Director: Christopher Nolan
Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Casey Affleck, Michael Caine, John Lithgow, Timothée Chalamet, Mackenzie Foy, Ellen Burstyn, and Matt Damon.
Certificate: 12
Run Time: 168 minutes
Special Features: Over 3 hours of extras and for details of them, plus the limited edition Digi-book, click here.
For me, the stamp of a great movie is how much your excitement, or self-induced hype, matches positively with the final product and in the case of INTERSTELLAR, it captures those desires with absolute assurance.
Love or dislike Nolan’s increasingly extensive films, you’ve got to accept that original work on such an expansive level to a worldwide audience is a Hollywood rarity these days. There’s definitely a growing universe of independent projects being backed by the offshoots of large movie corporations but Nolan and his brother have managed once again, like INCEPTION, to pull off one hell of an exploration of the mind and possibility.
With the backing of real theoretical Science from expert Kip Thorne, INTERSTELLAR is equally a complex spatial beast but has additionally found the niche to capture a wide audience with the basics of the storytelling, that of family and the oldest chapter in the book; love. The narrative here is, firstly, quite straight-forward and although there may be arguments about how Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper ‘finds’ things, this is a film after all.
The premise is simple; Cooper (McConaughey) is an ex-pilot who’s now a farmer because the world is running out of food and everyone is doing what he or she can to survive. It’s not a desolate planet but it works out that he must leave his family and an Earth gasping its final breaths to head out into space to find a new world for us to live on. He’s our only hope…along with some other Scientists. We learn that the last of the intelligent folk are NASA and they’re hiding underground trying to find a way to keep humanity existing and as it happens, they’ve discovered an anomaly in our solar system in the shape of a Black Hole.
This is when we meet Anne Hathaway’s Brand, Michael Caine’s Professor Brand (her Father), Doyle (Wes Bentley) and Romilly (David Gyasi). There is definitely an ensemble cast at full tilt here, and the introduction of a brilliant sarcastic robot in TARS (voiced by Bill Irwin), but the main string throughout proceedings are Cooper, his daughter Murphy and Hathaway’s Brand. McConaughey is exemplary in the lead role and a fine choice as the centre point around which everything revolves. Anne Hathaway, who once again proves her versatile nature, accompanies him and shows us she’s an impressive, convincing leading actor. Murphy is played at different points by Mackenzie Foy, Jessica Chastain and Ellen Burstyn and each of them blend effortlessly into one another, as you’d hope, and connect us between the world we know and time that’s being warped and changed out in deepest space.
The obvious part of INTERSTELLAR, that could easily be underplayed, is the sheer mind-blowing nature of what we see up there on the screen. With Wally Pfister moving onto his projects, Nolan teams up with cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema for the first time. Van Hoytema was Director of Photography for the likes of LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (2008) and TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY (2011), so we knew he could bring style and substance and there’s no change in proceedings here. The visual element throughout is striking in the highest regard, ranging between sweeping fields of corn, ice cloud planets, a re-imagined black hole in the shape of ‘Gargantua’ and the stunning sequences both on and off Earth are spectacular.
My only nag with Nolan’s work in recent years is the slightly excessive unbalanced sound levels at play. This might be a minor irk but right through his Batman trilogy, INCEPTION and again this time, the score and speech seem to flit a little too quickly between really quiet and excessively loud. This works well in many circumstances, and in fairness increases the chance of repeat viewings, but sometimes you don’t want to be looking at your fellow film-watchers asking ‘What did he say?’ But this is a minor indiscretion and a slight disservice to Hans Zimmer’s inspired score that moulds into the world it surrounds perfectly.
It’s not often you can, or want to, talk about a movie endlessly for hours and I’m concerned when a review could easily turn into an essay but the Nolan brothers have come up with the goods once again. INTERSTELLAR is a mind-blowing, expansive, exciting exploration of deep space and our humanity. It’s another world out there and this will help you explore it intensely, imaginatively and with true heart.
[usr=5] INTERSTELLAR is available on Blu-ray and DVD from 30th March. Order here.
