Year: 2014
Director: Christopher Nolan
Screenplay: Jonathon Nolan, Christopher Nolan
Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica
Chastain, Bill Irwin, Ellen Burstyn, Michael Caine
Synopsis is here:
I find it fascinating that Christopher Nolan has gone full
Kubrick in order to bring to us what I consider to be his most heartfelt film
to date. Nolan; like Kubrick, has often been considered a quite cold film
maker, yet in spite of placing his clear 2001 influences on his sleeves for
Interstellar, Nolan’s longest movie also holds one of his strongest central
relationships. There were quite a few moments in the film, in which I found myself
caught up not just in the scenes of Matthew McConaughey's Coop, his family and the intergalactic drama that plays out, but also the implications.
Once
leaving the cinema, however, unlike The Prestige (2006), Inception (2010) of
The Dark Knight (2008), I found that my first impressions drifted away as quickly as
they appeared. I had enjoyed the film and its playfulness towards relativity and
physics. I fell in love with its ambition (a word used ad nauseam by
critics/writers and myself when talking about this film) and often felt the tug of emotion
when the film pulled the strings. Yet
Interstellar when I finally sat down to ponder it, never felt as complete as
Nolan’s previous movies.
Thematically, I found the film enthralling, yet the concerns
that many detractors have about Nolan felt more apparent here. The protracted
nature of the film's structure and pacing for instance. Or the aspects of plot
which felt far more convoluted than previous features did. When piecing the film
together, the film often felt like a po-faced Fantastic Voyage (1966). The
screenplay often played out more like a B-movie dressed up.
That is slightly unfair to the Nolan’s and B-Movies, but I
did find the film's length, exposition and general sour-faced demeanour took
away from some Nolan’s most majestic set-pieces, the film’s emotional core and
its sense of adventure. I couldn’t care less about the science being exact.
This new trend of factual nit-picking fictional films to death for accuracy, is tiresome, particularly for the likes of Nolan, who gets more aggression for
his outlandish moments than others. Yet Interstellar is his biggest sci-fi
sandbox and this time his need to keep everyone on the same page with
exposition heavy dialogue was distracting. Particularly as I had already pieced
together pivotal moments of the plot early on and found myself waiting for
the characters to catch up.
Despite this, Nolan still manages to provoke interesting topics
of thought. This is still a film which forces a viewer to have an opinion. The
world of Interstellar is at times a compelling mixture of old school Americana
and individualistic philosophy. While I didn’t think it didn’t hit that feeling
of transcendence that I felt with Gravity (2013), the strength of Matthew Mcconaughey’s
central performance helps realise just how large the stakes are, not just
between him and his family, but with the world he has left behind.
The dying America that has been left, is one that has
decided to collectively dull down Earth’s scientific dreamers and explorers as
mere delusions, in a reversal of how old school religion is sometimes viewed
now. The earth’s demise is scary for
just how banal and accepting the people all are of whatever it is that may be destroying
them. The Dustbowl small town America, we see is as authentic as I could
imagine, but the behaviour of the people within it, also feels scarily
accurate.
So do, the more fantastical set pieces. Nolan litters the
film with imagery familiar to his own Inception, but still manages to provide a
freshness to the action. One set piece (set sublimely to Hans Zimmer’s celestial
score) involving the hard headed determination of Mcconaughey’s Coop, docking a
shuttle back onto a rapidly spinning spacecraft, tingles the spine in a way
little else has done this year.
With Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) said as a
major influence, and its commercial objectives clearly in its sight however,
Interstellar’s ambition gives way to an optimism that does appear a little
forced. Abrupt character arcs and moments that were awkwardly placed in the
movie finally give way to a final position that takes away a part of that
ambiguity that a film of such a scope deserves. It brings the likes of a film
like Alex Proyas’ Knowing (2009) into sharper focus. While a film I didn’t practically
enjoy, its climax, though preposterous at the time hints at an amount of
ambiguity that Interstellar takes a quarter step back from. Its closure hedges
its bets somewhat.
Still, Interstellar is punctuated by small, remarkable moments of
emotion resonance. While at times the film feels more surface level than Nolan’s
previous endeavors, as a piece of mainstream spectacle, Nolan still sets a
pretty high bar for grand adult orientated cinema. What I’ll really find fascinating
is whether the film’s more engaging moments will find a way of burrowing in my psyche
and finding some time to germinate. I feel there’s enough in Interstellar to do
that.
