I’m guessing that the mood of the entire U.S. conservative movement is stratospheric right now, so what better time to mention that I went to an early screening of Interstellar tonight? This space epic, along with the Thomas Pynchon adaptation Inherent Vice, is one of the two movies I’ve been looking forward to most this year, and it did not disappoint.

The film’s premise is a simple one: Mankind’s habitat on Earth is doomed, and astronauts (well played by Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway) must travel through a wormhole to another galaxy to find a new home for the human race. There are plausible and exciting twists in that basic story, so it sustained my attention for the entire 169-minute running time. One of the general problems with science-fiction cinema, and the adventure genre more broadly, is a failure to make the human dimension credible and interesting even as multimillions of dollars are being spent on special effects. Interstellar is an exception: The family and romantic dramas involving the key characters are fully integrated into the film’s story.

My relationship with science fiction was basically ruined by the fact that I saw Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey when I was a boy. “What a profound and revelatory film!” I thought. “What a beautiful attempt to imagine what man’s transcendence of himself will look like! This is going to be one of my favorite genres.” Well, it didn’t work out that way: Kubrick’s 2001 was a masterpiece but it turned out to be basically a dead end. For every Tarkovsky’s Solaris there were a hundred laser-beam shoot-’em-ups with weird computer-generated creatures and scantily clad babes. I was hoping that Interstellar would be director Christopher Nolan’s 2001, and — for better or for worse, and mostly for better — it is.

(SPOILER HERE: The way in which I think this film is worse than 2001 is that 2001 was basically a religious movie, in which man’s salvation comes from outside himself — whereas in Interstellar, man himself turns out to be the author of his own redemption, through a form of time travel. The mechanism of time travel is depicted convincingly enough, but as a plot device it lacks credibility: It feels circular to me. But I recognize that many people do not share my taste for religionizing everything, and anyway the film succeeds very well on its own naturalistic and humanistic terms. Nothing I say in this spoiler paragraph should detract from my recommendation of this excellent movie.)