Hoo-boy is Interstellar a nerdy movie. I don’t mean nerdy as in “Sure, I like to watch a Captain America movie every now and again.” I mean full-on hard science fiction nerdy, like Larry Niven–novel nerdy. I mean the plot hinges on speculative fiction about black holes and wormholes and event horizons and other vagaries of space travel, and the characters talk ceaselessly about this stuff like it’s their damn jobs.
Which, of course, it is. Without spoiling anything, you have probably already discerned from the trailers and promotional materials that Interstellar is set sometime in the not-so-distant future, when the environment is failing and humanity is gently drifting into extinction. Corn is the only crop hardy enough to grow in the heartland’s fallow soil anymore—as the movie opens, okra just flickered out, like a dying lightbulb—and tremendous dust storms are threatening the lives of people who are trying to coax the world’s only food from the ground. We meet Coop (Matthew McConaughey), a former NASA pilot who’s now farming and raising his two kids…