Interstellar reaches for the stars
FILM
Interstellar
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Michael Caine, Casey Affleck
Review Shannon Harvey
4 stars
After eons of hype, NASA-like secrecy and several portentous trailers, Christopher Nolan's space opera blockbuster blasts off to infinity - and awards season hysteria - and beyond.
You can almost smell the rocket fumes wafting from the cinemas and sending sci-fi fans and Nolan's loyal nuts higher than Willie Nelson on the International Space Station.
Big, bold and beautiful, it is the most visually and audibly stunning film since Gravity, with the vast expanses of space, huge planets and tiny spaceships matched by Hans Zimmer's thrumming score.
Just shy of three hours, it is as epic in size and scope as Hollywood blockbusters get. Be sure to experience it on a giant screen with great sound.
Story-wise, however, Nolan reaches for the stars yet falls agonisingly short by overcooking a mismatched, mind-melting mix of science and new- age cock-a-doody.
Talk about black holes, wormholes and the warping of space and time come as thick and fast as love being the cosmic juice that binds the universe together. Pah-lease!
That's like mixing space dust with fairy dust, making Interstellar simultaneously play like an astronomer's fever dream and an astrologer's hokey horoscope. It's as brainy as it is barmy.
In an unspecified future, for unspecified reasons, Earth is prone to dust storms that choke its citizens and starve them of crops. Farmer, widower and former ace pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) raises his whip-smart daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy) with the help of his father-in-law (John Lithgow).
Cooper and Murph discover NASA's old, top-secret HQ, now headed by Cooper's old boss Professor Brand (Michael Caine) and his scientist daughter (Anne Hathaway). They're told that the Earth is dying. It's a lost cause and the only way to save it is to colonise a new planet.
Cooper leads three other astronauts (Hathaway, Wes Bentley and David Gyasi) on a mission to find an inhabitable planet, taking a wormhole near Saturn to another galaxy. Murph never forgives him for leaving.
The ship includes two talking
robots, CASE and TARS (they may have well called them HAL or R2-D2), and they're almost Interstellar's best feature.
They save the day on several occasions and bring the few moments of action and humour to the film's often sullen, deadly serious tone, with good gags about self-destruct countdowns and blowing McConaughey out the hatch.
Humour has never been Nolan's strong point, and those jokes come few and far between all the heady jargon about time warps, fifth dimensions and how McConaughey stays the same age while Murph (played later by Jessica Chastain) ages 23 years on Earth.
The mood is so dour it's as if Nolan forgot that in space, audiences like having fun. Instead, he gives his actors binary moods; welling up with tears or about to well up with tears.
Hathaway is the worst offender, bringing way too much sentiment for a steely scientist. With one of the best CVs in Hollywood, from Memento to the Dark Knight trilogy to Inception, Nolan reaches for the stars here but his reach exceeds his ambitions this time.
He gets big points for trying. Few filmmakers dare make intelligent blockbusters that encourage audiences to think, and even lesser Nolan is essential viewing. It's as if he's tried to make a modern 2001: A Space Odyssey, with homages everywhere but none of the grace, majesty or open-ended mystery of that masterpiece.
That said, Interstellar is one spectacular star trek that dares to boldly go where no film has gone before.
