Ah, can you run that ending past me just one more time…

You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger.

It’s a throwaway one liner from Christopher Nolan’s previous attempt to bend mainstream cinema goers minds with his imaginative and ridiculous opus Inception.

Interstellar manages the seemingly impossible, by taking Nolan’s penchant for the epic and reimagining it on a scale that’s out of this world.

The year is some time in the future and the earth is fucked, which is a technical term for the unscientifically initiated amongst you.

Human kind’s destructive and parasitic nature is increasingly turning the earth into a planet sized dust bowl, where the only crop that grows is corn and the only career choice is farming.

Amongst this backdrop, we’re introduced to a maverick fellow by the name of Coop and his vaguely fractured family.

Still struggling with the untimely death of his wife, Coop is also dealing with putting his pilot career to one side as he joins the agricultural revolution to try and provide enough food for what remains of the human race.

And though this gnaws away at his sense of self, serving as a devoted father to his two kids almost fills this hole inside of him; especially when it comes to his precocious daughter Murph, who seems to have inherited the maverick gene from her daddy.

Convinced there’s a ghost in her room who keeps on moving things, Murph eventually convinces her father too when a coded message is left on her bedroom floor.

Taking this as an invitation, Coop and Murph drive out to the coordinates left in said message and begin a journey that will decide the fate of the human race.

Interstellar is a giant sized idea of a film that, even by the grandiose scale of Christopher Nolan’s previous films, cranks the epic up to eleven.

Space exploration, wormholes, black holes, new galaxies and planets, theories of relativity, time travel and much more besides; Nolan and his screenwriting brother Jonathan have managed to cram all of this into their latest cinematic collaboration.

So forgive me if I don’t tell you too much about Interstellar’s plot, because quite apart from spoiling your enjoyment of the film, it’s quite simply beyond me.

I’m happy to leave the scientific explanations of what actually happens in Interstellar up to better men than me.

Well, more interested men.

I know this much though, and this won’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who’s seen a Christopher Nolan film this decade, the plot doesn’t quite add up – no matter what galaxy you’re from.

On more than one occasion Nolan’s dialogue prompted laughter from the screening I attended last week.

Although, seeing as these were the same folk who gave a round of applause to a big screen as the closing credits rolled, it’s fair to say they’re probably not the brightest stars in the sky.

Someone whose star has never shone more brightly though is Matthew McConaughey, who plays the titular character of Coop.

I’m surprised it’s taken so long for people to warm to the man with the most famous texan drawl on the planet, as he had me at Dazed And Confused.

That, and the naked bongo playing incident.

Hell, The Dallas Buyer’s Club isn’t even that good of a film, and I’d take McConaughey in Mud or How To Lose A Guy In Ten Days over this every time.

But as those who know me best are so fond of saying, no-one cares what I think.

McConaughey’s been an actor you could put your leading man hat on for decades now, and his presence most certainly provides Interstellar’s on screen glue to keep you engaged for almost three hours.

Well, him and Anne Hathaway.

And you’re going to need their pretty faces to keep you watching, as Interstellar gets pretty rocky at times; particularly towards the end, as cartoon logic to rival the god awful plot holes in The Dark Knight Rises rears its ugly head.

But even then, Interstellar is something to marvel at.

I’m still not sure if Nolan’s conclusion is ridiculous beyond belief, or I’m just not smart enough to get all the science that’s going on.

Probably both.

But if you’re going to dream, why not make it the most grandiose dream your mind can possibly conjure?

For this alone, as well as the big screen spectacle Nolan provides, interstellar is something to behold.

Jonathan Campbell