INTERSTELLAR

 Reviewed by Paul and Patrick Gibbs

GRADE: A 
Matthew McConaghey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, MacKenzie Foy, Wes Bentley, Michael Caine Written by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Rated PG-13 (Violence, profanity, intensity)

        

Sometime it's hard to know whether to rate a film based on its ambitions, or how well it achieves them. Interstellar is one of the most ambitious films to come out of Hollywood this decade, a mix of cerebral sci-fi and commercial blockbuster that wants to engage the intellect and emotions equally. Even from the brilliant director Christopher Nolan (Inception, the Dark Knight trilogy) it's not a surprise that it's not 100% successful at achieving these goals. But it does manage to be a dazzling, awe-inspiring cinematic experience with some actual science (thanks to consultant Kip Thorne), and it's also dramatically moving (thanks in large part to leading man Matthew McConaughey, whose career resurgence now includes showing he can carry an epic).

McConaughey stars as Cooper, an engineer who trained as an astronaut but was forced to become a farmer when an environmental disaster called "The blight" turned Earth into a dust bowl that could barely grow anything, leaving humankind on the verge of extinction.  Cooper has a close bond with his children, especially his 10 year old daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy). When a wormhole is discovered near Saturn, Cooper is chosen to fly a mission through it to save the human race by finding inhabitable extra solar planets in another galaxy. But this means leaving his children, possibly to never return (or to return to discover that the effects of relativity have made his children older than him. The scenes of Cooper leaving his children and the emotional effect it has provide the film with its human drama, and McConaughey and Foy (and later Jessica Chastain as adult Murph) nail the emotional content of the film.

Cooper is joined on the mission most prominently by Dr. Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway), a brilliant scientist, and a really cool robot named TARS (who resembles the iconic monolith from Stanley Kubrick's 2001). The voyage of their ship, Endurance, takes them on an epic journey across space and time.

Nolan is a superb storyteller, and he achieves several moments of brilliance here, and an overall very good
film. But there's simply no way to completely tie everything he's trying to do here into quite the satisfying whole his biggest successes have been. The mix of science and sentiment, along with just some existential speculation, is somewhat tenuous and threatens to break apart at times. The third act is particularly likely to be divisive, as we're unsure whether he's trying to go for Kubrickian brainy sci-fi philosophy, Spielbergian sentiment (the film was actually originally developed as a project for Spielberg) or just "whoa, dude" head trip fare. The film never jumps completely off the rails, but it flirts with it at times, and also sometimes gets a little hard to follow (as good as it is, Hans Zimmer's booming musical score and the fact that Nolan has mixed it too loud don't help).

But through the whole thing, McCounaugey's excellent leading man turn and Nolan's formidable skills as a director manage to steer through the pitfalls of the perhaps overly ambitious material to pull us in. The supporting cast is strong, though Hathaway's character is underdeveloped and we never get a complete handle on her. TARS manages to steal the film with a likable personality and unique design. The film is visually resplendent, including a large number of sequences shot in IMAX (it's definitely worth the extra expense to see it in the large-screen format).  The space sequences are absolutely eye-popping.

Ultimately, Interstellar isn't perfect, and it's going to be a love it or hate thing for a lot of people. For us, it's a worthy addition to Nolan's filmography that deserves admiration for aiming so high, even if it can't quite nail its target.