Movie Review: ‘Interstellar’ (2014) - ‘In Search of a New Beginning for the Human Race’


Source - Reely Bernie

Introduction

Movie’s Name - Interstellar (2014)

Release date - 7 November 2014 (India)


Director - Christopher Nolan


Box office - 70.18 crores USD


Genre - Sci-Fi, Adventure, Epic, Mystery, Drama


Cast - Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Bill Irwin, Ellen Burstyn, Michael Caine

Synopsis - Spoiler Alert!

Earth’s environment is crippled in the not-too-distant future. A dwindling food supply due to crop pestilence means that mankind will soon be doomed. It is up to a group of intrepid astronauts to navigate galaxies via a wormhole near the rings of Saturn, to locate a new home for humanity

About the Movie

Christopher Nolan’s "Interstellar," about astronauts traveling to the other end of the galaxy to find a new home to replace humanity’s despoiled home-world, is frantically busy and ear splittingly loud. It uses booming music to jack up the excitement level of scenes that might not otherwise excite. 

It features characters shoveling exposition at each other for almost three hours, and a few of those characters have no character to speak of: they’re mouthpieces for techno-babble and philosophical debate. 

More often it illustrates the screenplay, and there are points in this one where I felt as if I was watching the most expensive NBC pilot ever made.And yet “Interstellar” is still an impressive, at times astonishing movie that overwhelmed me to the point where my usual objections to Nolan’s work melted away. 

I’ve packed the first paragraph of this review with those objections (they could apply to any Nolan picture post “Batman Begins”; he is who he is) so that people know that he’s still doing the things that Nolan always does. Whether you find those things endearing or irritating will depend on your affinity for Nolan’s style.

With the endless pints of physics chased by shots of moral philosophy, Interstellar can at times feel like a three-year undergraduate course crammed into a three-hour movie. Or, to put it another way, what dinner and a movie with Professor Brian Cox might feel like. 

The final act compounds the issue, descending into a morass of tesseracts, five-dimensional space and gravitational telephony. It’s a dizzying leap from the grounded to the brain-bending that will baffle as many viewers as it inspires.

More than the monolithic robot and his sarcastic, HAL-nodding asides (“I’ll blow you out of the airlock!”). It's the psychedelic, transcendental climax that feels most indebted to Kubrick’s 2001; something that will undoubtedly prompt some to accuse Nolan of disappearing up his own black hole.

Personal Verdict

Inception posed questions without clear answers. Interstellar provides all the answers — you just might not understand the question. This is Nolan at his highest-functioning but also his least accessible; a film that eschews conflict for exploration, action for meditation and reflection.

This isn’t the outer to Inception’s inner space (his dreams-within-dreams are airy popcorn-fodder by comparison), but it does wear its smarts just as proudly. 

Yet for the first time, here Nolan opens his heart as well as his mind. Never a comfortably emotional filmmaker, here he demonstrates a depth of feeling not present in his earlier work. It’s no coincidence that the film’s shooting pseudonym was Flora’s Letter, after Nolan’s own daughter. 

The first of many direct homages to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is the jump-cut from where he drives away from home, face filling the frame in the car, to the same face now clad in space helmet and taking off in a rocket set for interstellar overdrive in space. 

It was Cooper’s old boss Dr Brand (Caine) who convinced him (admittedly, without much effort) to make the perilous-but-promising journey navigating singularities and stars along with scientists Doyle (Bentley), Romilly (Gyasi), Brand’s charismatic daughter Amelia (Hathaway) and a helpful robot named TARS (Irwin) on their journey millions of light years from home and hearth.

Apart from the planned objectives, they have no idea what to expect. And it is this process of discovery that is magnificent, complex and a true testament to Nolan’s visionary genius. McConaughey is brilliant but Hathaway is a little unconvincing. 

The Bottom Line

Interstellar is a missive from father to child; a wish to re-instill the wonder of the heavens in a generation for whom the only space is cyber. Anchored in the bottomless depths of paternal love, it’s a story about feeling as much as thinking.

And if the emotional core is clumsily articulated at times (Brand’s “love transcends space and time” monologue being the worst offender), it’s no less powerful for it.

The terminologies and mathematical formulae might confound some, but you will nonetheless be dazzled. Subtexts abound: the individual vs. the good of mankind, love’s overarching influence over time and space and so on.

Hans Zimmer’s score swells like the tides throughout; ebbing, flowing and speaking a separate sonic language. This intergalactic extravaganza is clearly in a class by itself.

My ratings for the movie - 4.5 on 5

You may watch the movie on - Amazon Prime Video

Written By - Resmita Barai

Edited By - Umme-Aiman