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Christopher Nolan’s  "Interstellar ," about astronauts traveling to the other end of the galaxy to find a new home to replace humanity’s despoiled home-world, is frantically busy and earsplittingly loud. It uses booming music to jack up the excitement level of scenes that might not otherwise excite. It features characters shoveling exposition at each other for almost three hours, and a few of those characters have no character to speak of: they’re mouthpieces for techno-babble and philosophical debate. And for all of the director’s activism on behalf of shooting on film, the tactile beauty of the movie’s 35mm and 65mm textures isn’t matched by a sense of composition. The camera rarely tells the story in Nolan’s movies. More often it illustrates the screenplay, and there are points in this one where I felt as if I was watching the most expensive NBC pilot ever made.

And yet "Interstellar" is still an impressive, at times astonishing movie that overwhelmed me to the point where my usual objections to Nolan's work melted away. I’ve packed the first paragraph of this review with those objections (they could apply to any Nolan picture post "Batman Begins"; he is who he is) so that people know that he’s still doing the things that Nolan always does. Whether you find those things endearing or irritating will depend on your affinity for Nolan's style. 

In any case, t here’s something pure and powerful about this movie. I can’t recall a science fiction film hard-sold to a director’s fans as multiplex-“awesome” in which so many major characters wept openly in close-up, voices breaking, tears streaming down  their  cheeks. Matthew McConaughey ’s widowed astronaut Cooper and his colleague Amelia Brand ( Anne Hathaway ) pour on the waterworks in multiple scenes, with justification: like everyone on the crew of the Endurance , the starship sent to a black hole near Jupiter that will slingshot the heroes towards colonize-able worlds, they’re separated from everything that defines them: their loved ones, their personal histories, their culture, the planet itself. Other characters—including Amelia's father, an astrophysicist played by Michael Caine , and a space explorer (played by an  un-billed  guest actor) who’s holed up on a forbidding arctic world—express a vulnerability to loneliness and doubt that’s quite raw for this director. The film’s central family (headed by Cooper, grounded after the  dismantling  of NASA) lives on a  corn  farm, for goodness’ sake, like the gentle Iowans in " Field of Dreams " (a film whose daddy-issues-laden story syncs up nicely with the narrative of  " Interstellar"). Granted, they're growing the crop to feed the human race, which is whiling away its twilight hours on a planet so ecologically devastated that at first you mistake it for the American Dust Bowl circa 1930 or so; but there's still something amusingly cheeky about the notion of corn as sustenance, especially in a survival story in which the future of humanity is at stake. ( Ellen Burstyn plays one of many witnesses in a documentary first glimpsed in the movie's opening scene—and which, in classic Nolan style, is a setup for at least two twists.)

The state-of-the-art sci-fi landscapes are deployed in service of Hallmark card homilies about how people should live, and what’s really important. ("We love people who have died—what's the social utility in that?" "Accident is the first step in evolution.") After a certain point it sinks in, or should sink in, that Nolan and his co-screenwriter, brother Jonathan Nolan , aren’t trying to one-up the spectacular rationalism of “2001." The movie's science fiction trappings are just a wrapping for a spiritual/emotional dream about basic human desires (for home, for family, for continuity of bloodline and culture), as well as for a horror film of sorts—one that treats the star voyagers’ and their earthbound loved ones’ separation as spectacular metaphors for what happens when the people we value are taken from us by death, illness, or unbridgeable distance. (“Pray you never learn just how good it can be to see another face,” another astronaut says, after years alone in an interstellar wilderness.) 

While "Interstellar" never entirely commits to the idea of a non-rational, uncanny world, it nevertheless has a mystical strain, one that's unusually pronounced for a director whose storytelling has the right-brained sensibility of an engineer, logician, or accountant. There's a ghost in this film, writing out messages to the living in dust. Characters strain to interpret distant radio messages as if they were ancient texts written in a dead language, and stare through red-rimmed eyes at video messages sent years ago, by people on the other side of the cosmos. "Interstellar" features a family haunted by the memory of a dead mother and then an absent father; a woman haunted by the memory of a missing father, and another woman who's separated from her own dad (and mentor), and driven to reunite with a lover separated from her by so many millions of miles that he might as well be dead. 

With the possible exception of the last act of " Memento"  and the pit sequence in "The Dark Knight Rises"—a knife-twisting hour that was all about suffering and transcendence—I can’t think of a Nolan film that ladles on  misery and  valorizes  gut feeling (faith)  the way this one does; not from start to finish, anyway.  T he  most stirring sequences are less about driving the plot forward than contemplating what the characters' actions mean to them, and to us. The  best of these is the lift-off sequence, which starts with a countdown heard over images of Cooper leaving his family. It continues in space, with Caine reading passages from Dylan Thomas's villanelle "Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night": "Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light." (If it wasn't already obvious, this sequence certifies Nolan as the most death-and-control obsessed major American filmmaker, along with Wes Anderson .)

The film's widescreen panoramas feature harsh interplanetary landscapes, shot in cruel Earth locales; some of the largest and most detailed starship miniatures ever built, and space sequences presented in scientifically accurate silence, a la "2001." But for all its high-tech glitz, "Interstellar" has a defiantly old-movie feeling. It's not afraid to switch, even lurch, between modes. At times, the movie's one-stop-shopping storytelling evokes the tough-tender spirit of a John Ford picture, or a Steven Spielberg film made in the spirit of a Ford picture: a movie that would rather try to be eight or nine things than just one. Bruising outer-space action sequences, with astronauts tumbling in zero gravity and striding across forbidding landscapes, give way to snappy comic patter (mostly between Cooper and the ship's robot, TARS, designed in Minecraft-style, pixel-ish boxes, and voiced by Bill Irwin ). There are long explanatory sequences, done with and without dry erase boards, dazzling vistas that are less spaces than mind-spaces, and tearful separations and reconciliations that might as well be played silent, in tinted black-and-white, and scored with a saloon piano. (Spielberg originated "Interstellar" in 2006, but dropped out to direct other projects.)

McConaughey, a super-intense actor who wholeheartedly commits to every line and moment he's given, is the right leading man for this kind of film. Cooper proudly identifies himself as an engineer as well as an astronaut and farmer, but he has the soul of a goofball poet; when he stares at intergalactic vistas, he grins like a kid at an amusement park waiting to ride a new roller coaster. Cooper's farewell to his daughter Murph—who's played by McKenzie Foy as a young girl—is shot very close-in, and lit in warm, cradling tones; it has some of the tenderness of the porch swing scene in " To Kill a Mockingbird ." When Murph grows up into Jessica Chastain —a key member of Caine's NASA crew, and a surrogate for the daughter that the elder Brand "lost' to the Endurance 's mission—we keep thinking about that goodbye scene, and how its anguish drives everything that Murph and Cooper are trying to do, while also realizing that similar feelings drive the other characters—indeed, the rest of the species. (One suspects this is a deeply personal film for Nolan: it's about a man who feels he has been "called" to a particular job, and whose work requires him to spend long periods away from his family.)

