Or maybe it won’t be that great after all

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: 3/5

Interstellar is to Nolan what Sandinista! was to the Clash; a brilliant work interspersed amidst layers of fatuous clutter and turgid artistic pretensions.

It is a film that displays Nolan at his very best and worst: a cerebral, tense, visually stunning one-and-a-half hour space opera buried in another one-and-a half hours of pompous platitudes and mindless exposition.

It is clunky, bloated, and dissonant, yet in places undeniably breath-taking and atmospheric. Within a single scene, it will range from edge-of-the-seat exciting to dull-as-dishwater boring. It showcases Nolan’s talent for visual effects, alongside a lack of cinematographic prowess.

Interstellar is, ultimately, a collection of contradictions; with the overall impression simply an average between the very good and very bad.

The story, at its core, is a simple one. The human population is dying, ravaged by world wars and an agricultural blight. The remnants of humanity are reduced to eking out a living as farmers, working the increasingly infertile land. Starvation is all but guaranteed, and eliminating the blight is no longer possible.

Humankind’s only hope for survival rests on finding a new world to colonise. Thus four astronauts: Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), Brand (Anne Hathaway), Romilly (David Gyasi), and Doyle (Wes Bentley) must travel through a newly discovered wormhole in search of such a habitable new world.

Resources for the mission are limited, and the prospect of the returning is dependent on finding a habitable world before their fuel runs out. Should they be unable to return, they are to colonise a new world with thousands of human zygotes, leaving the population of earth behind to die.

It is an uncharacteristically straightforward plot for Nolan, and it is a good one. It is also distinctly human; much of the best material in the film comes from how the four astronauts perceive the enormity of their mission and the prospect that they may never return home.

Of course, the core concept does not justify three hours of screen-time, and thus is padded out with subplot upon subplot until the film becomes completely saturated with superfluous subject matter.

Some subplots, like Cooper’s relationship with his daughter back on earth, work excellently and drive the plot along.

Many others, however, are largely redundant and simply serve as a soapbox for Nolan as he spews New Age spiritual woo and inane technobabble. Because of this, McConaughey and Hathaway are forced to constantly juggle multiple contradictory facets of their respective roles, the end result being that neither performer can fully bring their talent to bear for any length of time.

Indeed, one of the most frustrating aspects of _Interstellar _is that it is an excellent examination of the human condition, yet it is inhabited by surprisingly insubstantial and schematic characters.

Yet, in spite of this, it is ultimately a good – at times great – film. The use of relativity and other scientific tenets as plot drivers lends it credibility as a science fiction picture, while the bleak, foreboding tension that suffuses much of the film conjures up memories of Danny Boyle’s Sunshine (and to a lesser extent, Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear).

Nolan’s realisation of a dying Earth, in contrast, is a homage to Steinbeck’s corpus of dust-bowl literature, and the juxtaposition of exotic alien worlds against a portrayal of humanity as a fading, agrarian society proves to be one of his best flourishes.

The visuals, also, are breathtakingly realised; few films (Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity is only exception that springs to mind) manage to evoke the scale and emptiness of space as well as Interstellar. All in all, it is a work that speaks volumes about the power of Nolan’s imagination as well his talent with aesthetics and a flair with the eclectic.

Ultimately, Interstellar is disappointing not because the film itself, but rather what it could have been. Had the story been more focused, the characters more fleshed out, the result would be have been a classic piece of sci-fi cinema, of a quality on par with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Yet, Nolan proves to be his own worst enemy, as he sacrifices focus and simplicity for sentimentality and pretension.

In the end, Interstellar feels like a missed opportunity.