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| Directed by Christopher Nolan Written by Johnathan Nolan |
This, my readers, is the big one. There were definitely other movies I was looking forward to seeing this year for various reasons. Noah to find out if applying the trappings of mythic fantasy to scripture was a valid approach (kind of, depending on perspective), Lucy to see what a 21st' century take on the ideas and themes of The Matrix would look like (we didn't get that), The Fault In Our Stars to see whether the work of John Green adapted to the silver screen (it does), but no film's marketing campaign attracted my attention quite like that of Interstellar.
It started long before any real footage was available. When I saw that first teaser, the one that was mostly Matthew McCaughnahey giving a speech over stock footage of NASA missions, it stuck in my mind more than anything else I could think of. I still have that speech memorized, and knew that I would have to see this, even before I started taking this site very seriously. I even sought out and purchased tickets to an advance screening on 70 mm film.
It's forty-odd years in the future, an incredibly virulent disease and environmental collapse are killing all of our crops and livestock, creating a worldwide Dust Bowl effect and slowly killing the planet. Our focus is on Matthew McCaughnahey as Cooper, a retired pilot and engineer that deeply resents the steps mankind has taken to make what time we have left livable. Coop, like me, is a bit of a space nut, and he is furious that those aforementioned steps included scrapping any sort of scientific experimentation or exploration, to the point that schools teach children that the Moon landings were faked to fool the Soviets into spending money on "rockets and other useless machines".
One night, during one of the all too frequent storms, Coop discovers mysterious phenomenon occurring in his young daughter Murph's bedroom, which lead him to the remains of NASA, literally forced underground when public opinion turned vehemently against "spending money on space exploration when people are struggling to get food on their plates". They've found a couple of things. 1) the virus killing all our food is making the atmosphere un-breathable, and 2) a wormhole out near Saturn that could lead to habitable new homes for humanity.
Coop signs up to fly the spaceship, and most of the movie is spent on that journey to see what's on the other side, and that's where Interstellar, well, shines brightest. The creative team, including theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, has done a good job sticking as closely to hard science as a story about rocketing off through mysterious portals to unexplored alien worlds can. Depicting wormholes, black holes, and even higher spatial dimensions as close to what we imagine they would work and look like. He even makes relativity of time into a plot point, setting a scene on a planet where the higher gravity means that hours there are years in Earth time.
They also do a really good job establishing a feeling of scarcity, both on Earth, which drips with constant Depression working class misery, and out in space, where that scarcity is lack of other humans. Matt does a wonderful job expressing that, perfectly encapsulating the feeling of being unimaginably far from everything and everyone that he's ever known or cared about. Of course, it isn't a one man show, Anne Hathaway and David Gyasi as fellow astronauts play off each other really well, Bill Irwin as the ship's automated assistant TARS comes off as consistently amusing, and only sometimes feels like a relic of when this was going to be a Steven Spielberg movie.
Unfortunately, that aforementioned feeling of isolation keeps being interrupted when we cut back to Earth during Act 3, where we see Jessica Chastain as a grown up Murph working for the secret NASA enclave. Oh, don't get me wrong, she's great in the part, but if Coop gains audience sympathy because of how alone he feels, and how uncertain he is of whether there are any people left on Earth left to save, that is undermined when we see that there are in fact people left that are still trying to save themselves, and the climax dealing with concepts of love as a quantifiable force that reaches across dimensions, while executed competently, have more than a little dissonance between the script written for master of heart string pulling Spielberg, and Nolan's much more stoic cinematic sensibilities.
That being said, Interstellar is still an impressive feat. An ambitious project in a year full of ambitious projects, it is a compelling hard SF drama paired with a stunning 70 mm IMAX show reel of fantastic cinematography. All paired to a pounding, tension building Hans Zimmer score, although there appear to have been some sound engineering issues since that score occasionally drowns out dialogue. Anyways, I think it's a damn good movie, it's almost certainly ending up on my best of the year list, and I'd recommend seeing it.
Have a nice day.
Greg.B
It's forty-odd years in the future, an incredibly virulent disease and environmental collapse are killing all of our crops and livestock, creating a worldwide Dust Bowl effect and slowly killing the planet. Our focus is on Matthew McCaughnahey as Cooper, a retired pilot and engineer that deeply resents the steps mankind has taken to make what time we have left livable. Coop, like me, is a bit of a space nut, and he is furious that those aforementioned steps included scrapping any sort of scientific experimentation or exploration, to the point that schools teach children that the Moon landings were faked to fool the Soviets into spending money on "rockets and other useless machines".
One night, during one of the all too frequent storms, Coop discovers mysterious phenomenon occurring in his young daughter Murph's bedroom, which lead him to the remains of NASA, literally forced underground when public opinion turned vehemently against "spending money on space exploration when people are struggling to get food on their plates". They've found a couple of things. 1) the virus killing all our food is making the atmosphere un-breathable, and 2) a wormhole out near Saturn that could lead to habitable new homes for humanity.
Coop signs up to fly the spaceship, and most of the movie is spent on that journey to see what's on the other side, and that's where Interstellar, well, shines brightest. The creative team, including theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, has done a good job sticking as closely to hard science as a story about rocketing off through mysterious portals to unexplored alien worlds can. Depicting wormholes, black holes, and even higher spatial dimensions as close to what we imagine they would work and look like. He even makes relativity of time into a plot point, setting a scene on a planet where the higher gravity means that hours there are years in Earth time.
They also do a really good job establishing a feeling of scarcity, both on Earth, which drips with constant Depression working class misery, and out in space, where that scarcity is lack of other humans. Matt does a wonderful job expressing that, perfectly encapsulating the feeling of being unimaginably far from everything and everyone that he's ever known or cared about. Of course, it isn't a one man show, Anne Hathaway and David Gyasi as fellow astronauts play off each other really well, Bill Irwin as the ship's automated assistant TARS comes off as consistently amusing, and only sometimes feels like a relic of when this was going to be a Steven Spielberg movie.
Unfortunately, that aforementioned feeling of isolation keeps being interrupted when we cut back to Earth during Act 3, where we see Jessica Chastain as a grown up Murph working for the secret NASA enclave. Oh, don't get me wrong, she's great in the part, but if Coop gains audience sympathy because of how alone he feels, and how uncertain he is of whether there are any people left on Earth left to save, that is undermined when we see that there are in fact people left that are still trying to save themselves, and the climax dealing with concepts of love as a quantifiable force that reaches across dimensions, while executed competently, have more than a little dissonance between the script written for master of heart string pulling Spielberg, and Nolan's much more stoic cinematic sensibilities.
That being said, Interstellar is still an impressive feat. An ambitious project in a year full of ambitious projects, it is a compelling hard SF drama paired with a stunning 70 mm IMAX show reel of fantastic cinematography. All paired to a pounding, tension building Hans Zimmer score, although there appear to have been some sound engineering issues since that score occasionally drowns out dialogue. Anyways, I think it's a damn good movie, it's almost certainly ending up on my best of the year list, and I'd recommend seeing it.
Have a nice day.
Greg.B
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