It's a visual and thematic delight flawed only by big-time daddy issues.
Interstellar
Grade: B+
Director: Christopher Nolan (Dark Knight)
Screenplay: Nolan, Jonathan Nolan (The Prestige)
Cast: Matthew McConaughey (Dallas Buyer’s Club), Anne Hathaway (Les Miserables)
Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 169 min.
by John DeSando
“This world's a treasure, but it's been telling us to leave for a while now.” Cooper (Matthew McConaughey)
Knowing that famed physicist Kip Thorne worked closely with famed brainy director Christopher Nolan, I was prepared for what I got: a scientifically full plate of theories that sound right for worm holes and time warp and a dramatically-charged space opera with enough head-scratching psychology to please the most discerning geeks.
As for the rest of us, it’s damn good sci-fi peopled with top actors and enough time to flesh out the characters and explain the science. The angst that haunts pilot Cooper, a former ace NASA pilot, is leaving his daughter, Murph (Mackenzie Foy), to travel to a new galaxy on the other side of a worm hole. But it has too much of this emotional torture. Enough father-daughter, please.
The set up with Coop farming and enjoying his daughter in an increasingly new Dust Bowl world is a long 40 minutes before he blasts off. Once in space, the action picks up with a science officer, Brand (Anne Hathaway). and a robot TARS, lacking the smoothness of 2001’s Hal but smarter with a surprisingly agile body, given it looks like the monolith from that classic film. Finally for my complaints, it is annoying to endure many of the women in the film having emotional/anger problems that get in the way of the science and developing some of the other minor characters.
Yet the visual effects by cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema (Her) and a superb VE team with jaw-dropping galactic imagery never get in the way of the science. Only now and then does Hans Zimmer’s bombastic organ music detract from the plot. These are small carps about an otherwise impressive achievement in storytelling.
Surprising a film so heavily laden with gravity, relativity, and the bending of time can engage the audience for so long with mostly human, earthbound shenanigans such as long-lost loves, bad guys, and declining fuel supply, to mention just a few. Science and math are the keys to survival, a point not lost on anyone in the audience.
Director Christopher Nolan is no freshman devising intricate stories to challenge even the science nerds, who should be happy with the theories as the rest of us are with the humanity.
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.rr.com
