Lost in SPACE!
Thank heavens they spent gazillions on the out-of-this-world special effects, because the plot’s so full of black holes it left our man...
‘As an example of big, bravura film-making, my goodness, it takes a lot of beating ’
Interstellar Cert: 12A 2hrs 49mins
Ivividly remember being taken to see 2001: A Space Odyssey as a boy and being dazzled by what I saw – the mysterious black monolith, the spinning space station, the psychedelic flight through the Jovian atmosphere… and, best of all, the gradual dismantling of the rogue computer, HAL. This, I firmly concluded, was how science fiction was meant to be in the cinema.
Christopher Nolan, despite not even being born when Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece was originally released, clearly feels the same. At times, his much anticipated new film, Interstellar, feels like one giant act of homage to 2001, so much so that when a wheel-shaped spacecraft begins to revolve, high in orbit above the Earth, you’re half expecting to hear the strains of Strauss’s Blue Danube.
That all said, Interstellar is far from perfect and if science fiction isn’t your thing, don’t waste your money. But as an example of big, bravura film-making, my goodness, it takes a lot of beating. You’ll almost certainly come out discussing the plot holes – indeed, my 16-year-old son and I were still happily discussing them when we got home 45 minutes later – but you’ll also be marvelling at an extraordinary cinematic spectacle. Waves hundreds of feet high, clouds of solid ice, the interior of a massive black hole… the visual-effects industry clearly hasn’t been resting on its computer-generated laurels since last year’s Gravity.
If Kubrick’s film dealt with beginnings – the appearance of the monolith kick-starts human evolution, while its reappearance on the Moon many millennia later sends mankind off into the stars – then Nolan’s film deals with endings. For as the film gets under way in a near-future where disease and drought are destroying the world’s farm crops, man’s future on Earth is looking distinctly doubtful.
But where can the human race possibly go? Space-exploration programmes have been shut down for lack of funds and, in school, it’s now official policy to teach children that the Apollo Moon landings were faked. Even gungho former space-pilots like Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) have been laid off and now run family farms in the dust-strewn Mid-West.
But why does his young daughter keep finding books that have been pushed out of the shelf, and why is she so convinced that someone is sending her a message? I don’t think it’s giving too much away that someone is about to discover a secret space programme that might just save the human race. And – surprise, surprise – the only thing they’re missing is a pilot.
McConaughey, who earlier this year won his first Oscar for his performance in Dallas Buyers
Club, has been in a rich vein of form for the past couple of years so it’s disappointing to report that in Interstellar he delivers a performance that, at least for my taste, is too macho, too slick, too much the all-American hero. It’s only once he’s surrounded by the calming and reliably classy Anne Hathaway, Matt Damon and Nolan regular Michael Caine – not to mention a visualeffects budget clearly running to gazillions – that the film achieves lift-off.
Set in a time-bending universe of wormholes and black holes where a father can say to his daughter ‘Who knows, by the time I get back we could be the same age’, this is a film that has Einstein, his theory of relativity and the immensely complex relationship between time, space and gravity at its demanding core. So it’s reassuring to find that Kip Thorne, a former professor of Theoretical Physics at CalTech, is on board as one of the film’s producers.
You have to assume therefore that Nolan – who co-writes with brother Jonathan – has got the physics right, even if there are one or two moments when common sense has you screaming the opposite. Thorne, however, can do nothing about the plot holes that emerge late on, when, in a twist that is presumably meant to explain everything, Nolan comes close to explaining nothing at all.
Moreover, the film has clearly been shot for a huge screen, something that is only partially successful. The big, outer-space bits are simply stunning, but the human bits are less effective. A tight close-up is an unforgiving thing when it makes Hathaway’s head 40ft tall.
Maybe that’s one of the reasons why, despite an ending clearly designed to tug at the heart-strings,
Interstellar fails to pack an emotional punch. Normally, such a shortcoming would have me reaching for three stars. But for sheer visual spectacle, unbridled ambition and the fact that days later I was still thinking about it, I’m scurrying off to find a fourth. Interstellar won’t be for everyone but it’s well worth grabbing a male teenage relative and giving it a go.