Bends space-time, narrative & your mind

Rating: 8/10 (13 November 2014)

Imagine Gravity and 2001 - A Space Odyssey had a baby; they'd name it Interstellar. With the production values of both and with science and nature not fantasy-magic driving the awe and wonder Interstellar leaves a long, lingering taste in your head.
Matthew McConaughey plays ex-NASA pilot turned farmer in some recognisably normal version of the Earth's future. We're just a few years ahead of our now and terrible climatic change is wreaking havoc with our ability to produce enough food. America is pedalling backwards, people are returning to the land in a desperate attempt to grow enough food but it is clear we are in the end of days of the human race. Cooper (McConaughey's character) is a widower, raising a teenage son and daughter. The daughter, Murphy, is intellectually gifted and in the early part of the narrative experiences poltergeist-type activity in her bedroom; things gets broken, books get pushed off shelves, strange lines appear on the floor when dust from a storm swills into her room. These lines turn out to be a simple binary code, co-ordinates of a secret NASA facility which Cooper sets off one night to investigate. Enter Michael Caine and NASA's skeleton crew, the once great and good space agency reduced to skulking in a mountain-side because public opinion, with the Earth going to hell in a hand-cart, not supportive of grand spending on the so-called folly of space exploration.
Michael Caine's character, a gifted physicist called Professor Brand who Cooper knows from when he worked for NASA, has a grand vision for the future of humanity. He also has some of the best lines, several of which turn up in the trailers. You'll know the one I mean; "Mankind was born on Earth, we were never meant to die here." Having discovered this mission to save the Earth Cooper learns of a stable worm-hole that has appeared in the orbit of Saturn which offers humans the opportunity to travel in interstellar space to search out a new home. His mission with a team of other astronauts, one of which is Professor Brand's daughter (played by Anne Hathaway), is to travel through the worm-hole to connect up with several pioneer missions that have already journeyed interstellar. NASA has lost contact with them though.
Enough plot to get you started I think, anymore begins to damage the sheer joy and wonder of a beautifully constructed story. Interstellar is science-fiction rooted deeply in science fact, it represents Einstein's relativity in narrative form, showing fascinatingly the time-bending qualities of dense gravitational fields. We have a black hole, a singularity and theories of everything. Interstellar bends narrative, back upon itself - lose not sight of that poltergeist - as well as space-time (as relativity predicts) along with our minds. Great story, great performances and cinema as it should be. Space is experienced as deadly, beautiful and silent. The forces that shape our Universe are portrayed superbly and the ridiculously puny nature of our lives is writ large.
Interstellar is definitely the best rendition of theoretical physics on the big screen, a physicist, Kip Thorne was on board as a consultant and producer. It's been generally well-received by critics and justifiably so. It would be my film of the year so far. Story, script and science beautifully intermingled and not an alien in sight. The one sour note in the reviews was Peter Bradshaw's in the Guardian. I love the Guardian but it does have on the payroll a cast of intellectual-snobs whose main role in life seems to be to sneer and whine.
Bradshaw's reviews fails utterly in two respects, one it contains too many spoilers not to destroy the experience of the story (so don't read it here if you haven't seen the film yet) and secondly it fails utterly to get the great big gravitational twist at the end (perhaps Mr Bradshaw isn't quite as intellectual a snob as he thinks he is, which might just leave him being a snob!) Three stars Mr Bradshaw does enable you to deliver your normal sneery review but doesn't reflect at all the popularisation of relativity and the beauty of space and science Interstellar makes real on the big screen. Mark Kermode in the Guardian also whines a bit, hey perhaps it's in the contract for journalists joining the paper, talking about plot-holes. The only holes I could spot were worm and black ones, along, of course, with the big one we are digging ourselves as we destroy our ecosystem's ability to support us.
Interstellar is epic cinema as its best and it will inspire many people, young and old, to journey deep and long and wide into the wonders of science fact and fiction.
**** (Four Stars)