Interstellar

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Interstellar is a sci fi film set in a future when Earth is ecologically unsustainable. Blighted crops are dying all over the planet and massive dust storms plague the world. Matthew McConaughey plays Cooper, an engineer and former pilot who is asked to help man a space mission through a wormhole, a kind of extra dimensional shortcut tunnel through space, in order to find habitable planets in another galaxy.

When I previewed Interstellar here a couple of weeks ago, I got a few things wrong and a few things right.

First of all, I said that Cooper had two daughters he was hesitant about leaving. He actually has a son and a daughter. The son gets few lines, little screen time, and mostly just makes you wonder why Cooper isn’t as worried about leaving him as he is about his daughter. Second, I predicted that it would take Cooper about thirty minutes to make his decision to leave his kids behind and save the world. In reality, it took almost forty five minutes. So I was a bit off there.

But I predicted a few things that I got right. Beautiful, glossy images? You bet. Director Christopher Nolan has a wonderful eye for arresting, epic imagery. Think of the city scape folding up like a game board in Inception or Tesla’s field of lights illuminating the night in The Prestige. In Interstellar, some of the most memorable images come from the new planets Cooper and his team explore – one is covered entirely by water with mountain-range sized waves, and another is so cold that the clouds above their heads are frozen glaciers.

I also predicted a plot that would make you wonder what kind of film you’re actually watching. Even though it’s a sci fi film and essentially a survival tale, the movie is actually about very big ideas. It uses real scientific practice and theory – about gravity, relativity, the possible 5^th dimentionality of time, and astrophysics to drive its story. The film explicitly asks whether or not love is an actual, measureable force in the universe. In other words, Star Wars it’s not.

In fact, at times, Interstellar walks a fine line between bring epic and being a bit too big and metaphysical for its britches. Some of the debates Cooper has with the other astronauts sound more like the screenwriters working out some of their own tripped out ethical and philosophical issues than actual dialogue.

Interstellar has allusions to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Malick’s Days of Heaven, and Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff. These are big movies that verge on myth and icon and it’s no accident that Nolan references them. His movie has the same kind of lofty grandeur.  Not coincidentally, Hans Zimmer’s score is full of holy-sounding church organs.

I also predicted an ending that would send audiences away talking about it for days. This is a Christopher Nolan specialty, so I knew this was a safe bet. Sure enough, when the final image faded to black and the credits began to roll, the woman sitting in front of me in the theater loudly said, “What?!” It’s ambiguous for sure, and you will probably either love the ending or hate it depending on how you feel about not knowing exactly how things turn out. I loved it and would like to see the movie again to savor the ambiguous possibilities of the ending a little more.

Interstellar is Oscar-bait for sure but deservedly so. It has ambition, originality, and artistry but still fits nicely in the multiplex. Look for it to be mentioned when Oscar nominations are announced in January.

This review was originally broadcast on Q90.1. Visit www.deltabroadcasting.org for more information.