There's a ghost in this film, writing out messages to the While "Interstellar" never entirely commits to the idea of a non-rational, uncanny world, it nevertheless has a mystical strain, one that's unusually pronounced for a director whose storytelling has the right-brained sensibility of an engineer, logician, or accountant. (“Pray you never learn just how good it can be to see another face,” another astronaut says, after years alone in an interstellar wilderness.) Treats the star voyagers’ and their earthbound loved ones’ separation as spectacular metaphors for what happens when the people we value are taken from us by death, illness, or unbridgeable distance. Spectacular rationalism of “2001." The movie's science fiction trappings are just a wrapping for a spiritual/emotional dream about basic human desires (for home, for family, forĬontinuity of bloodline and culture), as well as for a horror film of sorts-one that ("We love people who have died-what's the social utility in that?" "Accident is the first step in evolution.") After aĬertain point it sinks in, or should sink in, that Nolan and hisĬo-screenwriter, brother Jonathan Nolan, aren’t trying to one-up the The state-of-the-art sci-fi landscapes are deployed in service of HallmarkĬard homilies about how people should live, and what’s really important. ( Ellen Burstyn plays one of many witnesses in a documentary first glimpsed in the movie's opening scene-and which, in classic Nolan style, is a setup for at least two twists.) Granted, they're growing the crop to feed the human race, which is whiling away its twilight hours on a planet so ecologically devastated that at first you mistake it for the American Dust Bowl circa 1930 or so but there's still something amusingly cheeky about the notion of corn as sustenance, especially in a survival story in which the future of humanity is at stake. Other characters-including Amelia's father, an astrophysicist played by Michael Caine, and a space explorer (played by an un-billed guest actor) who’s holed up on a forbiddingĪrctic world-express a vulnerability to loneliness andĭoubt that’s quite raw for this director. The film’s central family (headed by Cooper, grounded after the dismantling of NASA) lives on a corn farm, for goodness’ sake, like the gentle Iowans in " Field of Dreams" (a film whose daddy-issues-laden story syncs up nicely with the narrative of " Interstellar"). That defines them: their loved ones, their personal histories, their culture, Sent to a black hole near Jupiter that will slingshot the heroes towards colonize-able worlds, they’re separated from everything On the waterworks in multiple scenes, with justification: like everyone on the McConaughey’s widowed astronaut Cooper and his colleague Amelia Brand ( Anne Hathaway) pour In which so many major characters wept openly in close-up, voices breaking, tears streaming down their cheeks. In any case, t here’s something pure and powerful about this movie. IĬan’t recall a science fiction film hard-sold to a director’s fans as multiplex-“awesome” Irritating will depend on your affinity for Nolan's style. Whether you find those things endearing or (they could apply to any Nolan picture post "Batmanīegins" he is who he is) so that people know that he’s still doing the I’ve packed the first paragraph of this review with those objections Overwhelmed me to the point where my usual objections to Nolan's work meltedĪway. Impressive, at times astonishing movie that
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