Unlike anything you've ever seen; bold, ambitious, mind-blowing

Rating: 10/10 (12 December 2014)

My passion for anything space travel made me fall instantly in love with "Interstellar", but there's a lot more to my recommendation of the film than just that. This is a profoundly ambitious movie, one that will make you think and that puts the "science" back in "science fiction". That's something to be excited about because the genre isn't just about alien robots that can turn into cars and mutant turtles that know martial arts, it's about the endless possibilities that might be within our reach. I'm getting ahead of myself though. You're wondering what this Christopher Nolan project is all about! Well, it's basically about a former NASA pilot named Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) who is enlisted to travel to space in order to find a new home for humanity. Sounds easy right? Not so much when you're venturing into an unknown galaxy through a wormhole, you have to deal with the drama of leaving your family behind for the good of humanity and you might just encounter the odd space anomaly like black holes while dealing with gravity and hypersleep.
I have a lot of admiration for this movie. This is one complicated story, and it doesn't try to dumb itself down, ever. It's not so complicated that you can't follow it, but there's a lot of material here. I had heard ahead of time that extensive scientific consultation was provided to make the movie as accurate as possible, but you could easily draw this conclusion yourself just by seeing the film. The visuals here are amazing, like nothing you've ever seen before. Literally. This is as close as we're probably ever going to get to see the inside of a worm hole, a passage from our galaxy to a completely undiscovered universe , fully rendered in a realistic way. That should be enough, but that's just the tip of the iceberg here. We actually get to travel through the worm hole, experiencing the dizzying effects as these astronauts travel who knows how many light years away from home. What do they find on the other side? Strange sights and locations, each more dazzling than the last. The film is absolutely breathtaking when it is showing you what space travel is like. Do you remember how movies used to be about seeing wild locations and catching a glimpse at other cultures across the globe? That's pretty much disappeared now that we have the internet, but that feeling, that rush, is back with "Interstellar". It's like the most beautiful Hubble telescope photos you've ever seen, set to a brilliant score by Hans Zimmer (and I know that gets you excited as soon as you remember that thunderous "Inception" or "Dark Knight" theme), packed with strong performances and what felt to me like boundless imagination.
Not only do we have the science fiction elements, with the space travel, the exploration of new worlds and all that this entails, but there's also a lot going on psychologically with this movie. Our main character is leaving Earth and his children behind for a mission that could take who knows how long. Not only does the family have to deal with the idea that they're going to be separated, maybe for years, but it gets even crazier. It's not like Cooper is going to come back to Earth and find that his children have simply grown up. This is space travel here. We've got hibernation sleep for the astronauts to consider, the fact that communication might be very limited and the biggest elephant in the room, the fact that because our astronauts are going to be traveling through space anomalies and at very high speed, the crew is going to be aging at a different rate than the people on Earth. Can you imagine if this mission went wrong and the astronauts got back to Earth, only to find that the world they were trying to save is already dead? Even if it wasn't that far, the odds are good that Cooper will never see his children again. That's not even considering the idea that his children might not WANT to see him again after he leaves the planet to go off exploring the stars. If you want a movie where the stakes are high, this movie is through the roof because it has both the intimate risk of the family crumbling apart and the chance that the entire world will perish.
I wish all science fiction, wait; I wish all films were as visionary and as bold as this one. It feels like every single detail was carefully selected and scrutinized to make sure it complimented everything else in the film. Not only do we have sights the likes of which you've never seen before, but I found that the action sequences were also really inventive and even the design of this world had me blown away. The robots in this film, not only in their look, but in their "personality" are so awesome that you will never be able to forget them. I feel like there's no shortage of praise I could give this film, and yet there was often so much going on that I'm certain I didn't even notice some significant elements. I know that realistically, there are some dramatic moments that do falter a bit and that the movie might have been able to cut a few minutes here or there, but because of the absolute mind-blowing experience that I had seeing the film, and for the fact that the inspiration and the boldness of it all swept me off my feet, I can't help but give the movie a perfect score. I can't see any way that this isn't going to be on my "best of the year" list. I can't wait to watch it again.As for you, see it in Imax if you can. Now that is an experience you won't easily forget. (Theatrical version in Imax, December 4, 2014)