Stellar for Sure

Rating: 8/10 (7 November 2014)

Grand scale, large score, big visual effects, typical Nolan movie? Um...not so much. This one is really difficult to summarize briefly, and may take multiple viewings to do so. I didn't quite know what to expect based on the previews and I tried not to find too much out about it ahead of time, which ended up to be the right move as many things about this film were surprising. A character drama on HUGE scale and a HUGE screen. IMAX is the place to catch this film in its glory as over an hour of the film was actually filmed with 70 mm IMAX cameras. And those scenes are breathtaking. At a run time of 169 minutes, you get your money's worth of screen time here, and at times it feels like it. This is not "Inception" or a "Batman" movie. "Inception" flew by at 2.5 hours and was suspenseful a majority of the time. This film does not possess that same feel or intensity. There are moments of intensity, and moments of peril and intrigue, but it's also ½ laced with heart, character, time, and soul. As a father who starts down a rather strange path to leave a formidable, cursed earth on an almost certain to fail journey across the galaxy to help save it, Cooper (McConaughey) deals with multiple types of adversity such as: impossible space catastrophes, physical confrontation with people, emotional confrontation with people, internal struggles with helping humanity and sacrificing his possible life and future with and for his daughter. The internal struggles resonated here with me almost more than the physical, visible dangers. Even after a strange ending that went nowhere near I was anticipating, I found myself thinking about the Cooper's sacrifice and choices hours later. I was at first ruling out multiple viewings just based on run time alone, but after reflecting on it a bit, I may have to revisit this in the future.