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“Perhaps we’ve forgotten that we’re still pioneers,” laments a drawling Matthew McConaughey over the teaser trailer for Christopher Nolan’s latest film Interstellar. One gets the sense that Nolan — who has cited seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars in the same year he started making films as being an influence — is longing for a return to an age of cinema where filmmakers carved out new worlds and took more chances. With Interstellar he offers a visually engaging and stunning film that manages to bring an open mouthed audience to another galaxy but can’t shake off some familiar Hollywood tropes.

McConaughey continues his streak of impressive performances with his turn as Cooper, a former pilot and engineer turned farmer and father to Tom and Murph (played in their youngest iterations by Timothée Chalamet and Mackenzie Foy respectively). In a world on the brink of starvation plagued by blight, extreme resource shortages and a dying atmosphere, he is part of the caretaker generation trying to survive on his corn farm manned by harvester drones. His daughter Murph is headstrong and quick-witted, the perfect shade of her father, and her determined belief that ghosts haunt her bedroom eventually leads Cooper to the skeleton crew of a NASA long thought to have been disbanded. Headed by the brilliant Professor Brand (Michael Caine), the space agency is attempting to send one final crew through a mysterious wormhole on a last-ditch attempt to find a new planet for humans to call home. Cooper steps up to the challenge as one of the last professionally trained pilots in a world without armies, and has to leave his children behind in order to give them a future. With Professor Brand’s daughter Amelia (Anne Hathaway), robots TARS and CASE, and fellow scientists Romilly and Doyle (David Gyasi and Wes Bentley) in tow they make the two year journey to Saturn before jumping through the wormhole. Interstellar plays with time and relativity in a way unseen on screen before now, with each passing minute as valuable a resource as fuel or food. Eventually, it becomes clear Cooper has been offworld for a number of years, with older versions of Tom and Murph appearing on screen played by Casey Affleck and Jessica Chastain.

These early parts of the film exhibit brilliant world building presented piece by piece to the viewer; a society in a time reminiscent of the Dust Bowl which is running out of options, year unknown but touches of the late 20th century remain. The robots Nolan presents us with are versatile with a unique design that makes them look more like ancient supercomputers. Science is used in clever ways to bring about emotional distress, and the alien worlds are thoroughly alien, with bizarre twists on familiar ideas that are completely wonderous. The film is filled with mesmerising shots that deserve to be seen in IMAX; mountainous tidal waves, the silhouette of a fragile spaceship against a giant far away planet, sandstorms and death-defying maneuvers and the first scientifically accurate representation of a black hole seen on screen, something which invokes both awe and terror with its inky expanse. Hans Zimmer’s score is a departure from his previous work on Nolan movies. Gone are the much lambasted heavy drums and womp womp bass of Inception and the Dark Knight films; Interstellar uses haunting church organs and electric guitar to drive home the urgency and lack of time available to the crew fighting for humanity’s survival against a backdrop of an ominous space filled with silence. The character of Murph is incredibly strong and well-written, with Chastain turning in an impressive performance as someone who feels abandoned and hopeless but is filled with determination to do a better job than her father did.

There are problems however, some which permeate the entirety of the movie. “This is the first film I have made where the actual experience of the film is paramount to the audience,” Nolan told Entertainment Weekly, and this is reflected in a script that fails to realise the importance of genuine character interaction and is full of clunky exposition and forced emotion. The result is a film that is extremely well acted but is in need of an injection of humanity; even when discovering new worlds or going further than anyone before them have gone, Cooper and his crew of explorers are oddly stoney-faced while the aforementioned robots come out with some of the most spontaneous lines in the film. The only real emotion comes from the father-daughter relationship between Cooper and Murph — throughout the numerous stages of her life — in what Chastain has described as the real focus of the film.

That relationship is linked to one of biggest criticisms of the film’s narrative, which manages to place humans at the centre of a universe that is perhaps not as callous as the one we actually live in, subverting the realism Nolan achieves with his scientific accuracy and perhaps not going far enough. Space, our place in the universe, and the sheer breadth and mystery of it all all contribute to the most basic of human fears; that we are dispensable creatures clinging to a tiny piece of rock in an infinite sea of possibilities. The film seems at one point to be focused on the uncompromising melancholy of the pains of time, space travel and isolation but rows back on these radical portrayals of emotion for something more common and grounded. Humanity’s place in the cosmos is presented in a way that stops frustratingly short of feeling fully refreshing and daring, especially considering how uncontrollable and random the universe actually is; black holes from which nothing can escape, skies lit up by stars dead for thousands of years, meteors and solar flares. The very real connection between Cooper and Murph is paramount to understanding the world Nolan has created, but the audience is led to believe that human relationships are a powerful force to be reckoned with and this casts a very mawkish shadow over the pensive and somber atmosphere the film builds up early on.

If anything Interstellar is a Christopher Nolan movie through and through and it’ll be subject to intense and perhaps unfair scrutiny for months to come because of that fact. Comparisons to last year’s space adventure Gravity are slightly unfair; Gravity was like a one-act play, contained within a running time of ninety minutes whereas Interstellar is a truly massive film, almost double the length of Gravity. It shares some similarities with Inception in that it’s a film filled with spectacle and risk taking, ideas about time and dimensions and is marred by some annoying flaws. Like most films set in space though, the journey is a huge part of what matters, and Nolan provides enough set pieces, beautiful worlds and exciting action to keep audiences engaged for the almost three hour long film. It won’t challenge how viewers think about our place in the universe, but it will keep them engrossed and amazed with glimpses of cosmic wonders worth the price of admission.