The movie's storytelling masterstroke comes from adherence to principles of relativity: the astronauts perceive time differently depending on where Endurance is, which means that when they go down onto a prospective habitable world, a few minutes there equal weeks or months back on the ship. Meanwhile, on Earth, everyone is aging and losing hope. Under such circumstances, even tedious housekeeping-type exchanges become momentous: one has to think twice before arguing about what to do next, because while the argument is happening, people elsewhere are going grey, or suffering depression from being alone, or withering and dying. Here, more so than in any other Nolan film (and that's saying a lot), time is everything. "I'm an old physicist," Brand tells Cooper early in the film. "I'm afraid of time." Time is something we all fear. There's a ticking clock governing every aspect of existence, from the global to the familial. Every act by every character is an act of defiance, born of a wish to not go gently.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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Interstellar (2014)

Rated PG-13 for some intense perilous action and brief strong language

169 minutes

Matthew McConaughey as Cooper

Wes Bentley as Doyle

Anne Hathaway as Brand

Jessica Chastain as Murph

Michael Caine as Dr. Brand

John Lithgow as Donald

Topher Grace

Casey Affleck as Tom

Mackenzie Foy as Young Murph

Ellen Burstyn as Old Murph

Bill Irwin as TARS (voice)

Collette Wolfe as Ms. Kelly

David Oyelowo as Principal

William Devane as Old Tom

• Christopher Nolan
• Jonathan Nolan

Director of Photography

• Hoyte van Hoytema

Original Music Composer

• Hans Zimmer

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Off to the Stars, With Grief, Dread and Regret

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Anatomy of a Scene | ‘Interstellar’

Christopher nolan discusses a sequence from his film..

By A.O. Scott

• Nov. 4, 2014

Like the great space epics of the past, Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” distills terrestrial anxieties and aspirations into a potent pop parable, a mirror of the mood down here on Earth. Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” blended the technological awe of the Apollo era with the trippy hopes and terrors of the Age of Aquarius. George Lucas’s first “Star Wars” trilogy, set not in the speculative future but in the imaginary past, answered the malaise of the ’70s with swashbuckling nostalgia. “Interstellar,” full of visual dazzle, thematic ambition, geek bait and corn (including the literal kind), is a sweeping, futuristic adventure driven by grief, dread and regret.

Trying to jot down notes by the light of the Imax screen, where lustrous images (shot by Hoyte van Hoytema and projected from real 70-millimeter film) flickered, I lost count of how many times the phrase “I’m sorry” was uttered — by parents to children, children to parents, sisters to brothers, scientists to astronauts and astronauts to one another. The whole movie can be seen as a plea for forgiveness on behalf of our foolish, dreamy species. We messed everything up, and we feel really bad about it. Can you please give us another chance?

The possibility that such a “you” might be out there, in a position to grant clemency, is one of the movie’s tantalizing puzzles. Some kind of message seems to be coming across the emptiness of space and along the kinks in the fabric of time, offering a twinkle of hope amid humanity’s rapidly darkening prospects. For most of “Interstellar,” the working hypothesis is that a benevolent alien race, dwelling somewhere on the far side of a wormhole near one of the moons of Saturn, is sending data across the universe, encrypted advice that just may save us if we can decode it fast enough.

Movie Review: ‘Interstellar’

The times critic a. o. scott reviews “interstellar.”.

What our planet and species need saving from is a slow-motion environmental catastrophe. Rather than explain how this bleak future arrived through the usual montages of mayhem, Mr. Nolan (who wrote the screenplay with his brother Jonathan) drops us quietly into what looks like a fairly ordinary reality. We are in a rural stretch of North America, a land of battered pickup trucks, dusty bluejeans and wind-burned farmers scanning the horizon for signs of a storm. Talking-head testimony from old-timers chronicles what sounds like the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, until we spot a laptop on the table being set for family dinner.

The head of the family in question is Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a widower who lives with his two children and his father-in-law (John Lithgow). Once a NASA pilot, Cooper now grows corn, the only thing that will grow after a blight has wiped out most of the planet’s other crops. The human population has shrunk to a desperate remnant, but the survivors cling to the habits and rituals of normal life. For now, there is plenty of candy and soda and beer (thanks to all that corn); there are parent-teacher conferences after school; and Cooper’s farmhouse is full of books and toys. But the blight is spreading, the dust storms are growing worse, and the sense of an ending is palpable.

The Nolans cleverly conflate scientific denialism with technophobia, imagining a fatalistic society that has traded large ambition for small-scale problem solving and ultimate resignation. But Christopher Nolan , even in his earlier, more modestly budgeted films, has never been content with the small scale. His imagination is large; his eye seeks out wide, sweeping vistas; and if he believes in anything, it is ambition. As it celebrates the resistance to extinction — taking as its touchstone Dylan Thomas’s famous villanelle “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” with its repeated invocation of “rage against the dying of the light” — “Interstellar” becomes an allegory of its own aspirations, an argument for grandeur, scale and risk, on screen and off.

Dick Cavett , a son of Nebraska, used to ask (quoting Abe Burrows), “How you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm, after they’ve seen the farm?” Cooper and “Interstellar” are clearly marked for something other than agrarian pursuits, but the first section of the movie is the richest and most haunting, establishing a delicately emotional tone and clear moral and dramatic stakes for the planet-hopping to follow. Cooper is devoted to his children, in particular his daughter, Murph, played as a young girl by the preternaturally alert and skeptical Mackenzie Foy and as an adult by Jessica Chastain. When her father is recruited for a secret NASA mission to search for a habitable new planet, Murph is devastated by his departure. Her subsequent scientific career is both a tribute to his memory and a way of getting even.

The Nolans are fond of doubled characters and mirrored plots, and so “Interstellar” is built around twinned father-daughter stories. Among Cooper’s colleagues on board the spaceship is Dr. Brand (Anne Hathaway), whose father, also called Dr. Brand (Michael Caine), has developed the theories behind their quest. He and Murph remain on the ground, crunching the numbers and growing older in the usual earthly way, while Cooper and the younger Brand, thanks to relativity, stay pretty much the same age. (Cooper’s son, Tom, played by Timothée Chalamet as a boy, matures into Casey Affleck). The two pairs of daughters and dads perform variations on the theme of paternal and filial love, finding delicate and moving passages of loyalty, rebellion, disillusionment and acceptance.

