I’m a sucker for movies with ambition. It’s a real blind spot for me.

I love nothing more than when a great filmmaker can trick some big studio into spending $100million on something that isn’t Superman or Transformers. Something thats personal, different and maybe a little weird. I find that I am willing give these kind of things the benefit of the doubt a lot more than most people. I will happily mount a strong defence for movies like Hugo, Noah and Cloud Atlas while acknowledging their goofy bits and ideas they didn’t quite pull of. Sure, sometimes you end up with a disaster like Sucker Punch, but I still love them for trying and am in awe of what they did achieve.

This is a long-winded way of saying Chris Nolan‘s new movie Interstellar is ambitious and huge and really weird and badly flawed and I loved it.

It’s the a perfect example of the type of movie I’m talking about.

The premise is that some time in the near future, our crops will fail and we will drown in dust. The earth can no longer sustain us and what we are doing to it. All of our ambition as a species and technological advances that we have made will be abandoned, replaced by the urgent need to try and keep feeding ourselves. Our brightest scientists, engineers and programmers will be forced into agriculture. And we will still be failing. From this, a last ditch mission will be launched by a NASA that doesn’t seem to officially exist to find another planet that might be habitable.

I won’t say any more than that – but believe me, this movie is huge. Some of the things it attempts to put on screen are insane. It’s beautifully made, and wonderfully acted.

It also has this fantastic optimism. There are not really any villains, and the movie is full of belief in what we are capable of as a species.

It has loads of smart people talking about heavy hard scientific principles, but it still tries to make you cry in the end. Not many movies go for for both those things. (It almost worked on me, too.)

There is no doubt that it overreaches and the plot doesn’t really hold together. The last act gets really trippy and, if you’re not feeling generous, kind of silly. A lot of people are going to walk into this wanting Guardians of the Galaxy and walk out furious. Not me though. I know it’s got problems, but I loved Interstellar all the same.

MORE:

Big Screen :: Fury

Big Screen :: Gone Girl

Big Screen :: Boyhood

Get ‘Big Screen’ Podcasts