I’ve left it a few weeks for a lot of the hype and hullabaloo surrounding Interstellar to have died down before I saw the movie. It is instructive reading the reviews on IMDb that seem to consist almost entirely of people giving it a score of 10 out of 10 (best sci fi ever) and people giving it 1 out of 10 (a complete borefest / the science makes no sense). I can’t help feeling that a lot of those people had made their minds up before even seeing the film, whether they are Christopher Nolan fanboys at one end of the scale, or haters of anything big / popular at the other.
I think the truth, as is often the case, lies somewhere in between. It is certainly an ambitious, epic (at 169 minutes) film, and for the first couple of hours, it was largely engaging. It is set at a unnamed date in the future where a large part of the world’s population has been wiped by starvation caused by a crop “blight”. Matthew McConaughey stars as Cooper, an ex-engineer and NASA pilot who, like most of the rest of the population, has become a farmer. After his daughter receives some strange messages from what she thinks is a ghost, he ends up stumbling upon a secret installation which just so happens to house a NASA plan to search for other liveable planets. Cooper is persuaded to pilot a mission and save the world…
Written down that all sounds pretty far fetched, but thanks to Nolan and his screenwriting partner brother Jonathan, as well as believable performances from McConaughey and Michael Caine, the build up to the mission has a pleasing 1970s feel and I was totally immersed in the plot. The take-off itself is one of two outstanding set pieces powered by arguably Hans Zimmer’s best ever score, and the practical effects used throughout the scenes of the mission are very pleasing.
The next third of the film, involving Cooper and his crew searching for a suitable planet is pretty good, though it is probably in that part that this extremely long film could have had some minutes trimmed. It does culminate in the second, and best, of the set pieces as Cooper struggles to dock his craft with a damaged space station. Truly breathtaking stuff best seen on the biggest screen if possible.
Shortly after there is a moment of sacrifice which would have probably had more impact was it not very similar to a scene in the film Gravity last year. Unfortunately, it is from that point that the film goes badly off the rails. Mixing confusing science, a touch of the supernatural and a lot of sentimentality the last half hour is a real slog. I imagine that after the success of the Batman movies, Nolan was able to do pretty much what he wanted, and it is in this part that he could have done with someone reining him in.
Undeniably a spectacle that I would urge you to see in a cinema, as a lot of its impact will be lost on a small screen, this is nowhere the masterpiece that some have claimed.
Rating: 7 out of 10