Interstellar (November 2014)

Official Australian release date: 6/11/14. Viewed: 6/11/14.
Director: Christopher Nolan
Actors: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, David Gyasi, Jessica Chastain, Matt Damon
Genre: Sci-Fi / Drama / Action
Rating: M

‘Interstellar’ was a film I’d been waiting to see all year, and it certainly is a huge sci-fi film – $165 million budget – from one of the best filmmakers going round. Basically, we spend 40min on Earth in the not-too-distant-future, where all the crops are failing and Homo sapiens are about to be wiped from the planet. Cooper (McConaughey), Romilly (Gyasi) & Dr Brand (Hathaway) are then sent to another galaxy – via a wormhole – as a last grasp attempt to find another habitable planet.

The film does really well of asking those big picture themes – what’s more important, family of the entire species, love or exploration, why do we matter? However, as a sci-fi/action film, it sometimes lets itself down – the characters aren’t that well developed, beside Cooper & his two kids (Chastain & Affleck when they’re older) and there’s too much maths/physics/relativity and not enough excitement and wonder.

Sure, the special effects you do get to see of the black hole and the planets they visit are great, but there’s just not enough of them – it’s a lot of them in a space suit/ship with an overbearing Hans Zimmer’s score making it hard to hear actual dialogue. It’s probably slightly longer than necessary also – 2 hours 50min, with the last 30min being a less-than-ideal conclusion to the film. Hopefully Damon playing an astronaut prepares him for next year’s ‘The Martian’, which should be more exciting than ‘Interstellar’.

Nolan – who will arguably one day go down as a directorial legend like Kubrick – owes a lot to ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ and essentially ‘Interstellar’ doesn’t do anything better than that film 46 years ago. But it’s not all bad – I think my expectations were too high, especially after ‘Gravity’ last year – with Caine & Lithgow being solid on Earth and the robots, TARS & CASE (very similar voices/roles to HAL in ‘2001’ & GERTY in ‘Moon’) providing some humour (and a very unique form/function!).

Overall: A good sci-fi drama, but needed more action and adventure!

Gav's Rating: 3.5 stars.