Reel Look: 'Interstellar'

Rating: 8/10 (4 February 2015)

"Do not go gentle into that good night; Old age should burn and rave at close of day. Rage, rage against the dying of the light." Christopher Nolan again hones in on the epic and launches off into the vastness of space that is 'Interstellar', based on the wormhole theory by American theoretical physicist Kip Thorne (who served as one of the executive producers on the film as well). This 2014 science-fiction features a crew of astronauts of whom travel through a wormhole in search of a new home for the human race. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema originally shot the film on anamorphic 35mm and IMAX 70mm photography, capturing the resilient, ineffable beauty of the universe in all of its magnificent infinity one could capture. We as the viewers can only hold on for the ride as we launch into the unexpected and endless realms beyond the safe atmosphere of our home planet as we travel with the team in seeking a new world to call home as ours is slowly deteriorating around us. How is the ride? Let's take a look.
Former NASA pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) runs a rural farm with his family. His 10-year-old daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy) believes her room is haunted by a specter behind her bookshelf trying to communicate with her from the netherworld. Discovering the "ghost" is an unknown intelligence trying to communicate with them sending coded messages using gravitational waves, it leaves binary coordinates in the dust that direct them straight to a secret NASA installation led by Professor John Brand (Michael Caine). He reveals that a wormhole, apparently created by alien intelligence, leads to new planets that could possibly sustain life and may offer hope for survival. Brand recruits Cooper to pilot the space craft Endurance for their mission, along with the professor's biotechnologist daughter Amelia (Anne Hathaway), scientists Romilly (David Gyasi) and Doyle (Wes Bently) and super-intelligence robots TARS and CASE. Cooper's departure devastates Murph, but he promises her he will return and gives her his watch as a keepsake. They then part on bad terms as Cooper sets of with the team to venture forth into the endless darkness of space in search of the hope of humanity as it hangs in the balance.
Nolan peppered his latest work with other outer space film nuances to reverberate the feel more towards his audiences of which he said influenced the picture, with echos from such sci-fi films as '2001: A Space Odyssey', 'The Right Stuff' and Tarkovsky's 'The Mirror', in which he describes the part it played, emulating: "elemental things in the story to do with wind and dust and water". He also compared it to the 1948 Western 'The Treasure of the Sierra Madre', in which the film reveals its human nature as well.
Lengthy, visually resplendent in scope and storyline, thought-provoking and sometimes downright saddening, 'Interstellar' pushes the bar of space-time continuum regarding modern space cinema and blasts us beyond the limits of our familiar planet and imaginations headlong past the eye candy galaxies in search for a possible future among the myriad stars in all of their visual splendor. Truly Nolan's latest remains his most humane and, though thousands of miles above the atmosphere, down-to-earth film to date. 'Inception' in space? You decide.