, puts the astronauts in a different time frame. Hours in space are years on Earth. The film's emotional punch of Cooper watching transmissions and seeing his children age decades are visceral. Audiences will be moved. It is the key plot element, but is milked too much and leads to a decidedly baffling result. The robotic companions to our intrepid explorers are a nod to 2001's HAL and its alien Tyco Monolith. CASE, TARS, and KIPP, are these black rectangular robots that contort their shape to match whatever problems they face. A very cool scene involves CASE becoming an asterisk and spinning to perform a rescue. For all the hubbub on Interstellar's special effects, the robots are by far the most impressive.

Interstellar has many contrivances that I simply could not ignore. The plot takes place in the future, but everyone is wearing plaid and driving last year's pickups. Even as decades go by on Earth, everything looks the same; even though conditions are supposed to be getting worse. Also, the astronauts are engineers and scientists, but spend an inordinate amount of time explaining things to each other that they should already know. This is a poor script gimmick where the characters are literally explaining the science to the audience. Cooper, as an example, is consistently surprised by scientific phenomena, when he's the damned commander of the expedition! This is a flaw that runs throughout. He stumbles on the secret NASA site, and within two minutes of screen time, he's leading the mission and has bought into the extinction story like emailing your bank info to a Nigerian prince. There are no other races or countries depicted. Right now America needs Russia to get to the space station, but in Interstellar's future; no other country has figured out the existence of the wormhole and mounted their own attempt? Nolan's desire for the white bread, baseball, and cornfields visual has precluded the millions of other Asian, European, African, South American scientists that just might have a stake in this whole end of the world scenario.

Interstellar's final act is very disappointing. This is a spoiler free review, but I offer audiences this advice, lower your expectations. There's an immense buildup in the near three hour runtime. And it simply doesn't deliver. In fact, it's pretty deflating and nonsensical. The problem with having a big, bold idea is that your majestic story has to have a spectacular ending or the whole thing collapses like a souffle. Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan are a great writing team. Their previous work and creativity (Memento, The Prestige) speaks volumes about their skill. But they unfortunately miss the mark here. Every film can't be a masterpiece and Interstellar, while ambitious, is a step back for them.

Interstellar has a great filmmaking team and cast, but is just another science fiction blockbuster with a fantastic marketing campaign. It doesn't come close to achieving, both visually and emotionally, what Gravity accomplished last year. Nor should it be mentioned in the same breath as 2001. That film is way, way out of Interstellar's galaxy.