Interstellar

Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Michael Caine, Mackenzie Foy, Jessica Chastain, Casey Affleck, and John Lithgow
Directed by: Christopher Nolan
Screenplay by: Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan

    Ladies and gentlemen, are you ready to have your minds blown, again?  Christopher Nolan is here to do it again!
    It's sometime in the future, later in the 21st century.  Blight has destroyed earth's food supply and therefore decimated the population.  Humanity is dying on earth.  It looks like there is not going to be a way to save the earth and the apocalypse is slowly setting in.  As Professor Brand (Michael Caine) puts it, "we must confront the reality that nothing in our solar system can help us".  The agency Professor Brand is working for, an agency thought to be extinct called NASA, is preparing for a mission to save the people of earth; to find a new world for people to settle on and colonize.
    Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is a farmer in this desolate world.  His crops are in danger of dying due to the blight.  He is a former pilot for the military who is recruited to pilot the mission by Professor Brand.  The problem; he has two kids, Tom (Timothée Chalamet, later played by Casey Affleck) and Murph (Mackenzie Foy, later played by Jessica Chastain), and he doesn't know when he will come back.  But Cooper is the only one suited to pilot the ship, named Endurance, to find a new world, so he has to go.  So, the mission takes off with him and the crew, Dr Brand (Anne Hathaway), Doyle (Wes Bentley), and Romilly (David Gyasi), along with two robot computers named CASE and TARS, not knowing if there will be anybody to be saved by the time they return, should they return at all.
    The Endurance takes them through a wormhole to a system in another galaxy with three planets that seem possible to sustain life.  They surround a super massive black hole called Gargantua.  These three worlds have their promising aspects, as well as their problems.  Gargantua affects everything about these worlds, even the rate at which time advances.  This makes the mission all that more difficult because they will consume years of earth time in a matter of hours if they get too close to the black hole.  The fate of the entire human race rests on their ability to find a new world.  Will they succeed?  If they do, how much time will be lost?
    The story as a whole is a little more clear than some of Christopher Nolan's other films.  Memento is confusing because the story is told in reverse, and Inception is confusing because it can be hard to tell which level of dream they are in at any given moment in the film.  Interstellar still has its moments of confusion and its plot twists, but is a more straightforward film than Memento or Inception.  
    The film runs almost three hours, making this one of Nolan's longest films, if not his longest.  Does the film need to be this long?  Probably not.  In fact, we don't even leave earth until about an hour into the film.  And in all that time it takes to leave earth, the one thing that isn't explained is where the blight came from and what it does to the crops.  For a film this long, it's hard to believe that something like this is missing from the exposition.  
    Interstellar has one of the most detailed and best developed story lines of all of Nolan's films.  Some of the characters are less developed than they should be and occasionally there are plot holes, patterns that do not have the best of explanations, and questions that do not have answers.   In fact, there are more problems with the story of Interstellar than there are in most of Nolan's other films.          Physicist Kip Thorne was a science consultant on the film, helping the science aspect of the film be more accurate.  Not only are viewers going to this movie to be entertained, but will also learn something interesting about black holes and wormholes and how we believe they work.  You won't find out what happens on the other side of a black hole because we still don't know what happens once inside a black hole.  The science and explanation of the science behind the film helps audiences feel like this is less science-fiction than it is and makes all of this seem plausible one day.  Interstellar has many leading scientists such as Michio Kaku and Neil deGrasse Tyson talking, and the conversations online are fascinating.  
    The visual effects are incredible.  There were no green screens used in the production of the film and the ships are real models that the actors and crew filmed inside of.  This gives the actors a much more realistic environment to perform in and a more realistic scene for the audience to watch.  As an audience member, I felt like I could be in the ship alongside the actors and immersed in the film completely.  The IMAX helped, but I'll talk about that later.  The visuals help the film not feel like a science fiction film and more like a "science-realism" film.  In short, everything looks just plain awesome!
    Interstellar features a cast including many actors with whom Nolan has worked before, such as Michael Caine and Anne Hathaway.  I like that actors Nolan works with appear in multiple films he directs.  There are enough new actors in this film to keep things fresh and interesting, showing audiences that Christopher Nolan doesn't just rely on what he knows in order to make money from his films, but is willing to be innovative in his filmmaking and casting of characters.  He is one of the more innovative filmmakers in Hollywood today and is constantly pushing the frontiers of our expectations of today's American cinema just a little further with each film he releases.
    Matthew McConaughey is excellent as Cooper, almost as good as he is in last year's Dallas Buyers Club.  This is a film that shows off his strength as an actor and his ability to play more serious roles.  Anne Hathaway delivers a strong performance as well.  Jessica Chastain has less screen time than I thought she would have and is fine in her role, but not as good as in some of her other roles (see Zero Dark Thirty).  
    Hoyte Van Hoytema is an excellent cinematographer for the film.  Some scenes, quite a few in fact, were shot on IMAX cameras, making full use of the IMAX screen and creating one of the best movie watching experiences I've seen recently.  Some of the shots are really amazing because the IMAX camera is used like a hand camera, which is not something that is easy to do.  
    Interstellar is the movie that I was most excited about for all of 2014, and quite frankly, I had really high expectations for it.  I'll admit that perhaps they were a little too high, but for the most part, they were met.  I saw it in the IMAX 70mm format, the way Christopher Nolan wants you to see it.  There is more color that can be seen when a film is shown on actual film rather than when screened digitally.  The image is a little shaky at times and there are jitters on the screen occasionally, but that is part of the fun of watching this film in such a format.  The sound is incredible and it feels like watching a feature length movie one would watch at a science center with an IMAX theater.  At some points in the film, mainly the launch sequence and wormhole sequences, the sound is so loud and detailed, you can actually feel the vibrations in the theater.  While pretty much all film screenings in theaters these days are done with digital presentation, film is the way movies were meant to be seen.  Interstellar defines this notion in the post celluloid era, and shows us that no matter how advanced and cheap the digital projection technology, nothing will ever beat the strip of film being projected on the screen in front of us.  Interstellar is a staggering 49 reels of film long, making it difficult and expensive to distribute, so that is why so many movies are projected digitally.  
     This is not Nolan's most innovative film yet, in fact, it's probably his least original.  So much of it relates back to (yes, I am going to compare it like many other reviewers are doing) 2001: A Space Odyssey.  TARS and CASE both look like the giant monolith from 2001, except we know what TARS and CASE do, whereas people are still trying to figure out what the monolith really is and what its significance is.  The difference is that TARS and CASE are not defiant computers like HAL is.  
     Much of the science stops making sense about two thirds of the way through the film and so it is left up to the imagination of the filmmakers to fill in the blanks.  So, it seems kind of magical in a sense, but we just have to go with it if we want the movie to end, especially if we want it to end happily.  
     As with most other Nolan directed films, this film may require a second or third viewing to truly understand everything that is happening.  However, this one of, if not his only, film that you may be able to get away with watching only once, unless you really enjoy it.  Then you might want to watch it again.  This film is not perfect, and sadly is not necessarily one of Christopher Nolan's better works.  However, this film gives audiences one of the best movie watching experiences around today and will stick with you long after you leave the theater.  
     I give Interstellar a B+.

Image source: wegeekgirls.com