Review: Interstellar
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
Real emotion remains something of a black hole for Christopher Nolan, and for much of the three-hour running time of Interstellar the resolutely cerebral director teeters delicately on its event horizon.
THE STARS LOOK VERY DIFFERENT TODAY: Matthew McConaughey is an astronaut turned farmer in this “what it means to be human” epic.
City Paper grade: B
Real emotion remains something of a black hole for Christopher Nolan, and for much of the three-hour running time of Interstellar the resolutely cerebral director teeters delicately on its event horizon. The film takes place a generation into the future, after ecological disaster has turned the world into one giant dustbowl. Matthew McConaughey is a former astronaut turned farmer who discovers that NASA has continued in secret, run by former professor Michael Caine, who is working on a long-shot rescue plan for the human race. Nolan has a tendency to get explainy, especially in a story that involves some of the most complex subjects in modern science.
This is a film, after all, where gripping suspense is mined from the ramifications of relativity as much as from daring spaceship maneuvers. Ultimately, Interstellar is an epic-scale debate over what it means to be human, as dispassionate reality conflicts with irrational emotion. As a man of science who faces real stakes in the form of his left-behind children aging at a rate outpacing his own, McConaughey embodies that debate most effectively. Anne Hathaway’s passionate scientist struggles to reconcile the two, unfortunate given that the sole female crew member is reduced to a blubbering wreck, tearfully arguing for the metaphysics of love.
Nolan ultimately does pass over that aforementioned event horizon, with predictable effects; the film’s otherwise admirable dedication to hard science is crushed into gooey sentiment, a stab at Spielbergian hokum that seems written by one of the movie’s humor-programmed robots. But when it succeeds, which it does much of the time, Interstellar is a gripping adventure that’s equal parts ’50s sci-fi thrills, heady 2001 thought experiment and tortured philosophical debate.