A lot of other stuff happens, too, as it tends to out in space. A cynical critic might suppose that the last two hours of “Interstellar” were composed in a fit of spoiler hysteria. Nondisclosure pleas from the studio have been unusually specific. Forget about telling you what happens: I’m not even supposed to tell you who’s in the thing, aside from the people you’ve seen on magazine covers. I guess I can disclose that Cooper and Brand are accompanied by two other astronauts, played by a witty, scene-stealing David Gyasi and a deadpan Wes Bentley, and also by a wry robot who speaks in the voice of Bill Irwin.

The touches of humor those characters supply are welcome, if also somewhat stingily rationed. Nobody goes to a Christopher Nolan movie for laughs. But it is hard to imagine that his fans — who represent a fairly large segment of the world’s population — will be disappointed by “Interstellar.” I haven’t always been one of them, but I’ve always thought that his skill and ingenuity were undeniable. He does not so much transcend genre conventions as fulfill them with the zeal of a true believer. It may be enough to say that “Interstellar” is a terrifically entertaining science-fiction movie, giving fresh life to scenes and situations we’ve seen a hundred times before, and occasionally stumbling over pompous dialogue or overly portentous music. (In general, the score, by Hans Zimmer, is exactly as portentous as it needs to be.)

Of course, the film is more than that. It is in the nature of science fiction to aspire to more, to ascend fearlessly toward the sublime. You could think of “Interstellar,” which has a lot to say about gravity, as the anti-"Gravity.” That movie, which would fit inside this one twice, stripped away the usual sci-fi metaphysics, presenting space travel as an occasion for quiet wonder and noisy crisis management. Mr. Nolan takes the universe and eternity itself as his subject and his canvas, brilliantly exploiting cinema’s ability to shift backward and sideways in time (through flashbacks and cross cuts), even as it moves relentlessly forward.

But “Gravity” and “Interstellar” are both ultimately about the longing for home, about voyages into the unknown that become odysseys of return. And “Interstellar” may take its place in the pantheon of space movies because it answers an acute earthly need, a desire not only for adventure and novelty but also, in the end, for comfort.

“Interstellar” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). A few expletives, a lot of peril.

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Film Review: ‘Interstellar’

Christopher Nolan hopscotches across space and time in a visionary sci-fi trip that stirs the head and the heart in equal measure.

By Scott Foundas

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We begin somewhere in the American farm belt, which Nolan evokes for its full mythic grandeur — blazing sunlight, towering corn stalks, whirring combines. But it soon becomes clear that this would-be field of dreams is something closer to a nightmare. The date is an unspecified point in the near future, close enough to look and feel like tomorrow, yet far enough for a number of radical changes to have taken hold in society. A decade on from a period of widespread famine, the world’s armies have been disbanded and the cutting-edge technocracies of the early 21st century have regressed into more utilitarian, farm-based economies.

“We’re a caretaker generation,” notes one such homesteader (John Lithgow) to his widower son-in-law, Cooper ( Matthew McConaughey ), a former NASA test pilot who hasn’t stopped dreaming of flight, for himself and for his children: 15-year-old son Tom (Timothee Chalamet) and 10-year-old daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy), the latter a precocious tot first seen getting suspended from school for daring to suggest that the Apollo space missions actually happened. “We used to look up in the sky and wonder about our place in the stars,” Cooper muses. “Now we just look down and wonder about our place in the dirt.”

But all hope is not lost. NASA (whose massive real-life budget cuts lend the movie added immediacy) still exists in this agrarian dystopia, but it’s gone off the grid, far from the microscope of public opinion. There, the brilliant physicist Professor Brand (Michael Caine, forever the face of avuncular wisdom in Nolan’s films) and his dedicated team have devised two scenarios for saving mankind. Both plans involve abandoning Earth and starting over on a new, life-sustaining planet, but only one includes taking Earth’s current 6-billion-plus population along for the ride. Doing the latter, it seems, depends on Brand’s ability to solve an epic math problem that would explain how such a large-capacity vessel could surmount Earth’s gravitational forces. (Never discussed in this egalitarian society: a scenario in which only the privileged few could escape, a la the decadent bourgeoisie of Neill Blomkamp’s “Elysium.”)

Many years earlier, Brand informs, a mysterious space-time rift (or wormhole) appeared in the vicinity of Saturn, seemingly placed there, like the monoliths of “2001,” by some higher intelligence. On the other side: another galaxy containing a dozen planets that might be fit for human habitation. In the wake of the food wars, a team of intrepid NASA scientists traveled there in search of solutions. Now, a decade later (in Earth years, that is), Brand has organized another mission to check up on the three planets that seem the most promising for human settlement. And to pilot the ship, he needs Cooper, an instinctive flight jockey in the Chuck Yeager mode, much as McConaughey’s laconic, effortlessly self-assured performance recalls Sam Shepard’s as Yeager in “The Right Stuff” (another obvious “Interstellar” touchstone).

Already by this point — and we have not yet left the Earth’s surface — “Interstellar” (which Nolan co-wrote with his brother and frequent collaborator, Jonathan) has hurled a fair amount of theoretical physics at the audience, including discussions of black holes, gravitational singularities and the possibility of extra-dimensional space. And, as with the twisty chronologies and unreliable narrators of his earlier films, Nolan trusts in the audience’s ability to get the gist and follow along, even if it doesn’t glean every last nuance on a first viewing. It’s hard to think of a mainstream Hollywood film that has so successfully translated complex mathematical and scientific ideas to a lay audience (though Shane Carruth’s ingenious 2004 Sundance winner “Primer” — another movie concerned with overcoming the problem of gravity — tried something similar on a micro-budget indie scale), or done so in more vivid, immediate human terms. (Some credit for this is doubtless owed to the veteran CalTech physicist Kip Thorne, who consulted with the Nolans on the script and receives an executive producer credit.)

It gives nothing away, however, to say that Nolan maps his infinite celestial landscape as majestically as he did the continent-hopping earthbound ones of “The Prestige” and “Batman Begins,” or the multi-tiered memory maze of “Inception.” The imagery, modeled by Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema on Imax documentaries like “Space Station” and “Hubble 3D,” suggests a boundless inky blackness punctuated by ravishing bursts of light, the tiny spaceship Endurance gleaming like a diamond against Saturn’s great, gaseous rings, then ricocheting like a pinball through the wormhole’s shimmering plasmic vortex.

