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.
