Movie Review: “Interstellar” (Rated PG-13)
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“Interstellar” – Paramount(NEW YORK) — Christopher and Jonathan Nolan’s Interstellar may not be the space movie you asked for, but it’s the space movie you need.
Wow. Just, wow.
While I’ve been a bit down on these almost weekly post-apocalyptic movie tales, Interstellar is more about preventing an apocalypse, through technology and space exploration, than it is about life after the very bad humans destroy a relatively comfortable existence on Earth.
In this case, atmospheric conditions have rendered our soil mostly useless. The only thing we can grow is corn. Oxygen is dwindling, the world’s livestock is gone and deadly sandstorms are a common occurrence. Matthew McConaughey is a former astronaut and engineer named Cooper, haunted by dreams of a crash that seemingly ended his career, and maybe to a larger extent, hope for mankind. He’s a widower, a single father of two: a feisty tween named Murph (Mackenzie Foy) and 16-year-old Tom (Timothee Chalamet). Cooper raises the kids with help from his father-in-law, Donald (John Lithgow), a guy who does his best to keep Coop honest while helping his grandkids survive a dying world.
The heart of this story, though, is Coop’s relationship with Murph. A series of events leads the pair to discover NASA, which has officially been defunct for years, now exists underground and has been feverishly working on an ambitious plan to save humanity. The project is being led by Professor Brand (Michael Caine), Coop’s genius mentor. A wormhole’s been discovered, a bridge from our galaxy to the rest of the cosmos, and Brand and his colleagues believe humanity’s only hope is for Coop to pilot a spacecraft through it, and search for a new home.
The consequences of this desperate mission are obvious not just for humanity, but for Coop. He’s risking not only his life, but never again seeing his children, who have already lost one parent. Even if he survives, because of the theory of relativity, time will pass more slowly for Coop and his crew, meaning he could return to find his children are old enough to be his parents.
But if Coop didn’t go, we wouldn’t have a movie. He leaves Tom and Murph in a heartbreaking farewell, and we’re off into space. Coop is joined by Professor Brand’s daughter, Amelia (Anne Hathaway), Doyle (Wes Bentley), Romilly (David Gyasi), and a nifty robot named TARS that reminded me of an old-school Kodak Instamatic camera if you made it man-sized and stood it on its end.
What happens next is a stunning, nail-biting journey into space offered by two of our most imaginative filmmakers, exploring humanity’s relationship with and understanding of not just the universe, but ourselves. You can also distill this film into a story about the relationship between a father and a daughter, but it is clearly so much more than that.
A bit Stanley Kubrick, a bit Terrence Malick and all Christopher and Jonathan Nolan — Chris the writer/director and Jonathan the co-writer — the brothers deliver an utterly exquisite and completely immersive aural, visual and emotional sci-fi classic. Even so, with its complex physics, copious exposition and, at times, lack of action, Interstellar may not be for everyone. To those people I say don’t worry: there’s another Transformers movie due out in 2016. Enjoy.
Five out of five stars.
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