Excellent at Many Things, But Too Overzealous for its Own Good

Rating: 8/10 (23 March 2015)

A beautiful, ambitious riddle that tackles the weighty topics of time displacement, space exploration, fatherhood and the end of life on Earth. Not necessarily in that order. Like Christopher Nolan's preceding mind-stompers, Inception and The Prestige, it's a crafty, sprawling creation that feeds and grows based on sheer conceptual might. I found it less accessible and rewarding than those two, however, overreaching in the third act to reel us back in after a few digressions. Most of the climax feels like an ill fit, too, discarding two hours' worth of rigorous scientific detail in exchange for a trippy, convoluted plot device and a fairytale ending. In a lot of ways, it's like a mainstream adaptation of the finale seen in 2001: A Space Odyssey, a clear inspiration, in that it's bright, blurry, colorful and confusing. Only this time, the static leads to a cookie cutter epilogue, not a blank canvas. Such complaints notwithstanding, I greatly enjoyed most of the ride to reach that point, even if it has a tendency to belabor a point. Nolan's vision of a near-death civilization on our home soil is vibrant and real. His emphasis on the pain of separation and the dizzying potential of galactic time-shifts are powerful and moving. It's a real visual stunner, too, making hay with staggering CG representations of theoretical deep-space star configurations that left me slack-jawed more than once. As a space nerd, that was very cool to breathe in, and seeing practical demonstrations of so many abstract concepts is wonderful.