Interstellar *** (2014, Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Michael Caine) – Movie Review

Sometime soon, the Earth is on the brink of extinction through drought, famine and extreme climate changes. But a mysterious rip in the space-time continuum gives humans a chance to widen their lifespan.

Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway lead a group of explorers on an interstellar voyage via a newly discovered wormhole near Saturn to conquer the vast distances involved in travelling beyond our solar system in a quest to find a planet capable of sustaining life. Unfortunately, through the wormhole, one hour is the equivalent of seven years back on Earth. So the mission will fail if the people on Earth are dead by the time they could pull it off.

McConaughey plays Cooper, the pilot of the spaceship Endurance who decides to put the future of the human race before seeing his children again. Despite his strong bond with his daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy), former pilot Coop grabs his chance to lead the mission into space. He joins the secret project to save Earth, directed by old professor Michael Caine, and soon waves bye-bye to his father-in-law (John Lithgow) and two young kids Murph and Tom, and blasts into orbit with the professor’s daughter Amelia (Hathaway) and two token crew members.

Co-writer/director Christopher Nolan‘s near-three-hour space epic is long, slow and mystifying. Taking its daft pseudo science far too seriously, it hasn’t an ounce of humour and is way up itself. It patterns itself far too closely on the masterpiece that is 2001: A Space Odyssey for comfort, leading to comparisons that are disadvantageous for Interstellar. It even comes up with a shiny, walking robot that is an obvious take on Stanley Kubrick’s HAL 9000. Its called TARS and it’s voiced by Bill Irwin and it becomes immediately irritating.

The film’s set-up seems to take for ever, coasting in the slow lane, but once the flight starts, the movie seems to be getting going. But then it doesn’t go anywhere. Time goes by with remarkably little happening, underscored by Hans Zimmer’s discordant score, which just serves to emphasise how little is actually happening.

As if the film-makers are very aware of this, the entire sub-plot involving a weary-looking Matt Damon as Dr Mann seems to be there just to add some incident or excitement, but it gets nowhere, and could happily be cut out. Nolan’s characters are paper-thin cyphers, giving the actors a very hard time to flesh them out or make them interesting or sympathetic.

McConaughey’s role is the only significant one in the entire movie, and he gratefully grabs it by being very intense and full-on throughout. This does at least command attention, but McConaughey’s acting strengths aren’t really called on here. He has no humour or wry lines to chew over. It plays all on the one note it’s written on.

That’s even more true of Hathaway’s character. She plays it wide-eyed and handsome, even if she’s stuck with a boy’s haircut. But the character is quite irritating and Hathaway can’t do anything about that. Look at how appealing Sandra Bullock was in Gravity (2013) last year. There’s none of that charisma here.

Caine does have quite a bit to do, but it isn’t very interesting stuff, and he doesn’t seem very involved. He’s one of several of the actors whose lines are hard to make out, especially at key moments. Jessica Chastain has a fair-sized, key role too as adult Murph, but she spends her time looking around for the meat on the bones of the part.

Other players fare much worse. Lithgow tries to bring authority and character but he’s acting in a different movie, Wes Bentley‘s spaceman Doyle soon gets chucked away and so does David Gyasi’s Romilly, Casey Affleck‘s adult Tom has zero to do, ditto Topher Grace‘s Getty, and Ellen Burstyn is disrespected with less than zero as Old Murph. Timothée Chalamet from Call Me by Your Name plays Tom Cooper, the 15-year-old son of Matthew McConaughey’s character.

By the end, Nolan reveals he is not remotely interested in the science – influenced by the physicist Kip Thorne – that he has so elaborately involved the audience in. He is interested in father-daughter relationships and, ah, love. Love is the motivating power of the universe, apparently. Time and space mean nothing compared with the true dimension of love.

The film’s conclusion, which you can see coming a few million space miles off, is banal, annoying and frustrating. You could just about forgive the dullness of the three-hour ride if it landed you up in a great place. But this lands up in Spielberg-style sentimentality. The deadly serious Nolan’s not got any kind of a sense of humour, of course, but being famously chilly paid lots of big dividends. Being soft at heart isn’t what we expect of rigorous film-maker.

Of course, with its $165 million budget, the movie looks marvellous and is a great spectacle, with a startling, eye-catching visual style. The moment an ocean rises up to form the most giant wave in the universe is a huge visual coup and extraordinary highlight. The film demands and repays that you look. If only we didn’t have to hear it too.

Intersellar earned five Oscar nominations, but two were in the Sound categories of Mixing and Editing — the aspect of the film that created the most debate — and the movie was shut out of the Best Picture and Best Director categories. It won the Oscar for Best Achievement in Visual Effects (Paul J Franklin, Andrew Lockley, Ian Hunter and Scott R Fisher) and the Bafta for Best Special Visual Effects.

It scored worldwide grosses of over $675 million. Nolan’s next movie Dunkirk opened on July 21 2017.

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© Derek Winnert 2014 Movie Review

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