INTERSTELLAR (Rated PG-13)

One might venture a guess that lengthy travel in space to a distant planet may involve a certain amount of tedium given the tight confinement of spacecraft.

To bring that concept into focus, think about Sandra Bullock’s lonely odyssey in “Gravity” as she pondered an uncertain fate.

To some degree, a similar providence awaits the audience that straps in for the nearly three-hour journey that is director and co-writer Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar,” an epic so convoluted and complicated that it easily recalls his muddled “Inception.”

Nolan, co-authoring the screenplay of “Interstellar” with his brother Jonathan, aims once more for a “big event,” as it is plainly clear that he believes his directorial skills will result in a production both grandly visionary and exceptionally replete with vivid imagination.

Stanley Kubrick’s influential, unconventional science-fiction masterpiece “2001: A Space Odyssey,” which was troubled by stilted dialogue, slow pacing and opaque storytelling, seems like an obvious inspiration for Nolan’s latest epic. I wonder, though, what could have been for “Interstellar” if Kubrick, still alive, or Steven Spielberg had been at the helm.

For his part, Nolan is satisfied to unpack a mess of grand messages in his cautionary tale, ranging from the familial bonds shattered by an absentee astronaut father trapped for decades in space travel and pending ecological disaster, to the strains of a society in freefall and the problem of sustaining humanity with little more than failing corn harvests.

Arguably, the vaguely futuristic “Interstellar” is about many things, with none more important than Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper, a former astronaut and engineer now relegated to working as a farmer under harsh Dust Bowl conditions, so brightly and emotionally connected with his young daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy).

The heartland of America, which could be any of the Plains states, is doomed.

Realizing that Planet Earth faces almost imminent extinction, Cooper locates a remote NASA underground colony, where the brilliant professor Dr. Brand (Michael Caiine) plans a space mission to find another planet capable of maintaining human life.

Dr. Brand’s daughter (Anne Hathaway) is an astronaut who teams with Cooper and two others for an incredible space odyssey, with an objective to discover a wormhole that supposedly exists near Saturn, offering a gateway to other inhabitable worlds.

Space travel gets more complicated by the presence of a black hole that somehow alters the space-time continuum.

It’s as easy for the viewer to get lost as it is for the astronauts to go off-course and end up in a paradoxical world of exploration where each hour represents seven years of life on Earth. Talk about being lost in space.

Considering that time becomes relative, back in the Midwest, Cooper’s children have reached adulthood, with Jessica Chastain as the grown-up daughter, and Casey Affleck as Cooper’s even more petulant oldest child Tom, who is struggling to keep the family farm going since school bureaucrats long ago decided he was not fit for a college education in the family field.

Odd as it may seem, Cooper and his children become relatively the same age in chronological terms. Emotional maturity is another matter.

Even in adulthood, Murph is not forgiving of her father’s long absence, and she seems unaware of his deep longing to return home to reunite with his family.

The age differential eventually shifts to an even greater magnitude, but that’s another story.

Though the action plods along at a leisurely pace, there is artistic brilliance to the planets discovered, one of which resembles a perpetual frozen Minnesota winter, where a stranded astronaut is a surprise character.

Another watery planet might be a surfer’s dream, though it would entail a death wish to conquer the massive waves.

One thing for sure is that Matthew McConaughey is in fine shape, with his comforting words that he hopes will reach his daughter measured in a tone of loving gravity. That seems to be the McConaughey style if you go by his voluble TV commercial for Lincoln automobiles.

The Hans Zimmer score is often loud and bombastic, such that on occasions it nearly obliterates some of the dialogue, while at other times the deafening sounds suggest immediacy to the action that is not fully realized.

Unquestionably, “Interstellar” has plenty of technical intensity and artistic radiance that makes this Nolan work a masterstroke for his ardent admirers.

Others, including this reviewer, recognize the film’s epic merits but take a more jaundiced view of what is essentially a rehash of many science-fiction themes which result in a somewhat pretentious exercise.

Score one for Christopher Nolan if “Interstellar” hits it big at the box office.

Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.