“We used to look up and wonder about our place in the stars. Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt,” Matthew McConaughey intones in the latest Interstellar trailer—establishing both the film’s tribute to the lamentably lost spirit of exploration on a wallowing, dying Earth, as well as this preview’s finally moving beyond the corn-filled soil of what we’ve understood so far. Indeed, this trailer promises to push us past the very limits of corn, introducing our first glimpses of Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain’s characters (and potentially spoiling the latter), and journeying to faraway alien worlds, in an epic voyage that Nolan himself compared to 2001 when he introduced it at Comic-Con.
That 2001 influence is evident not only in some of the imagery, but in the trailer’s majestic sweep—swirling shots of outer space contrasted with scenes of a ravaged Earth and tear-streaked faces, Michael Caine reading Dylan Thomas, etc. Though, perhaps surprisingly for Nolan, there seems to be just as much emphasis placed here on human emotion as technical dazzle. Interstellar takes you to corn-finity and beyond Nov. 7.