A Cross Between Inception and 2001: A Space Odyssey

Rating: 9/10 (8 November 2014)

Interstellar is Nolan's next big movie, and the best way to describe it is a cross between Nolan's own Inception and Stanley Kubrick's 2001. It has all the long tension of Inception, including cutting between two different building stories so that they reach their conclusion at the same time. This creates a lot of nail-biting suspense, the same as it did in Inception. However, apply that suspense, today's effects, and the modern way of making and presenting a movie to 2001, and you've got Interstellar in a nutshell (complete with off-the-wall, surreal climax at the end).
The world is dying, overtaken by dust and dirt, disrupting and killing crops. Humanity is a mess; everyone's a farmer and the quest for science is almost nonexistent. Cooper is an ex-astronaut who, just like everyone else, has resigned to keeping his own farm. However it's not enough for him and he craves space exploration more than ever, so when he finds a binary message in the dirt, he follows it's message into another galaxy to save humanity.
Interstellar is a very scientific movie. It's all pro-science, showing us what a world without interest in science would look like, which has become a bit of a hot topic recently it seems. In one scene Cooper points out how the lack of MRI's in the world (having been stripped for farming parts) essentially killed his wife. Likewise there's a certain attention to realism, at least to a point. For example all the space vehicles aren't the pristine, sci-fi gadgetry we've come accustomed to seeing of a future vision, but weathered and efficient. Their interiors look like the interior of the ISS today.
However Interstellar isn't like Gravity in that realism is the sole aim. It relishes in it's sci-fi surroundings, playing with somewhat more supernatural elements. The film is permeated with the mystery of ghosts and aliens, and as I mentioned before, the big finale takes a surreal route, not too dissimilar to 2001's LSD sequence. While it has these realistic moments and this bombastic sci-fi moments, it ties them together nicely with some elements that bridge the gap in the middle. Every planet is made to seem like a plausible place to exist, with oceans, mountains, clouds, glaciers etc, however they're also very alien in that they hold features unlike anything we've seen before, such as clouds that have frozen in mid-air, creating a sheet of ice and snow floating above the ground, or tidal waves so massive they're mistaken for mountains. The other way they bridge the gap is by exploring the most up-to-date scientific understandings and taken them a little further. The biggest and most obvious example is of black holes, of which one makes a significant point of the movie. Rather than being a 2-dimensional circle as often depicted, it's a black orb surrounded by swirling light in multiple directions. It plays with gravity and time, but isn't imminently dangerous. It even gives the Nolan's an opportunity to play with the idea of going beyond the event horizon. Physically impossible because you'd die from the increased gravity before you got there, but this is another liberty they take with their sci-fi approach.
The visual effects are out of this world (pun intended). They manage to strike the subtle balance between believability and sci-fi fantasy, which makes this alien worlds with their alien features come alive, as if they're actual places that exist and are being explored. My wife did note that Saturn's rendering did just look like an art project, but at the end of the day it's a ball of gas. There isn't really much more detail you can put into it. What did strike me about that scene was the attention to scale. All too often in movies, the ship is portrayed as actually being quite big compared to the planet it's passing or about to land on. The Interstellar ship (Endurance) is just a tiny speck in the corner.
Interstellar is a great movie for sure. It impacted me so much I left the cinema in silence, and I spent the last hour getting my mind blown over and over again. However I can't say it's perfect. It plays around with a lot of ideas, but not all of them quite work, the Inception-style cutting to build tension achieves the same results, but generally feels a lot messier as the story lines don't really tie together quite as well, McConaughey's mumble just comes across as trying to hard to win an award, and the Earth-based storyline doesn't hold anywhere near the same amount of suspense, just because it inherently has less at stake. It's also a really long movie, which isn't really a problem for me, but it spends an awful lot of time on a random planet with a random character that doesn't really amount to much beyond offering a HAL-type antagonist. In my opinion they could've stripped that straight down, if not cut it out completely, and saved quite a bit of time without ruining the pacing of the movie. All things considered, I give Interstellar a fantastic 9/10. It's definitely a must-watch, despite it's flaws.