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Interstellar: Head-to-Head

Bahnt Frieberger
Going galactic seems to be on everybody’s minds lately. Between “Gravity,” “Guardians of the Galaxy” and the recent comet landing, space travel is coming back in a big way. It only feels right that acclaimed director Chris Nolan’s latest film “Interstellar” explores that resurging interest in all things cosmic.

Ironically enough, the main thrust of the film is how we, as a species, have lost our desire to explore the unknown. As great as landing on a comet is, how serious are we about sending a manned mission to Mars? Nolan cleverly extrapolates that to a near future, where deadly blights have destroyed the crops and turned Earth into a global Dust Bowl.

Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper is a test pilot turned farmer, desperate to provide for his son Tom and daughter Murphy. Cooper is recruited by a NASA remnant led by Professor Brand (Michael Caine) and his daughter Amelia (Anne Hathaway) to pilot a mission to the stars. For just outside the orbit of Saturn, a wormhole to another galaxy has appeared, with planets that could support human life. If humanity is to survive, they must leave Earth. Cooper jumps at the chance, even though it means leaving his family, especially Murphy, behind.

This bond between father and daughter drives the film, using emotion to break up all the big scientific ideas. For unlike most science fiction films with phasers and warp drives, this one uses actual physics to propel the plot. Physicist Kip Thorne consulted on the project, and made sure that concepts like relativity and time distortions were as realistic as possible.

It’s all very heady stuff, the kind of thing you’d see if Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking did acid together and wrote a paper on it. The basic concept is that the longer Cooper spends off-world, the more time goes by on Earth. So in the blink of an eye, little Murph grows into Jessica Chastain, while McConaughey stays the same age.

But while the ideas burn brighter than any rocket engine, the human sentiment fails to lift off. While McConaughey and Chastain give it their all, none of the other characters really register. Michael Caine shows up to quote Dylan Thomas poems, while Hathaway struggles with a message about the importance of love as a force that transcends time and space (seriously). Half the time, the most interesting character is a sarcastic robot voiced by Bill Irwin.

But in typical Nolan style, the film is gorgeous to watch. Everything from the jaw dropping galactic visuals to the Hans Zimmer score is perfection. The wormhole sequence alone is worth an IMAX trip. In many ways, this film is more ambitious than anything Nolan’s ever done, “Dark Knight” and “Inception” included. While its humanity fails to launch, as a purely cinematic experience, “Interstellar” soars.

Jaylyn Cook

If you told me five years ago that I would pay money to go see Matthew McConaughey, who was fresh off of his role in “Ghosts of Girlfriend’s Past” in 2009, I would’ve laughed in your face and told you my money was going towards seeing a “quality” film, like “Dragonball: Evolution” (which, hypothetically, would be a mistake that I would regret for the rest of my life).

But now that I’m older and my taste (along with McConaughey’s) has matured, I jumped at the chance to see Christopher Nolan’s latest sci-fi epic “Interstellar” as soon as it hit the theaters, and I can honestly tell you I was not disappointed.

While it’s not Nolan’s best work from a storytelling perspective, as that honor goes to either “The Prestige” or “Memento,” the eye-popping, awe-inspiring and engrossing depiction of space that the movie offers is alone worth the admission price.

The special effects are so detailed and realistic, it honestly looks like the filmmakers sent the cast into the depths of outer space simply for our entertainment—a process that would be both dangerous and foolish, but still pretty darn cool to see if it happened.

Along with the fantastic visuals, the cast is top notch. McConaughey made piloting a spacecraft look as easy as driving a Lincoln, while providing a solid amount of Southern charm and dramatic pathos throughout. Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain and Nolan’s bestie Michael Caine effortlessly brought the goods to the interdimensional table. Oh, and Topher Grace pops up later in the movie too. Yes, I’m just as surprised that he’s still acting as you are.

Keep in mind that “Interstellar” does have its flaws: its runtime is two hours and 49 minutes, which is understandable for any film of this size and scope. At the same time, it can be very tedious for some people.

Also, the film contains a high amount of science jargon that can be hard to follow at times. As pointed out by noted astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson (who was pretty favorable towards the scientific accuracy behind the film), no published works exist to help you understand the plot you can’t follow it, which is too bad. Luckily, we have fan theories and blog posts for that kind of thing.

Lastly, there are points throughout the movie in which Hans Zimmer’s score, as great as it is, becomes so loud and booming that it drowns out the dialogue. This has been a recurring issue for Nolan and Zimmer’s collaborations recently. I’m all for epic film scores (I brush my teeth to the “Inception” soundtrack), but there comes a time when the music needs to dial back and allow the characters to speak for themselves. Hopefully, the pair will figure that out the next time around.

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