Brainy, Ballsy, and Beautiful to Behold

Rating: 10/10 (16 November 2014)

Reviewed by: Dare Devil Kid (DDK)
Rating: 5/5 stars
Christopher Nolan has reached deep into the stars to tell a story about mankind's demise and refusal to go quietly into the night. Here is a director whose name has, quite literally, become synonymous with realism. The Nolanisation of cinema, which made the gloomy streets of Gotham a bridge between the fantastical and the commonplace, now grounds countless fancies within the mud of our reality. With "Interstellar", Nolan inverts expectation once again, with a film rooted in the regularity of mathematics homework but spliced with the fantastic. The film charts a course in the latest theories in quantum physics and other space-related sciences to tell a story that engages and entertains viewers. It also goes to exacting lengths to meticulously depict the theory of relativity — vetted by executive producer and renowned astrophysicist, Kip Thorne.
Opening, on a dusty model of the shuttle Atlantis, the film's near- future setting sees humanity starving and devoid of hope. Eking out an existence in a post-millennial Dust Bowl, Matthew McConaughey's Cooper and his two children lead a life of agrarian survivalism. But in Cooper we find a new man cut from old cloth - an all-American hero. Played with a drawling, Texan swagger underpinned by startling emotional depth, he is Nolan's most traditional lead to date, embodying the wide-eyed wonder of the Director's youth; a man for whom we are "explorers and pioneers, not caretakers", who casts his lot among the stars as the human race's last, best hope.
With the ailing Blue Planet left behind, Interstellar shifts smoothly into second gear. According to "Interstellar's" on-board astrophysicist, Kip Thorne, the spherical wormhole (it's three- dimensional, obviously) and the spinning event horizon of the film's black hole (named Gargantua) are mathematically modeled and true to life. Sitting before a 100-foot screen, though, you won't give a toss about equations because Nolan's starscape is the most mesmerizing visual of the year. Gargantua is as captivating as it is terrible: an undulating maelstrom of darkness and light; this is space imagined with a dizzying immensity.
Nolan grounds his epic tale through the relationship between humans. There is a scene in the movie that shifts from deep space back to Earth, from a father (McConaughey) who hasn't aged much physically to a daughter(Chastain) all grown up. The difference captured in this moment was everything Cooper feared about leaving his heartland farm, son and daughter, for a last-gasp mission to find an inhabitable planet for Earth's population.
Thankfully, Nolan's helped no end by his lead, the charismatic McConaughey cementing his A-list comeback with a powerful performance that helps ground the grand proceedings and provides the film with its emotional core. Among all the space phenomena and alien terrains, it's his quieter moments that provides the film's small-scale highlights. It's also his back-and-forth banter with TARS – a former military droid with a fiercely caustic artificial intelligence (voiced by comedian Bill Irwin) – that lends the film some much needed humor amidst the solemnity of the mission at hand. Meanwhile, Nolan newbie, Chastain, and regular collaborator, Caine, provide solid Earthbound support with only fairly limited screen- time, and Hathaway adds a refreshingly down-to-earth presence to the outer-space adventure.
For Nolan faithfuls, all his signature notes are also present: Michael Caine imparts wisdom in front of a blackboard, the story skips through time without a fade to black, Hans Zimmer provides a haunting score, and multiple action sequences are cut together in a frenetic crescendo. If there's one area that Nolan is visibly more comfortable with, it's tense, super-sized set pieces – and he more than delivers here. From a race against a giant, skyscraper-sized wave to some frosty fisticuffs atop a herculean glacier (meticulously shot to frame the combatants as tiny ants compared to the enormity of the icy mass they're traversing), "Interstellar" contains its fair share of heart-in-mouth moments.
The production design is more "Alien" than "Star Trek", with a grimy, functional spacecraft reaching murky, yet beautifully conceived new worlds. New cinematographer, Hoyte van Hoytemer, more than ably replaces Nolan's regular DOP, Wally Pfister. The plot may be higher-than-high concept, but Nolan keeps the world of "Interstellar" admirably and charmingly low-key. Location shoots in Iceland lend a stunning natural edge to the film's alien landscapes, while the film's tech – taking cues from films like "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "Alien" – has a tangible, old-school quality to it, from the embryonic, sous-vide-style hyper-sleep chambers to McConaughey's clunky, faceless robot sidekick TARS. Even in the depths of new galaxies, characters still write out their trajectories on white boards and explain scientific theories using pen and paper. Ditto the movie itself, shot on film in good old- fashioned 2D. It's to Nolan and his visual effects team's credit, though, that he's still able to push boundaries despite this traditional approach: "Interstellar" contains without doubt some of the most inventive, immersive, and abstract outer-space visuals ever put up on the big screen.
"Interstellar" poses all the right questions and provides some highly cerebral answers to most of them, while leaving the others rightfully unanswered. This is Nolan at his highest-functioning but also his least accessible; a film that eschews conflict for exploration, action for meditation and reflection. For the first time, Nolan opens his heart as well as his mind. Never hitherto a comfortably emotional filmmaker, here he demonstrates a depth of feeling not present in his earlier work. "Interstellar" is a wish to re-instill the wonder of the heavens in a generation for whom the only space is cyber. Anchored in the bottomless depths of paternal love, it's a story about feeling as much as thinking.
As a light-year-spanning quest to save the human race, this is the director's broadest canvas by far, but also his most intimate. And against the alien backdrop of black holes, wormholes, and strange new worlds, "Interstellar" stands as Nolan's most human film to date.