With each stop the Endurance makes, Nolan envisions yet another new world: one planet a watery expanse with waves that make Waimea Bay look like a giant bathtub; another an ice climber’s playground of frozen tundra and sheer-faced descents. Moreover, outer space allows Nolan to bend and twist his favorite subject — time — into remarkable new permutations. Where most prior Nolan protagonists were forever grasping at an irretrievable past, the crew of the Endurance races against a ticking clock that happens to tick differently depending on your particular vantage. New worlds mean new gravitational forces, so that for every hour spent on a given planet’s surface, years or even entire decades may be passing back on Earth. (Time as a flat circle, indeed.)

This leads to an extraordinary mid-film emotional climax in which Cooper and Brand return from one such expedition to discover that 23 earth years have passed in the blink of an eye, represented by two decades’ worth of stockpiled video messages from loved ones, including the now-adult Tom (a bearded, brooding Casey Affleck) and Murphy (Jessica Chastain in dogged, persistent “Zero Dark Thirty” mode). It’s a scene Nolan stages mostly in closeup on McConaughey, and the actor plays it beautifully, his face a quicksilver mask of joy, regret and unbearable grief.

That moment signals a shift in “Interstellar” itself from the relatively euphoric, adventurous tone of the first half toward darker, more ambiguous terrain — the human shadow areas, if you will, that are as difficult to fully glimpse as the inside of a black hole. Nolan, who has always excelled at the slow reveal, catches even the attentive viewer off guard more than once here, but never in a way that feels cheap or compromises the complex motivations of the characters.

Nolan stages one thrilling setpiece after another, including several hairsbreadth escapes and a dazzling space-docking sequence in which the entire theater seems to become one large centrifuge; the nearly three-hour running time passes unnoticed. Even more thrilling is the movie’s ultimate vision of a universe in which the face of extraterrestrial life bears a surprisingly familiar countenance. “Do not go gentle into that good night/Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” harks the good Professor Brand at the start of the Endurance’s journey, quoting the melancholic Welshman Dylan Thomas. And yet “Interstellar” is finally a film suffused with light and boundless possibilities — those of the universe itself, of the wonder in a child’s twinkling eyes, and of movies to translate all that into spectacular picture shows like this one.

It’s hardly surprising that “Interstellar” reps the very best big-budget Hollywood craftsmanship at every level, from veteran Nolan collaborators like production designer Nathan Crowley (who built the film’s lyrical vision of the big-sky American heartland on location in Alberta) and sound designer/editor Richard King, who makes wonderfully dissonant contrasts between the movie’s interior spaces and the airless silence of space itself. Vfx supervisor Paul Franklin (an Oscar winner for his work on “Inception”) again brings a vivid tactility to all of the film’s effects, especially the robotic TARS, who seamlessly inhabits the same physical spaces as the human actors. Hans Zimmer contributes one of his most richly imagined and inventive scores, which ranges from a gentle electronic keyboard melody to brassy, Strauss-ian crescendos. Shot and post-produced by Nolan entirely on celluloid (in a mix of 35mm and 70mm stocks), “Interstellar” begs to be seen on the large-format Imax screen, where its dense, inimitably filmic textures and multiple aspect ratios can be experienced to their fullest effect.

Reviewed at TCL Chinese Theatre, Hollywood, Oct. 23, 2014. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 165 MIN.

• Production: A Paramount (in North America)/Warner Bros. (international) release and presentation in association with Legendary Pictures of a Syncopy/Lynda Obst Prods. production. Produced by Emma Thomas, Christopher Nolan, Obst. Executive producers, Jordan Goldberg, Jake Myers, Kip Thorne, Thomas Tull.
• Crew: Directed by Christopher Nolan. Screenplay, Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan. Camera (Fotokem color and prints, partial widescreen, 35mm/70mm Imax), Hoyte Van Hoytema; editor, Lee Smith; music Hans Zimmer; production designer, Nathan Crowley; supervising art director, Dean Wolcott; art directors, Joshua Lusby, Eric David Sundahl; set decorator, Gary Fettis; set designers, Noelle King, Sally Thornton, Andrew Birdzell, Mark Hitchler, Martha Johnston, Paul Sonski, Robert Woodruff; costume designer, Mary Zophres; sound (Datasat/Dolby Digital), Mark Weingarten; sound designer/supervising sound editor, Richard King; re-recording mixers, Gary A. Rizzo, Gregg Landaker; visual effects supervisor, Paul Franklin; visual effects producer, Kevin Elam; visual effects, Double Negative, New Deal Studios; special effects supervisor, Scott Fisher; stunt coordinator, George Cottle; assistant director, Nilo Otero; casting, John Papsidera.
• With: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Ellen Burstyn, John Lithgow, Michael Caine, Casey Affleck, Wes Bentley, Bill Irwin, Mackenzie Foy, Topher Grace, David Gyasi, Timothee Chalamet, David Oyelowo, William Devane, Matt Damon.

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Interstellar Reviews

Humbling and epic in scope, designed and conceptualised brilliantly, but a tad too stand-off-ish emotionally. While the father-daughter dynamic works in parts, the Cooper–Brand relationship is never given the right treatment and collapses.

Full Review | Oct 17, 2023

This is a film where complex concepts of quantum physics and powerful human emotions are inextricably intertwined and the ghost that haunts the farmhouse has both a scientific explanation and a sense of supernatural power.

Full Review | Sep 9, 2023

"Interstellar" pushes the limits for personal interpretation of both science and fiction. Both elements are wildly heightened to a bold scale to address the internal opposites between logic and spectacle, science and sentiment, and brains and emotion.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 4, 2023

…uses sci-fi to go beyond into the philosophical and spiritual beyond that few other epics can reach….

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 27, 2023

Nolan’s most openly emotional film, he fully lived up to his “Stanley Kubrick’s eye and Steven Spielberg’s heart” identity with this grand sci-fi epic about the sheer force of will that we have for those we love.

Full Review | Jul 20, 2023

Interstellar utilizes science in a way that strives for authenticity in a science-fiction thriller and it's why we're still discussing the Christopher Nolan film today.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jul 18, 2023

As Robert Bresson once said, “I’d rather people feel a film before understanding it.” Interstellar moved me, and I didn’t find myself fact checking the science so I could complain on Twitter.

Full Review | Jun 23, 2023

Staggeringly beautiful, bafflingly complex, this is proper event cinema.

Full Review | Apr 4, 2023

The film demands quite a bit of time from its viewers too, but its big ideas and wondrous sights are ample reward.

Full Review | Feb 27, 2023

When Mann appears to explain man, it collapses under the weight of a repeated thesis that doesn’t merit such explicit, redundant reiteration.

