Interstellar

Whether he’s making superhero movies or blockbuster puzzle boxes, Christopher Nolan doesn’t bandy with emotion. He’s an intellectual clinician concerned more with the whiz-bang side of filmmaking than in messy, icky sentimentality. We buy tickets to his movies in the pursuit of wonder because that’s his trade, much like we visit a mechanic to replace a transmission or go to a dentist for a root canal. But we generally don’t expect our mechanics and dentists to wax poetic about the human condition, and we definitely don’t expect Nolan to get all maudlin and mushy on us. The guy makes movies that are about as warm as an Eskimo’s ass. The very notion of him examining matters of the heart is almost comical.
But that’s Interstellar in a nutshell; it’s Nolan’s barely sub-three hour ode to the interconnecting power of love. It’s also his personal attempt at doing in 2014 what Stanley Kubrick did in 1968 with 2001: A Space Odyssey, less of an ode or homage than a challenge to Kubrick’s highly polarizing contribution to cinematic canon. (Maybe the wildly varied response to Interstellar to date suggests that it’s a new sci-fi classic in the making.) Amazingly, though, Nolan’s work runs on a surplus of feeling in comparison to Kubrick’s far cooler approach to 2001. Interstellar wants to uplift us with its visceral strengths, weaving a myth about the great American spirit of invention gone dormant. It’s an ambitious paean to ambition itself.
The film begins in a not-too-distant future, where drought, blight and dust storms have battered the world down into a regressively agrarian society. Textbooks cite the Apollo missions as hoaxes, and children are groomed to be farmers rather than engineers. This is a world where hope is dead, where spaceships sit on shelves collecting dust, and which former NASA pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) bristles against. He’s long resigned to his fate but still despondent over mankind’s failure to think beyond its galactic borders. But then Cooper falls in with a troop of underground NASA scientists, led by Professor Brand (Michael Caine), who plan on sending a small team through a wormhole to explore three potentially habitable planets and ostensibly secure the human race’s continued survival. With little thought and less prodding, Cooper joins the mission and Brand’s crew, which includes Brand’s biologist daughter Amelia (Anne Hathaway), physicist Romilly (David Gyasi), geographer Doyle (Wes Bentley), and two AI robots voiced by Bill Irwin and Josh Stewart.