Interstellar - It's much better than you think

Rating: 9/10 (10 November 2014)

(Longer review on my blog)
Interstellar is a film divided into three primary acts, the third of which rescues the previous two, gives depth to the 'hokey' dialog and expands the notions of time-free exterior space in alignment with time- bound interior space, which is undoubtedly one of the primary themes of Interstellar. Problematically the multiple treatment of the themes of time/interior/exterior/love/loss all within the shadow of the expanse around us dissipates in the initial reaction sci-fi tropes (of which Nolan takes full advantage) command. Interstellar expects us to elongate and magnify our relationship to the genre, teaching us something about ourselves in its method rather than in its narrative flow. It's a film we will appreciate more in ten years time, but Nolan is fully aware of this, and has taken the risks necessary eschewing the inevitable knee jerk reactionary position in favor of crafting a specifically long-term commentary on our relationship to sci-fi, space movies and scientific research inside and outside of film. For example when Nolan suggests in the future NASA will be a virtually illegal underground organization starved of funds which have been channeled into agriculture because the dying planet earth is starving, one is immediately reminded of the funding withdrawal of U.S. to the Large Hadron Collider project, whose multi-million dollar experimentation couldn't properly defend itself against contemporary economic demands for explanations. This is more than a 'hokey' play at the audience's heart-strings by displaying the 'American farming heartland', it is a commentary on a culture that refuses education to the qualifying poor in preference of them becoming work drones to continuously feed a dying system on a dying planet. Despite the cries that Nolan bludgeons his audience with rank sentimentality, this very accusation arises because he assumes a great deal of intelligence from his audience and doesn't labor any of his points, rather using certain tropes against themselves. This leads to our initial problem of missing his point. However his many points are so well executed, we will be drawn to re- watch Interstellar and we will slowly stretch ourselves into Nolan's rock solid perspective.
Much has been made of the spectacular imagery, the most accessible and easy aspect of the film for us to recognize, and I won't go into its beauty here, suffice to say as I did in the first paragraph, its worth seeing Interstellar for that alone – and over again for the other, deeper themes that have been delivered with some complexity. It is ambitious in scope using its access to Kip Thorne not only to 'get the physics right' but also to make a play for an alteration in the way we experience cinema, 'creating a wormhole of his own'thought his intricate awareness of all that cinema is capable of, not just as viewed object but in its ability to draw us out of that passivity. The multiple dimensions of space-time are not simply revealed to us through dialog and mise-en-scene, but also through the structure of the film itself, its narrative flow constantly turning back on its own objective. Thus, narrative (including dialog), structure and mise-en- scene work together to play out the tension between intimate and exterior space-time, and then in the final third of the film, work in unison to rectify the seeming discrepancies inherent in the films earlier two acts. So, if you have an experience of frustration at what you imagine to be 'hokey dialog' (a term being brandied about in commentary on this film) in either of the first two acts, Nolan planted it there, and expects you to remain with him to resolve it – which he fully and completely does – in the third (and ultimately splendid) third act. (See my review on my site for sources for this)
In the first of these three acts, Nolan portrays a 'future' where an exhausted earth is slowly killing its inhabitants with depleted soils and toxic, rolling dust storms that instill respiratory disease and cancer in the humans who still survive. The divide between Cooper (Mathew McConaughey) and his young daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy and then Jessica Chastain) when Cooper is recruited by NASA to go into space and explore alternate possibilities of inhabitable planets becomes the impetus by which resolution is possible, in a unique and brilliant observation about the importance of the interior world and how it impacts in very material ways on the external. Without any spoilers, this important plot line is fully resolved through the extension of the love we have for our children extended to a love for all children, as exemplified in the Murph's desperate search for a unified theory of quantum gravity. The final third of the film resolves this not by theory but through experience and the resolution of fundamental animosities between Einstein's geometrical description of the relative structure of space-time and quantum physics' mathematical description of the particle- and wave-like behavior of both subatomic and macroscopic physical matter. However, these 'human' narrative threads – another is Amelia Brand's (Anne Hathaway) exposition on the importance of pursuing her lover to his outpost despite the 'superior' data of team leader Dr. Mann (Matt Damon) ) are not merely additions tossed in to provide an emotional connection, rather the intimate and the planetary narrative threads are interwoven and crucial to each other, so that the resolution of both father/daughter divide occurs simultaneously with the practical resolution of interstellar space travel.
Interstellar is enormously complex,intricately laced and does depend on some broad, if not understanding, then at least acceptance, of physics and the specific hypothesis of Kip Thorne. It's a new way to 'watch' a film, and a rare and precious call to our flaccid intellect in a time when to desire an intelligent film is pretentious and to enjoy pushing the mind to its outer quarter is a financial waste of time.