Interstellar presents a future where the Earth is dying. Blight is killing off crops one by one, until all humanity has left is corn. Engineer-turned-farmer Coop (Matthew McConaughey) discovers a strange coded message in his daughter’s room, which leads him to the secret remnants of NASA. It turns out that years ago, a wormhole appeared near Saturn leading to a distant galaxy. Ten years ago, astronauts were sent through the wormhole in hopes of finding a habitable planet. Coop is asked to head up a new mission to investigate the most promising of those planets, but doing so means leaving his family behind.
The plot and its emotional elements get a little dodgy. The story is delivered in typical Nolan fashion: a meticulously constructed puzzle box that builds towards big revelations in the third act that ties the end with the beginning. There is definite skill in this narrative construction, but it’s so tightly wound that it leaves little room for surprise. The movie railroads its narrative towards a twist, and while the ideas are spectacular, the execution feels suspect. The film also makes a major bid for sentiment in its story, and that isn’t pulled off quite as well as it could have been.
The film ends up creating a conflict of themes. It wants to present characters with tough, tragic choices, while at the same time leading them into safer, more familiar dramatic arcs. It is stuck between exploring the unknown and returning to the familiar. The former is ultimately more compelling than the latter, especially as we get to the third act. While the characters in space are faced with life-and-death crises, the characters on Earth take a detour through tedious domestic drama that just never really gets the development needed to make it matter.
Fortunately for the film, its stellar cast makes even the roughest patches feel palatable. Matthew McCounaughey is just a terribly magnetic actor. He wears weariness well, and his inward intensity suggests a sharpness that really benefits his character. Anne Hathaway builds a lovely performance, balancing outward coldness with hidden warmth. Back on Earth, Jessica Chastain projects a heady mix of scientific curiosity matched with deep feelings of abandonment. There are no weak spots in this cast, and the actors are more than able to handle the film’s stickier spots.
Having said all that, knowing full well that there are problems with the film’s narrative, and that it’s mainly the actors that are making the story palatable, it’s still difficult not to recommend. It’s especially difficult to pass over knowing that it is being projected in 70mm. If nothing else, this film provides a one-of-a-kind experience: a mind-blowing journey through space and time ably brought to life by one of the finest technical filmmakers working today. This film is a visual delight, taking the audience into frontiers we can only really imagine. And it does so with real aplomb, constructing an experience so complete that it stays with you past the screening.
Interstellar openly invites comparisons to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In terms of scope and ambition, the film compares well. In other regards, Interstellar feels mushier than Kubrick’s masterpiece, more beholden to the clichés of big Hollywood filmmaking. But it almost doesn’t matter. At 70mm, it certainly doesn’t matter. What’s key here is the experience, and the ability of the filmmaker to just show us things we’ve never seen before. Interstellar isn’t quite the masterpiece it was meant to be, but it comes bracingly close.
My Rating:
