Interstellar

Released:  November 7^th, 2014

Rated:  PG-13

Studio:  Paramount Pictures

Starring:  Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Michael Caine

Directed by:  Christopher Nolan         

Written by:  Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan

Personal Bias Alert:  likes the Nolan brothers, not a big McConaughey fan

7 of 10

            I tried to avoid hearing about Interstellar, but with the amount of times I go to theaters, seeing the trailer was almost inevitable.  Watching it took me on a bad roller coaster ride, with the good (an intriguing Michael Caine voiceover, excellent visuals, and the ever-steady Jessica Chastain) alternating with the bad (an overwritten line and references to the vague but mighty power of love), causing emotional whiplash between excitement and apprehension.  Still, I showed up for the first possible screening, an IMAX 70mm showing at 8pm Tuesday.  This is Nolan, after all, a director with a proven track record of making intelligent entertainment pieces.

            It would be easy to go on and on about what Interstellar isn’t.  It isn’t a perfect blend of smarts and spectacle.  It isn’t Nolan’s masterpiece.  It isn’t enough to carry him to Oscar glory.  But framing a review like that misses everything that Interstellar is:  an ambitious, messy, and at times wonderful piece of work.

            Matthew McConaughey stars as a single father recruited by NASA to pilot a small expedition that must travel through a wormhole and skirt the edges of black holes to save humanity.  You see, Earth is no longer able to support human life, so a new, hospitable planet must be found in a hurry.  McConaughey’s Coop is reticent to leave his children, a plot point that feels natural thanks to the time the Nolan brothers take to establish the family’s relationships at the beginning of the film.  Too often this sort of plot point is taken for granted, and the audience is expected to accept the parent’s tormented when we’ve only seen the entire family together for one or two scenes.  It’s not that we’re monsters; we understand intellectually the bond between parents and children, but it’s much more resonant if we’re allowed to see that bond play out.

            This early portion of the film also allows us to see just how bad it’s gotten on Earth.  I’ve long considered the American dust bowl the most terrifying time I’ve ever heard of, and Interstellar is clearly lifting from this time period’s problems.  There’s crop failure, dust storms, and economic hardships.  It’s the dust storm that give us the film’s first grand visual, and it’s truly a wonder to behold.  This and later sequences of space and foreign planets are high points of the film, impeccable to look at and lingered on just long enough to instill a sense of wonder.  If the film could have maintained the early part’s balance between story, character, and spectacle, this could have gone down as Nolan’s masterpiece.

            But Coop and company must leave Earth, after which the nuts and bolts of complex space travel and Nolan’s insistence on big action sequences take over.  Not enough time is dedicated to characters or emotional arcs, and these aspects remain largely stagnant until the very end of the film.  It’s really a failure of setup.  Only four people go on the mission:  the fully realized Coop, the erratic and hyperbolic Brand (Anne Hathaway), and two other men who have no character traits I can remember.  Sticking your main character in a situation like that leaves little room for meaningful interactions and leads to the stagnation and eventual regression of character that Coop undergoes.

            Then you get the failure of the actual story.  I won’t get into spoilery details, so let’s just say that it doesn’t make sense.  There’s a troublesome ontological paradox (look it up) and an ending that unsuccessfully tries to land the emotional arcs that the film had dropped during its long middle section.  There’s few ways to leave the audience less satisfied than to muck up the ending both intellectually and emotionally.

            Even with a bad ending and a lackluster middle section, there’s more than enough here to make this a good movie.   That early portion is almost flawless, and the spectacle of experiencing the film in theaters shouldn’t be missed.  The bar for this film was simply set too high by audiences and the Nolan brothers alike.  They bit off more than they could chew, and we saw the potential for what this could be and expected them to pull it off.  Interstellar is a lesser film than we all wanted it to be, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad.

            Other Notes:

Ø  This is paced very much like other Nolan films.  There’s the steadily building tension interspersed with big action sequences, but it lacks a true climax.

Ø  Once characters start talking about love transcending time and space, I check out.

Ø  McConaughey feels like a Coop.