It feels important. It feels sometimes dreamlike. It feels like Oscar-bait. Christopher Nolan's newest, much-anticipated cosmic drama was, frankly, a disappointment to me. But it is also quite beautiful, and in unexpected ways.
Typical of Nolan's work, Interstellar makes you think while it awes you with great visuals. Its fanciful appeal keeps the lengthy running time (almost three hours) not quite unbearable. Though not as explicitly dazzling as the special-effects-heavy Oscar winners of the last two years (2013's Gravity, 2012's Life of Pi), Interstellar features truly amazing effects and visual art. Perhaps my attention was most captured by the practical appearance of those effects. I've not read much about the making of the film, but it seems to me that more of the effects were tricks of science and photography, rather than straight computer generation. That's a really interesting choice for a space adventure, and one that keeps it fresh and absorbing.
But the emotional substance of the film falls short of its visuals. Nolan and his brother Jonathan intriguingly wrote the film with an emphasis on human (especially family) drama rather than wild space exploration and adventure. But I think they failed at balancing what might be a moving family drama and what could have been a riveting sci-fi excursion. The film is only occasionally "exciting" in the typical sense of the word, and though a lot of the characters cry most of the time it's never cathartic; this film may tug at your heartstrings, but you can also feel the heavy hand that plucks 'em. Though the dialogue has its moments -- often heightened and abstract -- there are only so many times I want to hear Michael Caine recite the same verse. In fact, I think the most emotional connection I made to the film was through the lovely score by Hans Zimmer.
The acting is really solid, fortunately. Matthew McConaughey gives a powerhouse lead performance that will surely garner some award nominations. Jessica Chastain and Anne Hathaway tag-team as his strongest supporting castmates, and Hathaway especially delivers in a crucial monologue about the essence of love, about halfway through the film. These dynamic ladies, though, are featured with lots of close-ups of alternating crying and anger; they are giving great strength, but Nolan's direction sometimes works against them. Other actors Wes Bentley, Michael Caine, Matt Damon, John Lithgow, and Ellen Burstyn are all fine, though their roles are all quite brief.
I really liked the first hour of the movie, and the second hour only a little less. The family drama is a little too familiar, but paired with this cast and the high-stakes science, it's no less engaging. Not all of Nolan's dramatic choices work as well as he obviously wanted them to, and frankly I was annoyed and shocked by all the sizeable plot holes in the picture. Nolan usually knits up his plots with incredible detail, so this felt quite uncharacteristic. But in the third hour (or at least the third act, as I wasn't really keeping time), I just checked out. I don't want to spoil anything, but the already out-of-this-world film gets aggressively weird, and I just couldn't take it any more. It felt wildly contrived and forced, and Nolan's already sentimental approach controlled the last half hour so much that I was giggling at the melodrama. That, I guess, is not the response we're supposed to have.
IMDb: Interstellar
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