Mankind’s next step will be our greatest

INTERSTELLAR

Director: Christopoher Nolan

Screenplay: Christopher Nolan, Jonathan Nolan

Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Michael Caine, Jessica Chastain, John Lithgow, Casey Affleck, Ellen Burstyn, Wes Bentley

Rating: 5/5

Christopher Nolan has a back catalogue to die for. A Batman trilogy that revived a character left for dead by the film industry (and in no small part helped revive a genre that was under the threat of suffering the same fate), a mind-bending take on amnesia that deconstructed conventional film structures and one of the most incredibly original films in decades, and that’s barely scratching the surface.

And now here comes his biggest, boldest undertaking yet. And going by that list, that’s saying something.

And yet, despite all that hype – all the images of Matthew McConaughey in a spacesuit, exploring a new planet, the shots of the incredible vistas – Interstellar starts off curiously low-key. It’s focussed – intensely so – on the life of McConaughey’s Cooper, a former test pilot forced to lead a life of farming as part of the ‘caretaker generation’ of Earth: those forced to ensure the planet ticks over for the future, in the face of a vaguely referenced natural disaster that saw food stocks and sources obliterated.

Within minutes of the film’s opening, Cooper is sat in a parent-teacher conference (to borrow the American phrasing) with his children’s teachers, discussing their respective futures; his son Tom is ideally suited to becoming a farmer, while his daughter Murphy – Murphy is something else altogether.

If the concept of this, a Christopher Nolan film about space travel and wormholes and incredibly theoretical physics, opening on a parent-teacher conference sounds a little jarring – that’s most likely because it is. But it works. The early scenes are tender, involving – and the acting on display is top-notch from the start. McConaughey’s career resurgence continues unabated – perhaps reaching its peak here (if not at the start, then certainly later), while the actors playing the two children both deserve enormous quantities of credit – not least Mackenzie Foy as Murphy: an actress to watch if ever there were one.

Eventually – inevitably – the film expands in scope, and it does so somewhat rapidly once Cooper comes into contact with NASA; but it never loses that intensely human focus. Cooper’s goodbye to Murphy hurts, and the video messages sent to Cooper hurt just as much when the going gets tough.

This is a film about grand ideals, about physics that deals with concepts at the very limits of our comprehension, but it’s completely unabashedly unafraid to stick to the core of what it means to be human. It even throws in a grand speech by Anne Hathaway’s biologist Brand about ‘love’, and how it feels like it may just be another force, another dimension – like gravity, or time – that we still don’t quite understand.

Said speech on love is just one of many similar monologues – Interstellar shares Inception’s penchant for incredibly exposition-heavy dialogue, but just as there the fact that it was exposition about something inherently fascinating – and new – helped carry the film through, here Interstellar’s never-ending ambition and drive, as well as that human focus, forces it beyond the dialogue into something more.

If that comparison to Inception makes it sound like Interstellar only borrows that one aspect from its predecessor, don’t worry. The epic set-pieces are in evidence here too – if not even more so, on account of being set (variously) in space itself or on new, uncharted planets – as is a twisty-turny plot that never quite lets the audience rest back in their seats.

There’s always an underlying tension, not least the fact that, once the journey gets underway, Cooper and his fellow explorers have no idea of what they might find. And nor do we.

Interstellar does also occasionally borrow the bass-heavy tendencies of Inception’s score, at times to its detriment, but on the whole Hans Zimmer’s score is incredible, bringing in strains reminiscent of Kubrick’s 2001 while also retaining its own character. Unlike that other, more recent space-based cinematic outing (yes, Gravity),_ Interstellar _opts to allow to the score to continue over the sections set outside the shuttle environment (although the sound effects do drop out accordingly). It’s a move that initially feels slightly jarring – almost a tad inconsistent – but it soon comes to make sense, as the score becomes indispensable, and the jarring cuts in the other sounds are more than enough to achieve the necessary contrast between ‘in’ and ‘out’.

More indispensable than the score, though, is the cast. Nolan continues to attract the talent – including long-time collaborator Michael Caine – and (as ever) it pays off in spades here. As already noted, McConaughey continues to shine, but it’s really Mackenzie Foy who impresses here.

The other members of the supporting cast are universally excellent – Anne Hathaway brings her A-game to a very different role from her last outing with Nolan, while Jessica Chastain makes an immediate impression in her late-game appearance (as a character whose identity I won’t spoil here).

Another A-lister also pops up in an unexpected role, delivering a note-perfect performance in a scene that elicited horrified gasps from the audience I saw this with. Michael Caine manages to continue his trend of making me cry in a Nolan film, while the likes of Casey Affleck and John Lithgow all put in solid performances. There are no complaints here.

There are some in other areas – despite my excessive praise, Interstellar is not a perfect film (there’s no such thing) – but it comes damn close.

Some of the model-based shots are obviously of models, but in a film that manages to avoid the use of green screen so wonderfully, blending real-life sets seamlessly with computer-generated visuals (any reaction shots to the vistas were achieved by projecting them onto cloths for the actors to look at, rather than just a blank green screen), a few reasonably-but-not-perfectly realistic shots are allowable. The final stretch moves away from the realistic science and into what can only be described as “completely barmy” – but it’s so glorious it’s impossible to really care that it’s borderline nonsensical.

The sound mix’s occasional bass-heavy tendencies do threaten to drown out key dialogue, but in the end it all adds into the thrill of the experience, rather than taking away from it.

And in the end, Interstellar really is an experience. I have never been to a film in the cinema where, at the end, everyone burst into spontaneous applause, followed by fevered discussion of myriad different aspects of what they’d just watched. I’ve never been left physically shaking with adrenaline, to the degree where I can’t do anything but sit and watch the credits. I’ve never been left so utterly convinced I’ve just watched a master filmmaker deliver his finest work. The Dark Knight may well go down in history as Nolan’s masterpiece – and Inception as his greatest original work, but Interstellar is the culmination of everything he learned on those and all his other films. It is the culmination of making some of the defining films of the century, and because of that, it is utterly, utterly glorious.