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| "That's what I love about these time dilations, man. Murph gets older, I stay the same age..." |
THE GOOD
- Acting: The cast is tremendous, as you would probably expect them to be. Matthew McConaughey already completed his career resurrection earlier this year with the one-two punch of his Oscar win and TRUE DETECTIVE, so this is essentially a victory lap for him. He infuses Cooper, our protagonist, with all of the familial charm and emotion that he can muster, and is perfectly cast. Anne Hathaway does the best that she can with a somewhat underwritten role, selling us on Brand's abruptly introduced romantic interest in one of the earlier astronauts. Jessica Chastain is as good as usual as the adult Murph, but Mackenzie Foy may have her beat as the child form (while also appearing to have been sent from the fifth dimension in order to perfectly represent little Chastain). Michael Caine is Michael Caine in a Christopher Nolan movie, as per usual, even if his constant repetition of a certain Dylan Thomas poem can get a little repetitive at times. The rest of the cast mostly delivers as well, with Wes Bentley, Casey Affleck, Topher Grace, John Lithgow, and especially Bill Irwin as the voice of TARS, with one weak link exception that I will get to later.
- Visuals/Direction: INTERSTELLAR is not shy about aiming for the grandeur of space travel and all of the hope and fear that it represents, and Nolan delivers this angle on every level. This is a movie that demands to be seen in IMAX, as you feel like you'll be falling through black holes, wormholes, and dimensions at every turn. The alien planets, while somewhat monochromatic in appearance, also dazzle, with the ice cloud planet and the space station almost feeling like companion pieces to the dream warping scenes in INCEPTION. The movie also has a few mind-blowing setpieces, with a manual ride onto the hatch of the Endurance being the highlight of the movie. The entire theater I was in burst into applause as Coop piloted the craft through a perilous situation. TARS is also one of the coolest movie robots in a while, as he's funny, soulful, and exceedingly well-designed.
- World Building: While the aforementioned flight sequence was the movie's best scene, the movie's best act is its first. The brothers Nolan succeed as bringing us to a terrifyingly plausible future, one where the New York Yankees play baseball on an elementary school diamond (the most Spielbergian moment in a movie once meant as a Spielberg project), where the Apollo moon landings are historically retconned as being faked, where the majority of the world's population are farmers, where corn is the only viable food crop left, where dust storms plague the remnants of humanity and do lethal damage to childrens' lungs, and where there is only a generation left before the world will starve and then suffocate. The Nolans never let us forget what is at stake should Coop and crew fail their mission, and the sadness of the Earth they leave behind is all set up in the first forty minutes.
- Ambition: As you may have already gathered from the earlier points, this is a film of towering ambition. It aims very high and, like NOAH earlier this year, is a big-budget spectacle that demands that the audience turn their brain on. It doesn't reach as high as that aforementioned movie, but it reaches much higher than many movies of its ilk would ever dream of doing. Kudos to Paramount for getting involved in two such high-aiming projects (it ALMOST makes up for TRANS4MERS)
- Score: Hands down the single best thing about the movie. Hans Zimmer finally moves away from the sounds that have defined his recent career (his Batman scores, MAN OF STEEL, INCEPTION), and comes up with a new, fitting, and incredibly epic sound that perfectly fit with the movie. It's probably my favorite Zimmer score of all time, and is worth the price of admission alone.
THE BAD
- Exposition: Christopher Nolan movies have always had difficulty with the delivery of expository dialogue, and INTERSTELLAR may be the most problematic of them all in this particular regard. Characters spit explanations at each other constantly, plot developments (Brand being in love with one of the earlier astronauts) are introduced willy-nilly, and most damningly, the exposition in some scenes (particularly as we near the ending) end up over-explaining, dampening the ability to have an emotional response to scenes designed to deliver such a reaction, as well as completely removing any degree of interpretation or mystery. At times, the third act feels as if it was 2001, only with a compulsive need to explain the exact nature of the Star child, how the bedroom came into being, and who exactly sent the monolith. INCEPTION managed to make its rapid speed of plot development into a strength. Not so much luck here.
- Matt Damon: Some may disagree with me on this, but I found Damon being cast as the "antagonist" astronaut, Dr. Mann, to be distracting to an alarming degree. I get that the goal was to have Damon's presence help sell Mann as the legendary space explorer he was built up to be, but it in turn made in difficult to buy Mann's descent into cowardice (though I liked it on the level that Damon is famous for doing a McConaughey impresssion). Damon's a great actor whose work I very much enjoy, but he was simply misused here.
- The Third Act: On one level, the third act was absolutely spectacular, a visually stunning sequence that channels Kubrick in every way. However, it also asks that the viewer be very invested in the goings-on, something that is somewhat difficult to do when we've never really gotten a chance to know Coop or Murph as people. Cooper's only defining attributes are that he loves Murph and was an ex-pilot, and Murph's only defining attributes are a keen intellect and a resentment of her father's departure. It tries to sell Cooper's paternal love as an eternal, quantifiable matter that brings Coop's fifth-dimensional message through time to save the Earth, but it never quite got me. Also, it sort of simplifies a complex movie down to a simple "love conquers all" result. Not a bad sentiment, but not particularly intellectually stimulating either. And again, TARS' exposition means that not an iota is left to interpretation.
THE VERDICT
INTERSTELLAR is a movie that is at times beautiful, emotional, and visually exhilarating. But it just as often limps and plods through long pages of exposition and rather obvious thematic conclusions. It's a handsomely made movie, one that demands to be seen on the biggest screen possible, and one that I will recommend wholeheartedly. However, be warned that your mileage may vary. People talked up THE DARK KNIGHT RISES as being polarizing; however, I feel that in the long run, the anomaly of Nolan's career may indeed be INTERSTELLAR.
I'm going to refrain from giving the movie a grade on this one. It's just too difficult to gauge in such a way.
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