Review: Interstellar

Time and reality have oft been bendable concepts in Christopher Nolan's films. Think of Memento, in which Guy Pearce's Leonard battles with short-term amnesia to piece together the truth of his wife's murder. Told in reverse, the film was an exhilarating exercise in the shifting sands of truth and reliability. Or The Prestige, where two rival magicians engage in an increasingly dangerous game of one-upmanship with duplicates and illusions refracting ad infinitum. Inception upped the ante with its multiple levels of dreams and realities folding into one another. Even The Dark Knight Trilogy presented differing perspectives on violence and morality via its hero and the villains he battled; more often than not, they were two sides of the same coin.

Nolan explores the relativity of time and reality on a far grander scale in Interstellar, a space opera that marries grandeur and intimacy, the cerebral and the emotional, the ridiculous and the sublime. Set in the near future, mankind has abandoned armies and advanced technology to become an agarian society. Increasingly unable to sustain itself, crops are withering and the lands are plagued with dust storms. The planet may have enough in it to last one more generation.

Survival may be in the hands of Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a former NASA pilot turned farmer, who laments, "We used to look up at the sky and wonder about our place in the stars. Now we just look down and wonder about our place in the dirt." His daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy), who believes a ghost may be communicating with her, discovers coded messages by gravitational waves shaping the dust on their floor; cracking the code leads father and daughter to the relevation that NASA is still in operation. Recruited by his former mentor Professor Brand (Michael Caine) to pilot the Endurance, he and Brand's daughter Amelia (Anne Hathaway), physicist Romilly (David Gyasi), geographer Doyle (Wes Bentley), and robots CASE and TARS (voiced by Josh Stewart and Bill Irwin) are assigned to follow the surviving probes of the Lazarus Mission. Tasked to assess potential planets for human habitation, the mission has yielded three planetary candidates which Cooper and the team must verify.

Going on the mission means leaving his children behind and Murph takes it particularly hard. Cooper promises to return but when an hour on one planet could equal decades on Earth, Cooper and his crew may not even return in time to save humankind. That is, if Cooper and his team even survive the journey with its wormholes, multi-dimensions and possibly unreliable data.

Majesty and malevolence greet the crew in equal measure. An intended drive-by to the first planet finds them knee-deep in a seemingly limitless expanse of water before scrambling to escape a towering tidal wave. The next planet, with its frozen clouds and steep icy terrain, promises hope when they find the probe's helmer in stasis. Yet this voyager has plans of his own and his scuffle with Cooper results in a stomach-churning scene that leaves our hero gasping for breath.

Interstellar is not without its flaws. More scientifically minded viewers may take issue with the actualities of the events, but this is a movie and not a documentary. Others may find certain sections, most especially the last hour, particularly hard to swallow but it actually falls in line with the logic of most of Nolan's films.

Characters are not paid equal attention. Cooper serves as Atticus Finch in this telling, so stoic and upstanding is he, and McConaughey invests the character with deep feeling and melancholy. His scenes with the wonderful Mackenzie Foy certainly recall To Kill a Mockingbird's father-daughter rapport. Murph as an adult, however, despite Jessica Chastain's attempts, is a strictly one-note character. (Casey Affleck as her grown-up brother has even less to do.) As Murph is meant to be the emotional touchstone on terra firma, her continued resentment of her father's abandonment wears thin and weakens this particular theme.

Hathaway's Amelia is another weak link - a bit unusual for Nolan and brother Jonathan, who co-wrote the screenplay, as female characters in Nolan's films more than hold their own. More intriguing is Gyasi, whose thoughtful underplaying warrants more screen time; and Irwin, who renders TARS with humour and sarcasm.

Comparisons to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey are inevitable yet there are also doses of Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind and especially Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris in Nolan's brew. There's beauty and wonder as we sight the Endurance nearing the rings of Saturn and even in the darkness of space itself. There's euphoria as Cooper strives to dock on a madly spinning docking station. There's no question of the excellence of the CGI and special effects work.

Ambitious and audacious, lyrical and looney tunes, surprising and soaring, Interstellar is a flawed masterpiece that should not be missed.

Interstellar

Directed by: Christopher Nolan

Written by: Christopher Nolan, Jonathan Nolan

Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Michael Caine, Mackenzie Foy, David Gyasi, Wes Bentley, John Lithgow, Bill Irwin, Topher Grace, Ellen Burstyn