Another Christopher Nolan masterpiece

Rating: 10/10 (30 December 2017)

I'll say a number of things about Interstellar but basically ... words fail me. This is one h*** of a movie. Even though it has some flaws, or at least certain things that bother me a bit, I find this film so absorbing from start to finish that I just can't resist giving it 10/10. Big-screen, big ideas, big-budget, terrific technology, a script that's not dumbed down, and a stacked cast. And the run time of almost 3 hours has not a single wasted minute -- it's not at all too long for its seamlessly interlocked plot to unfold. Everything is here -- gut-wrenching personal tragedies and triumphs, visual spectacle like nothing before, high drama, inspirational striving against huge odds, and all delivered by actors in total command. If you don't read any further, I hope this is already enough to persuade you to see it (or see it again!).
TIFF was playing both Interstellar and 2001: A Space Odyssey this past month so I went in to see it in their beautiful theater space again, three years after its first release. The pro critics would see 2001 (from 1968) as its logical predecessor, and to some extent it certainly is. But it also owes a lot to 2010: The Year We Make Contact (from 1984) in its pure and accurate depiction of space travel. (As one example, take the sequence in Interstellar showing their arrival at Saturn, and compare it with 2010's arrival at Jupiter and the atmospheric braking technique. Both are visually magnificent.) But there are things in Interstellar that are entirely its own, such as the scenes of the black hole with accretion disk, its NON-singular center (a nonrotating black hole has a singular point of infinite density at its center, but a spinning black hole actually does not!), the stretching of time in a strong gravitational field, and the outside view of the wormhole with its gravitationally lensed images of galaxies on the far side. During the production it became well known that Nolan was (intelligently) relying on consultation with Kip Thorne, a theoretical astrophysicist and specialist in gravity and spacetime, and it showed. Maybe Thorne didn't get an Oscar for this work, but I'm sure he'll make do with his Nobel Prize. :) There's so much here that is done right, all the way down to the simple fact that the views outside the various spacecraft are utterly silent no matter if their thrusters are firing or they are colliding -- sound doesn't exist in a vacuum, period.
The cast list is just amazing: Matthew McConaughey, Jessica Chastain, Anne Hathaway, Michael Caine, Ellen Burstyn, Matt Damon, John Lithgow, Wes Bentley, David Gyasi, and a wonderful Mackenzie Foy as 10-year-old "Murph" (under certain camera angles and lighting, she and Chastain as her older self look uncannily alike). Every one of them has an essential role to play in this rich and complex script. Also worth noting: thankfully it's becoming common enough now for a woman scientist to play a major role in SF and other films, but it's still very rare to have MORE than one. Here we've got both Hathaway (biologist) and Chastain (physicist), and their characters are both key players and heroes in their own right. And the advanced-AI robots on the spacecraft are predictably charming, but thankfully do NOT steal the show. This is an ensemble cast all the way through.
Hans Zimmer's musical score is quite distinctive, even for him. I particularly liked the elegant dance-like motif that accompanies spacecraft travel scenes among others -- it's a gently soaring, yearning line of song that just ... never... quite ... resolves or comes to rest. On the other hand, he has a couple of suitably massive themes for the big dramatic buildups that pack a real punch.
OK, for the things that bothered me a bit:

the 'tesseract library' at the center of the black hole and the transmission of signals across time by manipulating gravity: I know it's ingenious, but it is just a bit hard to swallow. I keep wondering if there was a better way to do this, but I'll admit I can't think of one.

the ships would have been ripped apart going into the black hole; the tidal field around a stellar-mass b.h. is too steep for anything solid to maintain its structure.

with Earth's resources dwindling and monoculture crops catastrophically failing one after the other, how come everyone still drives cars and trucks everywhere? Where is the gas coming from?

These are quibbles though. The powerful storyline and first rate production quality trump everything else. A modern classic.