Full Review | Jan 24, 2023

It’s a contemplative adventure and an emotional exploration that captivated me from its opening moments.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 22, 2022

Rarely do epics of this scope and intelligence reach theaters anymore; such serious commercial filmmaking seems like a market almost exclusively maintained by Christopher Nolan.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 30, 2022

While not all-together perfect, the film represents a monumental cinematic achievement that deserves to be placed high within the caliber of Nolan’s filmography.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | May 27, 2022

The inherent message of the film brings hope, but it can definitely get waterlogged by intellectual speak and long-winded scenes.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 9, 2021

The film is indeed a sight to behold -- and one that demands to be seen on the biggest possible screen.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Aug 10, 2021

Nolan reaches for the stars with beautifully composed shots and some mind-bending special effects, but the dime store philosophy of the story never achieves lift off.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 2, 2021

Audiences are sure to lose their suspensions of disbelief over the nearly impenetrable climax.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Dec 4, 2020

...an often insanely ambitious science fiction epic that that remains mesmerizing for most of its (admittedly overlong) running time...

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 20, 2020

Scientists will debate, theologians will contemplate, philosophers will wonder, and cinema lovers will bask in the glory of another remarkable Christopher Nolan achievement.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4.0 | Sep 12, 2020

A big-budget reprise of ideas Nolan has been exploring since the beginning of his career. Not only is it a film about the passage of time, it's also a film about memory.

Full Review | Sep 3, 2020

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• Entertainment
• Movie Review

'Interstellar' review

• By Josh Dzieza
• on October 27, 2014 12:07 pm
• @joshdzieza

From the opening scenes of sprawling cornfields accompanied by a revelrie-like brass note, it’s clear that Interstellar is working in the tradition of 2001: A Space Odyssey . It has the grand scope of Kubrick’s classic, promising to take us from humanity’s past to its distant future, and proceeds with the same stately pace that encourages you to ponder the themes it offers along the way. It throws out plenty to think about — the nature of time and space, the place of humanity in the universe — but somewhat unexpectedly for this type of film, and for Christopher Nolan, whose work tends toward the cerebral, it explores these ideas in human terms. Interstellar is as interested in how general relativity would affect your family life, for example, as it is in the theory itself.

Before you proceed: this review has a few spoilers, but nothing beyond what you’d glean from the preview and the first ten minutes or so of film. Turn back now if you care about that sort of thing.

Directed by Christopher Nolan ( Memento , Inception , the most recent Batman trilogy) and written with his brother and frequent collaborator Jonathan, Interstellar takes place in a near future that harkens back to the recent past — like the 1950s Midwest or maybe the Dust Bowl, but with laptops and drones. There’s very little exposition; through telling details and offhand comments, you get the sense that there’s been an environmental disaster followed by a famine, and that humanity has scaled back its ambitions to bare subsistence. People farm corn — the one crop left unravaged by blight — watch baseball games in half-empty stands, and flee towering haboob dust storms announced by air raid sirens.

Matthew McConaughey plays Cooper, a NASA pilot who has turned to farming — like everyone else at the time, an odd cut to faux-documentary footage informs us. He lives in a ramshackle house, complaining to his father (John Lithgow) about humanity’s diminished horizons and doting on his daughter Murph, played by Mackenzie Foy with a believably teenage mix of mischief and exasperation.

McConaughey eventually leaves Foy and Earth behind to scout out a new home for for the human race, but it’s their relationship that grounds the movie. As action-filled as Nolan’s films are, they can sometimes feel abstract, like symbolic sublimations of some offscreen mental trauma. So many of his characters get their motivation from some prior loss — the dead wives from Memento and Inception, the dead parents of Batman — that they then work through according to the game-like rules Nolan excels at, whether those rules are imposed by amnesia, consciousness, or a supervillain. But Foy is an actual character, not a cipher, and the relationship between her and McConaughey gives the film an emotional heft that Nolan’s other work sometimes lacks.

Interstellar features some of the most beautiful images of space I’ve seen on film. Space feels vast, with the spinning white vessel often relegated to a corner of the screen or lost against the rings of Saturn. The depiction of a wormhole accomplishes the seemingly impossible and makes, well, nothingness look dazzling, as light slides and warps around it like water off a bubble of oil. The black hole is even more amazing. Present throughout the movie, it’s in these lingering shots of a tiny spacecraft floating through the galaxy that the influence of Kubrick’s Space Odyssey is most clearly felt.

Some of the most beautiful images of space I've seen on film

Not that it’s all languorous drifting through the galaxy. Nolan has a genius for landscape-scale action sequences, and the planets, with their alien weather and gravity, give him ample opportunity to stage them. The camera races and plunges and, especially in IMAX, creates classic theme-park pit-of-your-stomach thrills. There are gigantic waves, frozen clouds, and other dangers that feel threatening despite looking totally surreal.

The biggest danger the shuttle crew faces, however, is time. Time isn't just running out — it's compressing and stretching as they travel through space. The Nolans use relativity to create some original and urgent crises as the shuttle crew figures out how to best spend their shifting time. Time is a resource, like food or water, Hathaway warns. The time differential between the crew and those they left behind also gives rise to the movie’s most melancholy scenes. In this respect it feels less like Space Odyssey and more like Homer’s Odyssey , with McConaughey getting detained and delayed as time passes and things go wrong back home.

As in 2001 , things get trippy toward the end. Without revealing too much, I can say that after a series of mostly comprehensible events, it swerves into either deeply theoretical physics or sentimental spirituality. Possibly both. The shift is jarring, but also visually interesting enough that I mostly went with it.

There’s always the question with Nolan of what it all means. His movies tempt you to demand a thesis, partly because his characters always seem to be grasping for one. They talk almost aphoristically about the human condition, ghosts, time, evil, love, and other heavy but abstract things, and they quote Dylan Thomas a few too many times. Fortunately, McConaughey brings some wry levity to the role, as does the robot TARS, a toppling metal block with adjustable honesty and humor settings, voiced by Bill Irwin. Ultimately I took the grander bits of dialogue as thematic signposts, telling you to keep your head at the level of death and humanity and time but not meaning much in themselves.

Which is fine. The movie is most powerful when it’s at its least abstract — when it’s working through the messy decisions and sacrifices that actual interstellar travel would entail, finding dramatic potential in the laws of physics. Interstellar is sometimes confusing, melodramatic, and self-serious, but Nolan managed to make a space epic on a human scale.

Interstellar opens November 5th.

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Interstellar Review

Time is a circular circle..

