Interstellar
Director: Christopher Nolan
Talent: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Matt Damon
Release Date: 7th November 2014
Christopher Nolan’s ambitious Interstellar squints skywards and voyages from micro to macro to examine love and loss, and the interdependency of human beings as they reach across and stretch between generations of time and dimensions of space. Earth’s pastoral landscape grows barren and blighted, and engineer and founding-father Cooper (a withered, wiry McConaughey) travels through a chiasmus of twinned, parallel timelines to find a place and proportion for man in humanity’s malleable future. Nolan’s existential and sentimental humanism hits home, and Interstellar is ultimately more effective at stirring hearts than stimulating the cerebrum. While the well-plotted narrative can loosen, and the intergalactic exploration’s exposition via clunky metaphors can fail, its buoyant optimism is never too naïvely green as the film unravels and revels to scrutinise the darker side to mankind’s will to survive. Resisting the commonplace sterility of shiny, laminate, plasticky sci-fi, Interstellar’s unfuturistic mise-en-scène favours rusted, worn aluminium, and the drone and whir of its nuts and bolts resonates.
Words: Ross McDonnell
