Interstellar Review: Christopher Nolan’s Space Epic on the Big Screen

Interstellar November 7 review: a film about time that loses track of it

The Interstellar November 7 wide release followed a limited opening two days earlier on film in select theaters, and the movie arrived with the kind of expectation few studio pictures get. It was directed by Christopher Nolan, who wrote it with his brother Jonathan. The cast includes Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Matt Damon and Michael Caine, and the rating is PG-13. According to Wikipedia, the running time is 169 minutes.

Seeing it in IMAX 70mm at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood produces mixed feelings that are hard to sort out. For every mind-blowing image or interesting scientific idea there is a moment when a viewer wonders how far into the three hours the story has traveled and whether the end is near. That does not mean wanting it to end. It means losing all sense of time, a feeling that is borderline frustrating in a film about time. The characters deal with the passage of time, the theory of how it relates to space, and possibly the end of time as everyone knows it. Nolan did not intend the audience to check their watches, but the effect is interesting regardless.

Even so, the film is a big picture with bigger ideas, and it deserves credit for that. Major studios almost never green-light an expensive film that is not based on an existing property, and Nolan continues to push original storytelling further than any other director working at this scale. Inception showed the kind of original stories he carries around in his head. Not every one of them can turn to gold, and Interstellar proves it, but he earns points for the effort.

What Interstellar is about

The story is set in a near future where the Earth is slowly succumbing to another dust bowl and the prospects for human life are dim. Cooper (McConaughey) is a former NASA pilot who now farms. With his young daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy), he discovers a mysterious set of coordinates that lead to a secret government base. There they meet Professor Brand (Caine) and his daughter Amelia (Hathaway), who explain that they have been working for a NASA everyone thought was defunct.

Their plan is to send a team through a wormhole to another galaxy in search of a planet that can support human life. One crew has already gone ahead to scout the best candidates, and the new mission will make the final choice and return with the news. Because the scientists take cryptic messages seriously, they believe Cooper was sent to them for a reason and insist that he pilot the ship. He refuses at first, because he wants to stay and look after his two children, then reluctantly agrees in the hope of saving his own children and everyone else’s.

The journey, the visuals and the human story

Murph resents her father for leaving, and she refuses to say goodbye when it is time to launch. What follows is an epic trip through space and time. Cooper, Amelia and their NASA colleagues Romilly (David Gyasi) and Doyle (Wes Bentley) pass through wormholes, fly near a black hole, visit a water-covered planet with waves the size of mountains and land on an icy planet where even the clouds are frozen. The images alone make the case for the film. Whatever a viewer thinks of the characters, the plot or the dialogue, the beauty, wonder and believability of these sequences are overwhelming, and on that front the film is a masterpiece.

The visuals land because they are anchored by Cooper’s single-minded wish to get home to his children. Time passes differently for the people left on Earth, which turns the film into a science-fiction cousin of Boyhood. Murph and her brother grow up, and are played as adults by Jessica Chastain and Casey Affleck. Chastain has the larger part, and she carries the heartbreak of a child who feels abandoned and betrayed by a father who may never come back after an absence of twenty years or more. Their relationship is complex and becomes more so as the story proceeds.

Where Interstellar overstays

The problem is in the final act. The film often feels as though it does not know where to end. Several scenes in the last stretch would have been satisfying endpoints, and what follows is not terrible, but it seems to exist to answer every remaining question and tie up every loose end. Some viewers will appreciate that. For a film this operatic and mystical, leaving something to the imagination would have made a stronger impression.

Interstellar verdict: see it big

It is a hard film to rank, and the answer to whether the Interstellar November 7 opening was worth a ticket is yes. It did not make this reviewer want to sing its praises from the rooftops, and yet the recommendation is strong. Interstellar is an experience, and the right way to have it is in the best theater, on the biggest screen, with the biggest crowd available. Watching it on a phone or a laptop is a thought that makes a viewer wince. The film is a movie in the largest sense of the word, and it was made to be seen that way.

The Interstellar November 7 date matters mostly because it marks the point when the film left the theaters equipped to show it on film and reached everyone else. The experience differs between those two groups, and the film is built for the first.

The script is not perfect, and the running time is much longer than the material needs. Even so, it made space feel marvelous again in a way that has not happened since childhood, and sometimes that is all a movie needs to do.

Sources

• Interstellar (film), Wikipedia — cast and crew, release dates and production