Nolan enters wormhole to go back to the 1970s but cosmic forces bend everything badly out of shape

Rating: 7/10 (8 November 2014)

The 70s, it seems, is where the cinema zeitgeist is at the moment. From bleak sparse thrillers ('Jack Reacher' – 'A walk among the tombstones') to Horror (Under the Skin' -'You're Next' and 'The Guest') to Sci-Fi ('Guardians of the Galaxy) to anarchic comedy ('Wolf of Wall Street') everyone is wearing retro. Now it's Christopher 'The Messiah' Nolan 's turn with a brave and ambitious stab at the cerebral sci-fi of the early 70s. A difficult enough genre at the best of times ('cold' and 'dry' are kind terms, 'pretentious', 'boring' and 'painfully dull' less kind) it takes someone of Nolan's current stature to sell such a project today. Has it worked? Well yes and no.
The story is, like the originals, very hazy and has Humanity slowly dying out from nature itself turning against us, something we see through the rather limited prism of a dirt farm in the mid-west (dirt farm and dirt cheap!) Although the fate of all humanity is at stake we concentrate only one family, that of widowed ex-Nasa pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) and his unnaturally smarty pants daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy as a kid, Jessica Chastain as an adult) who through some weird messaging from beyond end up with boffin Dr Brand (Michael Caine) After a very long time we finally blast off on 'mankind's last hope', an exploration ship that goes through a wormhole that has very handily just appeared near Saturn. From there it's off to three planets, 'water world' 'ice world' (where Matt Damon appears as 'poorly sketched but necessary human antagonist') and finally 'rock world'. Then Cooper, who despite all of humanity being in his hands thinks more about his daughter than anything else (Selfish? Not really because love is the 5th dimension apparently) leaves his co-pilot Amelia (Anne Hathaway) and leaps into a giant black hole which, rather than utterly destroying him, leads him to some sort of time-gate built by humanities distant descendants who have learnt to master the 4h dimension so that he can set everything in motion. Then there's possibly the most forced happy ending in cinema history and what could be a sequel lead in.
The original 70's movies were roughly divided between pessimistic (We're all frakked and we deserve it) and the optimistic (Humanity will thrive no matter what and there are higher forces out there helping us out too) and 'Interstellar' falls squarely into the second category. . As many have pointed out the main players (Cooper-Amelia-Murphy-Dr Brand, the red shirted crew) are one-dimensional cyphers (as they were then) but here Nolan has found his forte anyway since it can be argued that the same is true of all Nolan movie characters. It's clinical coldness it counter-weighs with 'emotional heft', also known as 'schmaltz' and 'cheese'. Not quite as sick bag inducing as the absurd 'Gravity' it still manages to raise plenty of groans and face palms from the get-go. Everyone gets a chance to cry and weep and make important, unlikely speeches about the power of love, the nature of the human spirit, etc. Also a lot of major short cuts are taken with the science especially towards the end where it reaches such heights of tenuous straw grabbing that you could imagine Adam West and Burt Ward's Batman and Robin making similar deductions ("The message said 'Stop!' And what do you do when you 'stop'? – 'You Wait!" – "Exactly Robin! Wait- WEIGHT! Weight is obviously the secret to time!" "Holy time machine Batman, we have to use gravity to stop time!" "Exactly Robin, that's what Dr Brand was missing all the time!")
What the 70s sci-fi films lacked in narrative cohesion or character building they made up for in striking images and music and this film delivers that in abundance. The movie's look is carefully designed to evoke the 70s, complete with that 'grainy' 70mm film some people are complaining about and a design aesthetic that is 40 years old. While impressive in its recreation, a lot of it looks frankly ridiculous in 2014, especially the 'walking block' robots that became such an integral part of the tale. Even the special effects all look practical (or are CGI made to look practical or a combination of both) and ships look like models clumsily blue screened and matted that move at odd jerky right angles (on controlled pole arms) over painted backdrops. Again, this is wonderfully nostalgic and accurate to the source but it looks cheap and amateurish to a mainstream audience. Thematically also it has that 70s combo of 'Space Race optimism' (when we all believed we'd be having holiday's on Mars by 2000) and 'New Age' philosophy, both lingering hangovers from the 60s.
The brooding Organ led music by Hans Zimmer (who else) is a good imitation of Phillip Glass and suits the film well, doing a lot of the 'talking' for it. Acting wise it is a lot of familiar faces really going through the motions but then Nolan movies are never acting tour-de- forces.
The Nolan brothers are to be congratulated on attempting to do something like this and to explore some (sadly) rarely visited themes including the power of wonder and striving that fuels science and exploration, mankind not being isolated but part of a greater unity we can perceive but barely understand (yet) the bonds of love in a Universal context, (etc) even when the result comes out looking rather too silly and melodramatic, melding stony seriousness with frankly ridiculous events and impossible coincidences. One to watch, but with a big pinch of salt!