Interstellar is an imperfect film, but like its central characters, aims about as high as one can. The ambition, execution, and craftsmanship are all to be admired. As the filmmaker intended, this is an experience that one can only truly have in the theatre itself and it is one worth having. Though, as mentioned, Interstellar also has the potential to become a highly divisive film. Ultimately, the viewers takeaway will likely come down to their emotional response. [poilib element="accentDivider"] Roth Cornet is an Entertainment Editor for IGN. You can chat with her on Twitter: @RothCornet , or follow Roth-IGN  on IGN.

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• Entertainment
• Review: <i>Interstellar</i> Shows the Wonder of Worlds Beyond

Review: Interstellar Shows the Wonder of Worlds Beyond

“We’ve forgotten who we are,” says Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper. “Explorers, pioneers — not caretakers.” That could be Christopher Nolan speaking about movies in this timid age of old genres endlessly recycled and coarsened. He’s the rare filmmaker with the ambition to make great statements on a grand scale, and the vision and guts to realize them.

Nolan is also a consummate conjuror. Memento, his amnesiac movie, ran its scenes in reverse order. In The Prestige, magicians devised killer tricks for each other and the audience. Inception played its mind games inside a sleeper’s head, and the Dark Knight trilogy raised comic-book fantasy to Mensa level. But those were the merest études for Nolan’s biggest, boldest project. Interstellar contemplates nothing less than our planet’s place and fate in the vast cosmos. Trying to reconcile the infinite and the intimate, it channels matters of theoretical physics — the universe’s ever-expanding story as science fact or fiction — through a daddy-daughter love story. Double-domed and defiantly serious, Interstellar is a must-take ride with a few narrative bumps.

In the near future, a crop disease called “the blight” has pushed the Earth from the 21st century back to the agrarian 1930s: the world’s a dust bowl, and we’re all Okies. In this wayback culture, schools teach that the Apollo moon landings were frauds, as if America must erase its old achievements in order to keep people from dreaming of new ones.

Farmer Coop, once an astronaut, needs to slip this straitjacket and do something. So does his daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy); she’s getting “poltergeist” signals from her bookshelves. A strange force leads them to a nearby hideout for NASA, whose boss, Dr. Brand (Michael Caine), drafts Coop to pilot a mission to deep space. With Brand’s daughter Amelia (Anne Hathaway) and two others as his crew, Coop is to find a wormhole near Saturn that may provide an escape route for humanity. “We’re not meant to save the world,” Brand says. “We’re meant to leave it.”

Coop, a widower, wasn’t meant to leave his children. Son Tom (Timothée Chalamet) can manage; but the precocious Murph sees abandonment and betrayal in Dad’s journey to save billions of humans. Coop, who thinks a parent’s main role is to be “the ghosts of our children’s future,” shares Murph’s ache. He needs her. He goes out so he can come back.

What’s out there? New worlds of terror and beauty. Transported by the celestial Ferris wheel of their shuttle, Coop and the crew find the wormhole: a snow globe, glowing blue. One planet it spins them towards has a giant wall of water that turns their spacecraft into an imperiled surfboard. Another planet, where treachery looms, is icy and as caked with snow granules as Earth was with dust. Interstellar may never equal the blast of scientific speculation and cinematic revelation that was Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, but its un-Earthly vistas are spectral and spectacular.

Someone on the icy planet says, “Our world is cold, stark but undeniably beautiful.” Shuttling between the grad-school blackboard and the family hearth, this undeniably beautiful film blows cold and hot, stark and sentimental by turns. Taking the visual wow factor as a given, you may feel two kinds of wonder: a child’s astonishment at the effects and a bafflement that asks, “I wonder why that’s happening.”

It’s not just that the rules of advanced physics, as tossed out every 15 minutes or so, are beyond the ken of most movie-goers. It’s also that some scenes border on the risible — a wrestling match in space suits — and some characters, like Amelia, are short on charm and plausibility. In story terms, her connection with Coop is stronger than that of the two astronauts in Gravity. But Sandra Bullock and George Clooney gave their roles emotional heft, in a film more approachable and affecting than this one.

If the heart of Interstellar is Coop’s bond with Murph, its soul is McConaughey’s performance as a strong, tender hero; in the film’s simplest, most potent scene, he sheds tears of love and despair while watching remote video messages from his kids. He is the conduit to the feelings that Nolan wants viewers to bathe in: empathy for a space and time traveler who is, above all, a father.

With Interstellar, Nolan’s reach occasionally exceeds his grasp. That’s fine: These days, few other filmmakers dare reach so high to stretch our minds so wide. And our senses, all of them. At times, dispensing with Hans Zimmer’s pounding organ score, Nolan shows a panorama of the spacecraft in the heavens — to the music of utter silence. At these moments, viewers can hear their hearts beating to the sound of awe.

Go Behind the Scenes of Interstellar

Read next: Watch an Exclusive Interstellar Clip With Matthew McConaughey

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Interstellar

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

It’s damn near three hours long. There’s that. Also, Interstellar is a space odyssey with no UFOs, no blue-skinned creatures from another planet, no alien bursting from the chest of star Matthew McConaughey . It reveals a hopeful side of filmmaker Christopher Nolan that will piss off Dark Knight doomsayers. And, hey, didn’t Alfonso Cuarón just win an Oscar for directing Gravity ? How long are audiences expected to get high on rocket fumes?

Blah, blah, blah. Bitch, bitch, bitch. What the neg-heads are missing about Interstellar is how enthralling it is, how gracefully it blends the cosmic and the intimate, how deftly it explores the infinite in the smallest human details.

Of course, Nolan has never been the cold technician of his reputation. Watch  Memento again, or The Prestige , or the undervalued Insomnia . The sticking point here is that Interstellar finds Nolan wearing his heart on his sleeve. Nothing like emotion to hold a cool dude up to ridicule. But even when Nolan strains to verbalize feelings, and the script he wrote with his brother Jonathan turns clunky, it’s hard not to root for a visionary who’s reaching for the stars.

Which brings us to a plot full of deepening surprises I’m not going to spoil. The poster for Interstellar presents McConaughey surveying a wasteland. It’s meant to be Saturn, but it could just as well be Earth, where environmental recklessness has morphed the planet into a Dirt Bowl starving and choking its citizens.

Nolan spends the first third of the film in the American farm belt of the near future, introducing us to widower Cooper (McConaughey), a former test pilot, who depends on his father-in-law (John Lithgow) to help him raise 15-year-old son Tom (Timothée Chalamet) and 10-year-old daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy, superb). Like her dad, Murph is a rebel who refuses to buy into her school’s official dictum that the Apollo space program was a lie.

