Interstellar (****)
Directed by: Christopher Nolan
Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Anne
Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Michael Caine, Casey Affleck, John Lithgow, Mackenzie
Foy, Timothée Chalamet, Ellen Burstyn, David Gyasi, Wes Bentley, Bill Irwin
(voice), Josh Stewart (voice), Topher Grace, David Oyelowo
Seen: November 15th 2014
**** Out of ****
Since his indie classic Memento in
2000, Christopher Nolan has consistently blown me out of the water. Memento and
The Prestige were incredible storytelling events, the Batman trilogy was what
everyone else had up to then been trying for when making Batman movies, and
Inception changed the way we think of dreaming. Interstellar dares to go bigger
and grander, with earth’s very survival being weighed up and set next to a
father’s love for his daughter. Nolan dreams big, and pulls it off big in
Interstellar, a movie that stands head and shoulders above anything else to be
released this year, perhaps this decade.
Interstellar is set in a close future,
approximately 30 to 50 years from today. Earth is crippled by crop blight,
which has eliminated almost all of our sustainable food sources, corn being one
of the last surviving ones. Ex-NASA pilot Cooper (McConaughey) farms with his family;
father-in-law Donald (Lithgow), son Tom (Chalamet), and his daughter Murph
(Foy), with whom he is especially close. Murph’s room hosts somewhat abnormal
occurrences; she believes it’s haunted. With the blight comes harsh sandstorms,
and during one storm Murph’s room is overblown. But before cleaning up Murph
and Cooper notice something – the haunting presence is communicating, and in
the sand they find binary coordinates leading them to a remote and secret NASA
base, where Professor Brand (Caine) leads a team of astronauts in attempts to
find a solution for the global food shortage.
Brand tells Cooper his arrival is
quite fortuitous, as he is one of only a few NASA pilots ever to be good enough
to give their mission, to find another planet for humanity to relocate to, a
realistic chance of success. Brand and his team have sent a group of astronauts
through a wormhole near Saturn, leading them to other galaxies with possibly
habitable planets, and the new team must follow up on these missions. Cooper
has an extremely difficult separation from Murph, who doesn’t want him to go as
he has no idea whether he’ll ever return. He joins Brand’s daughter and
biologist Amelia (Hathaway), and scientists Romilly (Gyasi) and Doyle (Bentley),
on the Endurance as they head for distant stars, planets, and galaxies, where
the laws of physics bend space and time in their search for the salvation of
humanity, and perhaps even for themselves.
Matthew McConaughey carries
Interstellar, while the rest of the cast excellently support him. Anne Hathaway
is Brand, Cooper’s co-pilot and anchor on the mission, and Jessica Chastain is
the grown-up Murph working for Brand Snr., the man who took her father away
years ago. Casey Affleck is good as the grown-up Tom, while Michael Caine can
pretty much never set a foot wrong, this time as Professor Brand, the head of
the project on earth. Bill Irwin and Josh Stewart lend their voices for two
very interesting characters, A.I. robots named TARS and CASE.
Walking out of the cinema after
watching Interstellar (on IMAX) I was dumbstruck, uncertain of how I would even
begin to review it. It’s a movie so enormous in scope and ambition that it
absolutely has to be seen to be believed. It’s bold in melding science fiction
and romanticism, melding space opera and global fears with the concept of
familial love into one visually spectacular movie of just under three hours,
filmed and edited so expertly that it barely feels like one hour. Interstellar
is phenomenal, and is in my opinion the epitome of why we even go to the movies.
With this epic masterpiece, Christopher Nolan delivers on the hope we carry
into the movies, the hope to see something along the lines of Interstellar.
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