Interstellar - a feast for eyes and heart

Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), right, and his 10-year-old daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy) in a scene from “Interstellar” / Courtesy of Warner Bros. Korea

By Jason Berchevaise

Christopher Nolan, already an established name in Hollywood following the critical and commercial success of the “Dark Knight” trilogy, along with other films such as “Inception” isn’t content on merely entertaining audiences with visual spectacle. Rather, with the help of his brother Jonathan who assists the famed director in writing his scripts, Nolan provides Hollywood with another kind of blockbuster: one where viewers are forced to actually think and reflect.

This is further illustrated in Nolan’s latest “Interstellar” which is a magnificent display of cinematic prowess and inventive storytelling. The film’s gargantuan scope, however, won’t please everyone, and is almost certain to receive criticism for its ambitious narrative that to some is perhaps a stretch too far as Nolan takes the film into the realm of “illogical”, but to do so, is to miss the point.

The 169-minute film takes place at a point in the near future where the Earth is in the midst of some catastrophic changes; most notably sand storms, which engulf entire towns and villages destroying crops and killing the planet. The film centers on a former NASA pilot called Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) who is now a farmer and widower focused on raising his 15-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter with the help of his father-in-law (John Lithgow).

His intelligent and perceptive daughter called Murph picks up on a supernatural presence in their house and after some investigation; they realize it’s a gravitational force, which leads them to discover a code that turns out to be a location in the desert. Cooper soon gets in his truck to dig deeper.

To reveal too much more would spoil the show, but Cooper’s discovery ultimately leads him into outer space along with a small crew including a scientist called Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway) leaving his children behind in an effort to find another inhabited world, which is only possible to reach through a wormhole near Saturn. With the Earth now dying, searching for such a planet is the last option.

Tellingly Cooper’s tale of personal sacrifice serves as the core of the story making it not only an emotional one, but also appears a very personal film for Nolan who himself is a father of four. This is not to say it’s sentimental. Nolan is armed with too much talent and expertise for that, but by wrapping the film’s premise in a story of parental sacrifice and love is what ties the narrative together.

Yet, this is no conventional melodrama, it’s a sci-fi extravaganza with epic proportions firmly anchored in emotional depth. Paying homage to Stanley Kubrick’s classic “2001: A Space Odyssey” the film’s visuals are as beautiful as they are extraordinary. While CGI inevitably played a big part in the construction of some of the most awe striking images of space ever put on screen, Nolan insistent on building sets for the ships interiors and creating as many effects in-camera as possible allows the filmmaker together with cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytemato create a truly cinematic experience.

Shooting the feature with anamorphic 35mm stock and IMAX cameras — to the extent that some sequences were shot with a Learjet that had such a camera installed at the front, much like Kubrick’s 2001 and last year’s “Gravity,” Nolan’s latest is a groundbreaking film, but interestingly not in 3D.

Nolan, a true film devotee, is keen on exploiting the IMAX format, but remains loyal to more traditional formats and so viewers can watch the film in 35mm (as opposed to digital) and approximately 50 screens in the U.S. will be equipped for 70mm IMAX for the ultimate experience.

Of course “Interstellar” isn’t all about the visuals and so akin to “2001: A Space Odyssey”, the film’s score plays an instrumental part in generating the film’s powerful atmospherics. Composed by Hans Zimmer who now frequently collaborates with Nolan, it helps capture the vastness of space. At times subtle, at others impossible to ignore, harmonious in its accompaniment to the images on display, it lives up to or even perhaps exceeds Zimmer’s most mesmeric scores.

If the film is guilty of anything, many might point to its expansive scope. It does get bogged down, in places, in the science and the theories of relativity and interstellar travel, but with the film’s executive producer, Kip Thorne, a leading theoretical physicist and scientific consultant for the film; it doesn’t feel like science has been thrown to the wind — though, of course, it’s always up for debate.

Turning to the performances, Matthew McConaughey, who appears to be at the pinnacle of his career following his academy award earlier this year for his role in “Dallas Buyers Club” and his acclaimed lead in TV series “True Detective” is again on scintillating form playing Cooper.

A perhaps genuine criticism is the lack of development regarding the female leads: Anne Hathaway playing thechief scientist and daughter of a NASA professor played by Michael Caine along with Jessica Chastain who plays Cooper’s daughter Murph (having aged due to the long space mission). With so much going on, they don’t leave quite the same impression compared to the male lead, but their characters serve the narrative well.

Nolan’s latest isn’t perfect, but in an era where audiences are beginning to suffer from CGI fatigue, he has delivered yet another spectacular film full of imagination and flare arguably making him one of the finest mainstream Hollywood directors of his generation.

“Interstellar” hits screens in Korea on November 6 and given the high reservation rate, it’s expected to open strongly.

The writer is a film columnist for The Korea Times.