Time is a circle, just like Matthew McConaughey said in True Detective. But it isn't flat. It's spherical.
McConaughey’s renaissance continues: He’s required to play practically every emotional note imaginable, and he hits them all. Hathaway isn’t quite as convincing as a scientist, and she also gets the movie’s worst speech, but she’s passable and doesn’t ruin the movie. For all its flaws, Interstellar is required viewing for anyone who appreciates the majesty movies are capable of, the way they can fool us into thinking we’ve been transported into another galaxy, and for anyone who wants to see things they’ve never seen before.
Interstellar is the most mercilessly awe-inducing. Even if you gag on its payload of sentiment, as many have and shall, it is the film of 2014 that demands to be experienced on the biggest screen available. Nolan would prefer that you see it in 70mm IMAX if you can; Paramount is making a well-publicized exception to its recent switch to exclusively digital exhibition formats just for him. That's what three wildly successful Bat-movies buy you.
In the scenario cooked up by Nolan's brother Jonathan, Global famine and food wars have drastically thinned our herd. Militaries have disbanded ,, and almost everyone — even hotshot former test pilots like our man Cooper, who remembers the Good Old Days even though he's only in his 40s — works the land, which now yields only corn.
NASA is a secret organization led by Michael Caine, Nolan's go-to man for gravitas. In fact, his character is literally a gravity expert, one who has spent decades trying to crack an equation that will enable humanity's migration to Somewhere Else. What's more, his team — Anne Hathaway, David Gyasi and Wes Bentley, plus a sarcastic military-surplus robot voiced and manipulated, — have identified a dozen potentially habitable planets accessible via wormhole, those express lanes across the cosmos. NASA's best guess is that the wormhole and the planets were put there for us by extraterrestrial intellects vast, cool and weirdly sympathetic. But they need Cooper's Right Stuff to get to Saturn, where the wormhole is. It's unclear who was going to handle the driving if an eventually explained series of mysterious portents hadn't led Cooper and Murph, his 10-year-old budding genius daughter, to their secret lair.
As with every Nolan movie, there's a clockwork narrative logic to it that eventually reveals itself, even if your willing suspension of disbelief has burned up by then.
Anyway, Cooper must leave behind his two kids — Murph and Tom, her less gifted big brother — to try to save the species.
I wouldn't have minded a bit if Nolan had lingered on these space vistas more than he does. But he's got a super massive story to tell, one that keeps him rushing even given the lengthy run time.
Interstellar is probably the first presumptive blockbuster to grapple with the problem that everyone you loved back on your home world would almost certainly grow to surpass you in age. (It takes two years in cryo-sleep just to get to the wormhole, apart from the time-dilation problem.) Some of the consequences of this make for stirring, emotional stuff, even if the movie isn't as profound as it wants us to believe.
Nolan, a director often accused of coldness, finally got all mushy when he went to outer space. I can't solve that equation, but I've enjoyed trying to scratch it out.
This isn’t Nolan’s best movie, but his ambitions and trust in the audience keep getting bigger. He’s one of Hollywood’s few true remaining visionaries, and he’s only getting warmed up.
My Rating : 8/10
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