Review: 'Interstellar' Is A Flawed But Massively Ambitious Space Adventure

Wesley Emblidge ‘17 / Emertainment Monthly Assitant Movies Editor

It’s an unanswerable question, but one that is posed seemingly every year: what’s better, an ambitious yet flawed movie, or one that is better made yet less bold? Looking back over the years, my love for films like Cloud Atlas and Upstream Color would suggest the former, as well as how much I like Christopher Nolan’s new film Interstellar. It’s overlong, sappy, blunt with its themes and doesn’t leave much to contemplate, but it also has no real fear of any of those things. It’s a massive film, and one that few filmmakers could pull off as well as Nolan has.
Nolan, and his brother/co-writer Jonathan, throw us somewhere in the near future that doesn’t look all that futuristic. It’s more apocalyptic than anything, but rather than war or disease the crises the world is facing here are lack of food, extreme dust storms, and other conflicts that aren’t really explained. Nolan doesn’t really have much interest in what’s happening on earth though, because Interstellar is all about leaving it behind.

Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) was a hotshot pilot before a bad crash forced him out of the game to become a farmer. Years later, as a widower with two kids (Mackenzie Foy and Timothée Chalamet), he’s led through a variety of mysterious circumstances to the secret headquarters of NASA. He’s asked to pilot the ship that will lead their mission to find a new planet for humanity to inhabit, and so after struggling with leaving his kids behind, he heads off with a crew of scientists (Anne Hathaway, Wes Bentley and David Gyasi) and a sassy robot (Bill Irwin) to try and find somewhere that his kids will be able to live a better life.
That’s where the film really kicks into gear, traveling through wormholes to new planets and grappling with the science of it all. Nolan hammers home the emotions on earth about as hard as possible, with Cooper’s daughter Murph unable to cope with her abandonment, but when they head out into the solar system Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema create some incredible imagery that shows off the massive scope and size of the universe. Composer Hans Zimmer turns in his first truly inspired work in what feels like years, and McConaughey keeps us hooked even when the film drags. When it really drags is every time the film cuts back to earth (with Cooper’s daughter now grown up and played by Jessica Chastain), a place it’s hard to care about in a film all about moving on and going forward.

Amongst all its pontificating about our place in the universe and humanity, Interstellar is ultimately just a really good adventure movie. And there’s nothing wrong with that; it feels like now every blockbuster has to be an action movie, and Interstellar barely even has one scene you could posit as an action beat. It’s certainly not Nolan’s best film (it might make the top five), but the amount of ambition and Spielbergian emotion that he conveys shows the director is growing, at least, and that we’ll surely have more great work to come from him in the future.
Overall Grade: B

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