I'm going to keep this one short because, honestly, I don't feel that I have too much to add to the conversation about Interstellar. The film has been out for nearly a month and those who were champing at the bit to see it probably already have. The critical reception has been, not tepid exactly, but not hot. I find myself in agreement with the general consensus of the critics: Interstellar is a movie that aims for greatness and achieves goodness.
If anything can be said of Christopher Nolan's latest film, it is definitely ambitious. Not just visually, but intellectually and emotionally. You get the feeling that Nolan envisioned this film as his magnum opus. Perhaps that ambition is what held the movie back from true greatness. It feels overstuffed, as if Nolan and his brother, Jonathan, who wrote the movie were like "Ok, we gotta have stuff about wormholes, and the love between a father and his daughter, and a message about environmental stability, and a sarcastic robot, and a message about how love is a force that transcends time, and a giant tidal wave, and and and..." My first impression upon leaving the movie theatre was that if Nolan had held back a little bit, or maybe had a tighter focus without the lofty philosophical messages, the movie would have been better.
Visually, Interstellar is amazing. There are any number of beautifully imagined scenes, including travel through a wormhole, a stop on a planet with tidal waves a mile high (this part of the movie was probably my favorite, and was also legitimately terrifying), and a climatic scene near the end that dares to imagine what five dimensions would actually look like--if you had a God's eye view of time itself. Accompanying these scenes is Hans Zimmer's pounding organ music score which is perfect for the film. It invokes a sense of religious reverence and adds to the feeling of mankind's puniness in the face of an endless universe. As a work of art, Interstellar succeeds.
As a work of philosophy, not so much. Beyond the science of wormholes and black holes and relativity, there is a message about love and human connection. The idea is that love is more than just a feeling and that it is in fact a force of nature itself that can even transcend time. The idea is voiced first by a teary-eyed Anne Hathaway, playing an astronaut who tries to convince her fellow space travelers to use the little fuel and time they have left to travel to a planet that her lover, Edmunds, set out to explore ten years earlier. She argues that her love for Edmunds is perhaps a signal, across the universe, that they will find the resources they need on his planet. On the one hand, wow, what a beautiful message. On the other hand, barf. I don't know why I reacted so skeptically to this part of the movie. But I just couldn't buy it, and I thought that this emotional overlay--"love conquers all, including the theory of fucking relativity"--just took away from the more interesting aspects of the film.
So that's my conclusion. Interstellar is a beautiful, but overly ambitious film. I found it unfocused and confusing at times, and wish Nolan had exercised a little more restraint. I guess the worst you can say about Interstellar is that it's a movie that aims for the moon--and lands among the stars.
3.5 out of 5 stars
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