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| Interstellar review: McConaughey v the whole wide world | |
| (about 17 hours later) | |
| The moon and the planets are there, likewise new hopes for knowledge and peace. JFK would doubtless approve of Christopher Nolan’s grand space opera, Interstellar – well, the subject matter, at least. Strident, overbearing, tangled up in plot-lines and bunged with theory, the director’s first film post-Batman rockets its way to entertainment through Nolan’s dogged force of will. | The moon and the planets are there, likewise new hopes for knowledge and peace. JFK would doubtless approve of Christopher Nolan’s grand space opera, Interstellar – well, the subject matter, at least. Strident, overbearing, tangled up in plot-lines and bunged with theory, the director’s first film post-Batman rockets its way to entertainment through Nolan’s dogged force of will. |
| Earth’s food is running out. The wheat is blighted, the okra’s out. Every able body is needed to help grow corn. Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), an engineering whiz and former flying ace, tends his farm amid worsening dust storms with the help of son, Tom (Timothée Chalamet) and daughter, Murph (Mackenzie Foy). | Earth’s food is running out. The wheat is blighted, the okra’s out. Every able body is needed to help grow corn. Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), an engineering whiz and former flying ace, tends his farm amid worsening dust storms with the help of son, Tom (Timothée Chalamet) and daughter, Murph (Mackenzie Foy). |
| Tom is happily grounded, but Murph’s like her dad: she sees patterns in chaos, knows there’s something out there that can save humanity. She’s convinced that a ghost is leaving her messages which point to a new truth all of them need to appreciate. Her hunch leads them to Lazarus, a covert operation run by what remains of Nasa, where chief scientist Professor Brand (Michael Caine) proposes sending a team, including his own daughter (Anne Hathaway) and Cooper on humanity’s last space flight – a journey through a wormhole to scope out a distant solar system for new planets to call home. | Tom is happily grounded, but Murph’s like her dad: she sees patterns in chaos, knows there’s something out there that can save humanity. She’s convinced that a ghost is leaving her messages which point to a new truth all of them need to appreciate. Her hunch leads them to Lazarus, a covert operation run by what remains of Nasa, where chief scientist Professor Brand (Michael Caine) proposes sending a team, including his own daughter (Anne Hathaway) and Cooper on humanity’s last space flight – a journey through a wormhole to scope out a distant solar system for new planets to call home. |
| Co-written by Nolan (with his brother, Jonathan) and inspired by theoretical physicist Kip Thorne’s work on traversable wormholes, Interstellar only really gets going once it’s up in the air. A tribute – occasionally a remake – of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, it saves its beauty for the cosmos and its humanity for the machines. The actors – even those of the calibre of McConaughey and Hathaway - are script-delivering modules, there to output exposition and process emotional data. The best lines, those that seem truly spontaneous and responsive, go to TARS, the crew’s AI assistant. In this world human beings are outdated software, bad code to be over-written. | Co-written by Nolan (with his brother, Jonathan) and inspired by theoretical physicist Kip Thorne’s work on traversable wormholes, Interstellar only really gets going once it’s up in the air. A tribute – occasionally a remake – of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, it saves its beauty for the cosmos and its humanity for the machines. The actors – even those of the calibre of McConaughey and Hathaway - are script-delivering modules, there to output exposition and process emotional data. The best lines, those that seem truly spontaneous and responsive, go to TARS, the crew’s AI assistant. In this world human beings are outdated software, bad code to be over-written. |
| The fear of the unknown is matched only by the threat of humanity knowing more than is good for us, but this is no Alien. There’s no sense of day-to-day existence, no capacity for individual quirk. The soundtrack thunders all over the dialogue. Michael Caine intones Dylan Thomas’s Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night across scenes of brave men and women in peril. The solemnity makes the journey hard-going and the film sporadically sways into the absurd, like a M Night Shyamalan film shackled with the responsibility of maintaining its intelligence. Not every film need address the possibility of human extinction with the gung-ho silliness of Armageddon, but at least that was a space adventure. This is a science report. | The fear of the unknown is matched only by the threat of humanity knowing more than is good for us, but this is no Alien. There’s no sense of day-to-day existence, no capacity for individual quirk. The soundtrack thunders all over the dialogue. Michael Caine intones Dylan Thomas’s Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night across scenes of brave men and women in peril. The solemnity makes the journey hard-going and the film sporadically sways into the absurd, like a M Night Shyamalan film shackled with the responsibility of maintaining its intelligence. Not every film need address the possibility of human extinction with the gung-ho silliness of Armageddon, but at least that was a space adventure. This is a science report. |
| Interstellar looks remarkable. It’s the best introduction of scientific theory into blockbuster cinema since Nolan’s state-of-consciousness thriller, Inception. Nolan never patronises his audience, yet – in thrilling at the potential of human endeavour – he often forgets them. The relationships (even the crucial one between Cooper and Murph, who is abandoned and bitter, back on earth) don’t have enough pull. The characters got lost in space. | Interstellar looks remarkable. It’s the best introduction of scientific theory into blockbuster cinema since Nolan’s state-of-consciousness thriller, Inception. Nolan never patronises his audience, yet – in thrilling at the potential of human endeavour – he often forgets them. The relationships (even the crucial one between Cooper and Murph, who is abandoned and bitter, back on earth) don’t have enough pull. The characters got lost in space. |
| The last of our species wobble on the brink of extinction. The crew, stranded in a distant solar system with time running out, debate quantum theory and the selfish gene. Outside the majesty of the galaxy sweeps by, a glorious, timeless distraction. Interstellar, a near three-hour whopper of a picture, powers through its plot holes and barrels through the corn. It’s a glorious spectacle, but a slight drama, with few characters and too-rare flashes of humour. It wants to awe us into submission, to concede our insignificance in the face of such grand-scale art. It achieves that with ease. Yet on his way to making an epic, Nolan forgot to let us have fun. | The last of our species wobble on the brink of extinction. The crew, stranded in a distant solar system with time running out, debate quantum theory and the selfish gene. Outside the majesty of the galaxy sweeps by, a glorious, timeless distraction. Interstellar, a near three-hour whopper of a picture, powers through its plot holes and barrels through the corn. It’s a glorious spectacle, but a slight drama, with few characters and too-rare flashes of humour. It wants to awe us into submission, to concede our insignificance in the face of such grand-scale art. It achieves that with ease. Yet on his way to making an epic, Nolan forgot to let us have fun. |
| Interstellar is released in the US and UK on 7 November | Interstellar is released in the US and UK on 7 November |
| • Interstellar wins celebrity raves as widest-ever IMAX rollout anticipated• Notes on an Interstellar voyage through the Oculus Rift wormhole• Christopher Nolan on Interstellar: ‘It’s about what it means to be human’• Initial reviews roundup | • Interstellar wins celebrity raves as widest-ever IMAX rollout anticipated• Notes on an Interstellar voyage through the Oculus Rift wormhole• Christopher Nolan on Interstellar: ‘It’s about what it means to be human’• Initial reviews roundup |