With Interstellar, director Christopher Nolan has created the 2001: A Space Odyssey this generation deserves; a top-down built Masterpiece™ that attempts to merge Kubrick’s galvanising, philosophically inclined cosmic spectacle with Spielberg’s mass-appeal sentimentality. In both regards, the film comes up short, leaving the gulf between its naked ambition and actual results on display like a gaping black hole.
Like another of Nolan’s touchstone films – 1983’s The Right Stuff – this three-hour film begins with a lengthy portion on Earth, as farmer and former NASA pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) frets about the future of his children while famine ravages the planet. Mankind’s only hope lies in Michael Caine (playing Michael Caine), a physicist who unites Cooper with a team of astronauts (played by Anne Hathaway, Wes Bentley and David Gyasi) to test the (sometimes literal) waters in the farthest reaches of the galaxy for inhabitable, hospitable land, even if it means abandoning his loved ones forever.
Characters in Nolan’s films tend to be vague ciphers, who exist in a realm beyond metabolism, libido, or anything that might potentially nullify the universal resonance of the ideas they’re able to articulate so effortlessly (here, the dialogue is tin-eared as ever). This is detrimental to a film that repeatedly hammers home the importance of love, whilst only depicting it in abstracted, broad strokes; aside from one powerful scene that tests and proves McConaughey’s recently unearthed acting prowess, it’s up to Hans Zimmer’s overbearing, bowel-loosening music score to do the emotional heavy lifting, and it can’t disguise the sheer dopiness of the entire package. It’s also another of Nolan’s films in which the main character’s deceased wife is used like a trump card, and the sentient women in the film – particularly Hathaway’s conveniently irrational scientist – don’t fare much better.
Between the distracting guest star appearances, subplots and over-explanatory gasbagging, Nolan finds time for some truly spectacular interludes of interplanetary lightshow that distinguish Interstellar as his most aesthetically striking film to date, aided in no small part by the tactile cinematography of wunderkind Hoyte van Hoytema (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Her). It’s here that Interstellar excels, even as it remains Earthbound in every other regard.
2.5/5 stars
Interstellar opens in cinemas on Thursday November 6.
