Interstellar is a fantastic film that falls short ever so slightly on the emotion of the story telling. Never the less, a technical feat and well-made film.

Rating: 7/10 (1 December 2014)

Interstellar is the kind of film I've come to expect from screen writer and film maker Christopher Nolan, baring his DC Comic related films. The depth of his story telling is engulfing, well executed and always engaging. I tend to find myself considering my watch at least once during most of his films but, that doesn't make him any less of an impeccable story teller and Interstellar is definitely a credit to his abilities (and to the abilities of everyone who had a hand in the creation of this film).
The focus of the story falls slightly more on the content of what makes it worth telling than the characters caught up in the story which I find to be something I see often in Cinematic screen writers' work; writers writing with the greater visual picture in mind but who still have a strong sense of story. Interstellar is a powerful story that could have gotten even more out of its characters, though some of the content would have needed to be dropped to accommodate this; honestly I think it would have been worth it. The challenges the characters are faced with are huge, valuable and in certain cases excruciating. Nolan and Nolan draw on the kind of things that all humans inherently understand without needing to put ourselves in their shoes and Interstellar is littered with slightly underwhelming exploitation of these kinds of challenges.
The story becomes very visual and is very visually pleasing (beyond some of the focus issues) but the narrative loses some of its potential which makes the whole experience of the film slightly 'less' to me. At one point I expected the film to cause a lot of thought but it never quite got there. It constantly feels like you're moving from one point to get to the next point and ultimately the well rounded Hollywood ending. That disappoints me as I wanted to get involved with the moments of the film and not just with the film as a whole. Interstellar feels well planned, well thought through and well executed (even though some of the science feels like a bit of a bigger reach to fiction than the narrative had room for) but, it feels too clinical. The messy element of emotion in story is missing. This story has the potential to tear open your chest and break your heart but it doesn't; we don't want to think about this kind of content, we want to feel it and feelings are messy.
The music understands this.
Hans Zimmer has a way of approaching music that makes it emotional beyond what one would expect to find in a recording studio, but is what we want from our film scores. There are moments where the music becomes somewhat repetitive but in the moments where it connects, Hans Zimmer takes the visual and narrative story and utterly captures the emotions with the score, contributing substantially to the feeling of the film. I always consider Zimmer's use of instrumentation and arrangement when I watch a film he scored as he has an iconic way with sound; the organ and bass drones in Interstellar captures the grandeur and terror of space wonderfully.
Interstellar is an powerful and ambitious film and the film makers succeeded with what I think must have been a daunting task.