It’s when dad and daughter find the remnants of NASA, headed up by Cooper’s old boss Professor Brand (Michael Caine), that the story gains momentum. Cooper heads into space to find a new world to colonize, leaving behind two kids who may never forgive him.

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The physics lessons (Cal-tech’s Kip Thorne consulted) kick in when Coop captains the Endurance mother ship with a science team made up of Amelia ( Anne Hathaway ), Brand’s daughter; Romilly (David Gyasi); and Doyle (Wes Bentley). And don’t forget R2-D2 and C-3PO. Not really. The ex-military robots of Interstellar are called CASE and TARS. The great Bill Irwin voices TARS, a chatty monolith that looks like something out of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and sounds like that film’s HAL. (Note to viewers: Kubrick’s 1968 landmark and George Lucas’ Star Wars franchise are part of Nolan’s DNA. React accordingly.)

Next comes the wow factor that makes Interstellar nirvana for movie lovers. A high-tension docking maneuver. A surprise visitor. A battle on the frozen tundra. A tidal wave the size of a mountain. Cheers to Nolan and his team, led by cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema and VFX supervisor Paul J. Franklin ( Inception ). See Interstellar in IMAX, with the thrilling images oomphed by Hans Zimmer’s score, and you’ll get the meaning of “rock the house.”

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And yet it’s the final, quieter hour of Interstellar that gives the film resonance and lasting value. All the talk of black holes, wormholes and the space-time continuum take root in Coop when he realizes his two years in space have occupied 23 years on Earth. His children, the now-adult Tom (Casey Affleck) and Murphy ( Jessica Chastain ), spill out decades of joys and resentments in video messages that Coop watches in stunned silence. McConaughey nails every nuance without underlining a single one of them. He’s a virtuoso, his face a road map to the life he’s missed as his children bombard him with a Rorschach test of emotions.

In case you haven’t noticed, McConaughey is on a roll. And he partners beautifully with the sublime Chastain, who infuses Murph with amazing grit and grace. Familial love is the topic here, not the romantic or sexual kind. How does that figure into space exploration? Nolan gives Hathaway a monologue about it. But dialogue is no match for the flinty eloquence shining from the eyes of McConaughey and Chastain. They are the bruised heart of Interstellar, a film that trips up only when it tries to make love a science with rules to be applied. In 2001, Kubrick saw a future that was out of our hands. For Nolan, our reliance on one another is all we’ve got. That’s more the stuff of provocation than a Hallmark e-card. Nolan believes it’s better to think through a movie than to just sit through it. If that makes him a white knight, Godspeed.

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Interstellar, common sense media reviewers.

Ambitious intergalactic drama focuses on a father's promise.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Ultimately this is a story about the fierce love b

Cooper is an attentive, responsive father who talk

Several scenes of intense, impending peril -- part

Two adults kiss in celebration.

Strong language is infrequent but includes one or

Dell Latitude computer, several close-ups of a Ham

Parents need to know that Interstellar is a compelling sci-fi thriller/poignant family drama directed by Christopher Nolan ( The Dark Knight ) and starring Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway. As in Gravity , there are nail-bitingly intense (and life-threatening) sequences that take place in…

Positive Messages

Ultimately this is a story about the fierce love between a parent and his children. It explores the power of the intangible, unquantifiable feeling of love; the good of the man versus the good of mankind; and the certainty that there's more in the universe than we can possibly understand. The opening lines from Dylan Thomas' poem, "Do not go gentle into that good night," are repeated again and again as a reminder to not be complacent or accept death when there's a possible solution that could save your life. Cooper encourages his children to look hard for the answers to their questions.

Positive Role Models

Cooper is an attentive, responsive father who talks things through with his kids and always answers their questions. He sacrifices time with them in order to help the entire population of Earth, but he never forgets his promise to return to them. Amelia and her father believe in the virtue of sacrificing yourself for the good of the mission, but in the end, Amelia also understands that love needs to be taken into account, not just hard science. Murphy never stops looking for a way to explain her father's absence or to rescue the people of Earth.

Violence & Scariness

Several scenes of intense, impending peril -- particularly the parts of the movie that take place in space. Several characters die -- mostly in space, but one on Earth as well. Characters are usually killed by a hostile environment, but one dies of natural causes. Two men get into a dangerous physical confrontation in space.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Strong language is infrequent but includes one or two uses of "s--t," "a--hole," "son of a bitch," "dumb ass," and "f--king."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Dell Latitude computer, several close-ups of a Hamilton watch.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Interstellar is a compelling sci-fi thriller/poignant family drama directed by Christopher Nolan ( The Dark Knight ) and starring Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway . As in Gravity , there are nail-bitingly intense (and life-threatening) sequences that take place in space, but this is more than a survival tale: It's a relationship story about a father who has made a promise to his children to return to them, no matter what. The layered themes, intergalactic peril, and references to astrophysics may prove too dark and complicated for elementary school-aged tweens, but middle-schoolers and up will be drawn in by both the science and the parent-child bond that guides the central characters to keep searching for a way to reunite. Characters do die (both in space and on Earth), and there's some language ("s--t," one "f--king," etc.). To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

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Community Reviews

• Parents say (43)
• Kids say (181)

Based on 43 parent reviews

Awesome movie. Kids will love it for different reasons as they grow up.

What's the story.

Director Christopher Nolan 's INTERSTELLAR takes place in a future in which severe drought has killed most of the world's crops, and humans are dying of starvation and disease on a doomed, dust-covered Earth. Cooper ( Matthew McConaughey ) is a former pilot/engineer who, like the majority of Americans, has had to trade in his defunct career to work as a farmer. Coop's love of science is evident in his young daughter, Murphy ( Mackenzie Foy ), who swears there's a ghost in her bedroom leaving her messages in code. Coop is unbelieving at first but then helps Murph decipher one of the codes, leading them to a secret lab run by Professor Brand ( Michael Caine ), who heads what's left of NASA. Brand reveals that they sent a group of scientists through a wormhole leading to another galaxy -- and that now a small group of brave souls must embark on a mission to see whether any of those scientists found an inhabitable planet. Brand convinces Coop to be the life-and-death mission's pilot, with the understanding that his time spent in outer space could mean missing many years on Earth (one hour on one planet equals seven years on Earth) -- years that he'd be away from his children. As the team tries to survive unthinkable odds, back on Earth, Murph grows into a brilliant scientist ( Jessica Chastain ) obsessed with finding her lost-in-space father.

Is It Any Good?

