Film Review | Interstellar

“With great power comes great responsibility,” runs the life philosophy espoused by Peter Parker/Spider-Man. Many high-calibre Hollywood directors would do well to adopt the same adage when it comes to their own work, though so few of them actually do.

Instead of focusing their newfound success to undertake risky but rewarding projects that could potentially enrich the cinematic landscape, a lot of them are content to just drift along and churn out increasingly paler versions of their former successes.

Not so Christopher Nolan.

After the British writer-producer, already slated as an heir to Hitchcock in the wake of intense high-concept suspense pieces like Memento (2000) and The Prestige (2006), undertook his Batman sequel The Dark Knight (2008), it went on to rake in over $1 billion and inspire a trend of ‘grimdark’ superhero films bearing a similar stylistic stamp.

Shooting in high-definition IMAX and staunchly refusing to submit his films to the indignity of 3D gimmicks, Nolan carefully curates full-on sensorial experiences for his viewers.

But he’s sometimes a hollow and clumsy storyteller, choosing set pieces over emotional resonance (Inception) and garbled political subtext over narrative cohesion (The Dark Knight Rises), while also never draining his films of humour – resulting in visually impressive and thematically rich blockbusters that are engaging but ultimately a bit po-faced.

Ironically, with Interstellar he fixes these problems by going bigger.

In the near future, the world is struggling with famine, with the majority of the world’s effort shifting to farming. The atmosphere has become rich in nitrogen but poor in oxygen, and soon global starvation will give way to global asphyxiation.

Former NASA pilot and widower Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) still dreams of flight, while doing his best to eke out an existence for him and his children Tom (Timothée Chalamet) and Murphy (Mackenzie Foy).

Meanwhile, physicist Professor Brand (Michael Caine) and his team, including his scientist daughter (Anne Hathaway) have two potential plans to save mankind, but only one involves saving the six billion plus people on Earth.

That Interstellar a breathtaking experience almost through and through will become evident pretty early on, but part of the reason the film breaks out of familiar blockbuster comfort zones is that Nolan takes risks, and not all of them pay off.

While its commitment to science remains admirable, a lot of it is conveyed in long talking heads scenes – which would have been less of a problem had Nolan not opted to muffle a lot of the dialogue. A claustrophobic soundscape makes sense for a space-bound epic, but it shouldn’t come at the price of coherence.

It’s not that dialogue is its forte either. Admittedly, having characters who are mouthpieces for the film’s concepts is a staple of the ‘hard science fiction’ sub-genre of which Interstellar is a shining example, but having a warm, affable actor like Jon Lithgow intone dry, world-building exposition is a bit of a let down.

Nolan’s perennial balancing act between mainstream and arthouse also leads to some awkward gear-changes, particularly as the leisurely expanding first half narrows towards a more breakneck-paced conclusion.

A thriller-laden penultimate act feels welcome after all that talk and ambling exploration, and though the final act makes good on the intellectually tangled experiments of one of the film’s most evident predecessors – Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) – it doesn’t grow out of the story naturally, and instead feels like a last minute dash to the finish line. It’s a thrown-together, accelerated chapter, so much so that it almost seems as though Nolan is rushing along to cover any mistakes… which he may very well have made for all we know, as at that point the science becomes to tangled that lay people may be tempted to just write it off with, “eeh, okay, it’s basically magic”.

But Nolan’s film could comfortably be called a masterpiece, if only because these problems – crippling structural issues in any other feature – feel like minor niggles in the grand scheme of things. And make no mistake, it is a grand scheme, arguably the grandest of all. It lacks the esoteric mystery of ‘2001’, but its valiant attempts at maintaining scientific accuracy – famed astrophysicist Kip Thorne was involved every step of the way – arguably make it a more magical experience throughout.

Just as Nolan’s Batman trilogy, at its best, used realism to inject convincing, gritty thrills to a foundation of superhero silliness, here a comparatively rigorous adherence to science lends an immersive immediacy to the (literally) outlandish adventure that frames it.

But the adventure elements – the broad-brush strokes of the story, if the science is the detail that makes it – aren’t slapdash either. Nolan had made it clear that he was inspired by old school sci-fi films of his youth, and the hunger for exploration, and the yearning hope to exploit humanity’s intellect and invention in the pursuit of survival, is culled from that heartfelt, nostalgic source. For all his reputation of being a dour merchant of joyless grit, here Nolan is taps into a disarmingly child-like sense of wonder.

A nod to Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter of Mars is a clear acknowledgement of the film’s generic history (‘Tars’, the resourceful android on board the ship, shares his name with a character from Burrghous’s boy’s own space adventure), and for all its stylistic links to the sombre ‘2001’, the dusty farmlands that give the film its starting point bring to mind not only Superman – the last filmic instalment of which Nolan produced – but also Wizard of Oz.

Frank Baum may be the artistic opposite to what Interstellar tries to do as a whole, but a nod in his direction proves that despite all his previous grit, fury and seriousness, Nolan still has a capacity for wonder and optimism.

An entrancing, uplifting experience.