A Voyage Like None Other Seen In 2014

Rating: 10/10 (10 November 2014)

Given how much Hollywood has been obsessed with mega-budget blockbusters based on comic books or franchise films in the 21st century, it is sometimes easy to forget that certain films of other genres, made on roughly the same budgets can have an impact as well. British director Christopher Nolan's immense and philosophical 2014 science fiction epic INTERSTELLAR is just one such film. It is a film that, much like 1997's CONTACT and 2013's GRAVITY, owes a significant story debt to director Stanley Kubrick's 1968 sci-fi masterpiece 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, a debt that Nolan himself freely acknowledges Set in some unknown, far-flung future in which life on Earth is becoming increasingly uninhabitable due to out of control climate chaos, and where massive dust storms are commonplace, the film stars Matthew McConaughey as the chosen leader of an expedition to find new habitats for what's left of Earth's population in the vast reaches of outer space. But to do that, they will have to venture through a black hole that opened up within our own Solar System, around Saturn. They make that ultra-hazardous journey through the black hole, and find three worlds spinning along the vortex, one of which may very well support human life, and another one of which they find a survivor (Matt Damon) of a previous expedition. They are then confronted with the issues of the space-time continuum that was part of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity; and McConaughey is confronted with having left his family behind to face the apocalyptic devastation that he knows awaits him if and when he should return from the far-flung reaches of the universe. But following another trip through the black hole, McConaughey is in for an extremely big surprise, one as much inspired by The Twilight Zone as anything else.
Nolan, whose credits include such comic-book smashes as THE DARK KNIGHT and THE DARK KNIGHT RISES, as well as psychological thrillers like MEMENTO and INCEPTION, set himself an enormous task in making INTERSTELLAR. In a movie business so overrun with mega-budget movies with lots of CGI special effects, plenty of explosions, over-the-top stunts, and way over-the-top violence, all of which are supposedly "sure things", he took an extreme risk by expending close to $150 million on a fantastic sci-fi opus that touches on genuine human, psychological, and philosophical concerns for the future of mankind. But as Kubrick, one of Nolan's favorite filmmakers, once observed, nothing is as dangerous as a "sure thing"; and in making INTERSTELLAR the way he has, along with co-writing the screenplay and largely eschewing CGI for more traditional special effects work, some of which had been seen in CONTACT, he has sought to make his concerns every bit as real as humanly possible, and attempted, more than a little successfully, to follow in the footsteps of "2001" in showing us the possibilities of where Man was going in the universe, and his ultimate place in the cosmos. He has managed to do this in a film that runs slightly under three hours, or about thirty-five minutes longer than even the lengthy and stately Kubrick masterpiece. This will invariably try a lot of audience members' patience, but the truth is that not every film needs to be reduced to childish lowest common denominator simplicity to be very good.
Even with so visual a story that INTERSTELLAR has, Nolan hasn't forgotten that people power films as much as the technicians; and having seasoned actors like McConaughey, Jessica Chastain, and Anne Hathaway, and veterans like Michael Caine and John Lithgow, in the cast is certainly something to be proud of. The scenes of the dust storms ravaging McConaughey's home farm in the opening section of the film are frighteningly impressive; and the passage that McConaughey's ship "Endurance "takes through the black hole have some of the mythical quality of the Star Gate in "2001", and similar ones in STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE and CONTACT.
The keyboards/synthesizers/organ score by Hans Zimmer, who is one of the most prominent composers in film music in Hollywood during the 21st century, does a lot to enhance the immensity and the scope of INTERSTELLAR, as Steven Price's did for GRAVITY. And while it is easy to get wrapped up in the IMAX sound and the visuals of the piece, in the end the overwhelming sense to be gotten out of INTERSTELLAR is, like Kubrick and "2001", a genuine concern for not only film as Art, but the future of Man in the cosmos. That by itself sets it apart from a lot of Hollywood films of the 21st century.
And in the final analysis, all of those things make INTERSTELLAR easily one of the best films of 2014.