Interstellar
It’s easy to imagine how Interstellar got pitched: Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight Rises) does 2001: A Space Odyssey. Of course, that comparison isn’t entirely accurate.
Despite the frequent visual callbacks to Kubrick’s space opus, Interstellar doesn’t belong in the same intellectual league. At the very least, you’ll walk away from the film with a solid grasp of Nolan’s thematic aspirations and story. In fact, Interstellar’s plot just might be Nolan’s most accessible.
In the near future, a series of unspecified wars and ecological disasters have ruined humanity’s ability to grow any crops other than corn and unleashed omnipresent dust storms. Matthew McConaughey (The Wolf of Wall Street) stars as an ex-NASA pilot-turned-corn farmer who accidentally stumbles upon the coordinates of the remnants of NASA.
His mentor, played by Nolan regular Michael Caine (Stonehearst Asylum), tells McConaughey of a mission to find inhabitable planets in a last-ditch attempt to save humanity. Soon, McConaughey and his intrepid crew rocket through a wormhole into the great unknown, far from his grieving daughter and the rapidly deteriorating Earth.
Though Nolan lacquers the film and script in dense technical exposition and minutiae, the story really doesn’t require that much hand-holding. But as with The Dark Knight Rises and Inception, Nolan unfortunately indulges in so much exposition that whole conversations, scenes and characters exist solely to explain and re-explain the story.
Interstellar may well be Nolan’s least disciplined effort yet, but it might also be his greatest since The Prestige. Take this with a grain of salt — the center of the film is as delicate as a souffle to the point that subsequent viewings might radically change my opinion — but Interstellar, at first blush, is a soaring, epic ode to the power of human ingenuity.
In the same way that 2001: A Space Odyssey and Apollo 13 inspired generations of children to look to the stars, Interstellar works first and foremost as a monument to the vastness of space and a stirring argument for space travel as something beyond petty political bargaining and austere, recession-minded economics.
Though there is something disappointingly literal and unsophisticated about Interstellar’s themes, the fact that Nolan manages to juggle any big ideas while delivering an engaging action spectacle and an emotionally potent father-daughter story is nothing short of miraculous.
Still, I have enough reservations about the film that I’m not willing to throw around the other m-word (masterpiece), at least not yet.
For one thing, the sound mix in the digital IMAX screening was so catastrophically loud that the speakers strained to balance Hans Zimmer’s (The Amazing Spider-Man 2) bombastic score with mission-critical dialogue. For another, one ill-advised cameo and plot twist hurl the second act within a dangerously close orbit of Danny Boyle’s Sunshine.
These represented minor nuisances on my first viewing, but I could easily see them derailing the whole movie for others and for me in future viewings. At worst, Interstellar might simply turn out to be merely decent, the hokum of Contact wrapped in the visual splendor of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
That, however, would not be a terrible fate.
