Movie Review: Interstellar

Did you go to the cinema with the BDA and you fell in love with Nolan’s talent? Or are you still craving to watch Interstellar?

No worries, Kaleido, has highlighted our favorite parts and will convince you (or not) to (re)watch Interstellar!

The synopsis

Our planet saw extreme changes that resulted in unbearable living conditions, and the ten million people left are trying to adapt in order to survive. The NASA is financing researches and scientists behind closed doors to find another planet that would provide favourable conditions for the humanity not to become extinct. Cooper, ex-pilot and father of two children, decides to take part in an interstellar trip to help find this planet.

Main information:

Genre: Sciences Fiction

Duration: 2h49

Released on November 5th

Main actors: Matthew MacConaughey, Anne Hathaway, and Michael Caine

Director: Christopher Nolan

The director: Christopher Nolan

As a director, screenwriter and producer, Nolan has already succeeded to stand out his talent in the 7th art, and took part in producing several of the most successful films of the 21st century. Memento, Batman trilogy, Inception… These films are the ones you can read on the British director’s list of success.

With this new film mostly on science and human intelligence, the comparison with Inception is obvious and the conclusion logical: Nolan is interested in complicated and tricky plots.

« A great film should be depressing but the reason it’s not is because we want the world to be more complicated than it is »

Interstellar reveals the fascination of the director for human beings and their capacities. He doesn’t hesitate to express the influence that had Kubrick’s 2001: A space Odyssey (1968) and Spielberg’s Close encounters of the Third Kind (1977) in his work. However, Nolan emphasizes the psychological side of his film: it is also about the figure of the father, which is embodied by Matthew MacConaughey: what does it imply to be a father?

Why this film?

In a time when science fiction films do not face a lack of interest (Oblivion, 2013 and Gravity, 2013), Interstellar distinguishes itself from the genre. There are no little green men, neither super-cool/sophisticated/unlikely-to-exist-one-day machine. Nolan provides us a simpler vision of our successor’s earth: only dust and despair (we may admit that it is a little negative). No race to sensation and explosion, merely an exploration through the infinity of the universe and beyond our available knowledge.

What we rarely find in “science-fiction” is the emphasis on the word “science”. Interstellar is indeed on one hand very pleasant to watch and aimed at all type of audience, but it is on the other hand full of scientific references. We appreciate a very rare marriage between Hollywood and physics (that we weren’t able to appreciate rightly since high school, right?). Nolan didn’t hesitate to work in association with scientists in order to make his scenario as likely as possible[1]. The references are (almost) always right and accessible to a large audience (no worries, you don’t need a PhD in physics to understand the film!): Nolan succeeded a great on this point.

Far from only being focused on the universe, Interstellar is also a deep reflexion on human beings themselves: what does it mean to be parent? As previously said, the father figure is a very important part of the film, embodied by the character Cooper, torn between his duties as a father and his will to “save the world”. To what extent are humans able to choose between the survival of their specie and the well being of our loved ones?

Adding to that an underlying ecological message and you get Interstellar. Masterly directed by Nolan, Interstellar got our attention in the releases of the end of the year and for good reasons.

The press and public opinion[2]

Average grade of the public: 4.5 /5

Average grade of the press: 3.8 / 5

[1] Kip Thorne especially took part in the realisation of the scenario, see an interesting interview here: http://news.sciencemag.org/people-events/2014/11/physicist-who-inspired-interstellar-spills-backstory-and-scene-makes-him

[2] According to the website Allociné (survey of 37 newspapers and almost 2000 spectators’ critics)

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