Unless you're well-versed in the physics of wormholes, don't expect to understand the intricacies of Interstellar' s science. And there's a lot of science, most of which sounds unbelievable, but it gets the story where Nolan and his brother Jonathan (who co-wrote the film), need it to go -- from the dust-smothered and scorched Earth to the dangerous outer reaches of space. The visuals are gorgeous, and not just in space, where Coop and his fellow astronauts -- Amelia ( Anne Hathaway ), Doyle ( Wes Bentley ), Romilly (David Gyasi), and the wise-cracking militarized robot, TARS, voiced by Bill Irwin -- travel from planet to planet, but also back on Earth, where time is passing so quickly that Coop's now grown children have all but lost faith that they'll see him again.

Occasionally the time-bending storyline starts to feel like it's stretching time for viewers as well, but somehow the missions -- both the one to save mankind and Coop's personal one to see his kids -- are compelling enough to keep audiences interested. McConaughey balances the line between dead serious, sarcastic, and heartfelt, and he plays well off of his co-stars (particularly his space team). Both the young and adult versions of Murphy are perfectly cast, and Caine -- whose professor has a penchant for quoting Dylan Thomas' poem "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" -- provides elder-statesman gravitas as he did in Nolan's Batman films. As Hathaway's character explains, love is a force that transcends time and space, so if you feel invested in Coop's promise to Murphy (and, to a lesser degree, his son, who grows up to be played by Casey Affleck ), you'll forgive some of the confusing and convenient plot loops and concentrate on the possibility that at some point, this father will embrace his children again.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how Interstellar is similar to, and different from, other serious/thoughtful space movies -- like Gravity , Contact , and 2001: A Space Odyssey . How would you describe it to friends -- as a sci-fi movie, a thriller, a family drama, or what?

Does the violence in the movie seem less upsetting when it's man vs. nature instead of man vs. man? Why do you think Professor Brand keeps quoting Dylan Thomas' poem "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night"? What does the poem mean?

Director Christopher Nolan is known for movies with psychological themes that play with time, space, memory, etc. How is Interstellar like his previous films? How is it a departure?

How would you describe the parent/child relationships in this movie? Are they realistic? Relatable?

Movie Details

• In theaters : November 5, 2014
• On DVD or streaming : March 31, 2015
• Cast : Matthew McConaughey , Anne Hathaway , Jessica Chastain
• Director : Christopher Nolan
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Paramount Pictures
• Genre : Science Fiction
• Topics : Space and Aliens
• Run time : 169 minutes
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Interstellar review: Nolan’s biggest spectacle – and biggest disappointment

Matthew McConaughey stars in this colossal space adventure that is as visionary as Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, but not nearly so subversive Full coverage: Interstellar

M ost film-makers think small or medium. Not Christopher Nolan , for whom even big or bigger won’t cut it. His new picture is his biggest: biggest event, biggest spectacle, biggest pastiche, biggest disappointment. It’s a colossal science-fiction adventure avowedly in the high visionary-futurist style of Kubrick’s 2001, but sugared up with touches of M Night Shyamalan. Nolan takes on the idealism and yearning from 2001, but leaves behind the subversion, the disquiet and Kubrick’s real interest in imagining a post-human future. What interests Nolan more is looping back to a sentimentally reinforced present.

Interstellar is a muscular, ambitious film with bang-per-buck visuals that broadly make up for the moderate acting and toenail-extracting dialogue. Nolan’s stars are Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway and Michael Caine, who have not exactly been encouraged to leave their performance comfort zones, or divert from their usual acting orbit trajectories. McConaughey can be entirely insufferable, though there is one real emotional coup in Interstellar that has been slightly overlooked in the Enronising hype the movie has triggered so far.

A global food crisis has turned America into a coast-to-coast dustbowl of unproductive emergency farmland. McConaughey plays Cooper, a retired Nasa pilot who, like every other adult, has had to turn to the soil: he is a widower living with two tricky kids, Tom (Timothée Chalamet) and Murph (Mackenzie Foy), and his grumpy father-in-law Donald (John Lithgow).

Cooper is furious at the world’s dreary earthbound dullness, and that his kids’ school teaches that the Apollo moon missions were a hoax designed to bankrupt the Soviets. He is rightly disgusted at this nonsense: I would have liked to have heard a more explicit speech attacking it, and incidentally making it clear that space exploration was not what did for the Soviet economy. Weird Shyamalanesque signs lead Cooper to a top-secret research station where his old Nasa boss Dr Brand (Caine) tells his stunned ex-employee that Earth is finished, but that a recently discovered “wormhole” in the space-time continuum looks likely to lead us to other habitable planets for resettlement – and that Cooper surely has the Chuck-Yeagerish Right Stuff to lead an expeditionary space-team right away , without training or preparation. His crew will include Brand’s daughter, the comely and borderline-preposterous Amelia (Hathaway), along with Doyle (Wes Bentley) and Romilly (David Gyasi).

They get the regulation white suits, Nixon-era tech, long-sleep hibernation routines, flickery video messages from home and standard-issue talking robot called Tars, who is quirky but obedient – basically Hal 2D2 . Wormholes are presented in this film as different from, say, wizards or unicorns : they are supposed to be scientifically real. Kind of. Nolan has been inspired by the work on this subject by the theoretical physicist Kip Thorne from Caltech, who is not just scientific consultant but executive producer, a credit that may be intended as an extra-textual guarantee of authenticity. But, inevitably, these wormholes do the traditional narrative work of a warp drive or time machines. When McConaughey thinks of something mathematically brilliant to do with gravitational pull and fuel consumption, he writes it on his little spaceship whiteboard and Hathaway says frowningly: “Yeah. That’ll work!” It’s all you can do not to smile at our two rocket scientists.

Nolan contrives a great scene: Cooper comes out of the hole to find that time has slipped forward decades while he’s been away hours and 20 years’ worth of backed-up video messages reveal that his little kids have turned, in the blink of an eye, into two middle-aged adults, played by Casey Affleck and Jessica Chastain: angry and embittered in their own ways by their abandonment. With some psychological acuity, Nolan shows that grownup Tom is permanently trapped in psychological defeat. But all the rest is mannerism and starburst portentousness, underscored by Hans Zimmer’s score that toys playfully with Straussian themes but relies on heavy, wheezingly religiose, organ-type chords.

The appearance of Interstellar is a moment to reflect that Kubrickian sci-fi, like Loachian social-realism of the same 60s period, was once rooted in the real world: social-realist films could change the law, and sci-fi reflected and even inspired a world in which the moon really was about to be conquered, and everyone assumed that manned space exploration would continue onwards at the same rate. Today, this is a lost futurism. What remains is style, and Nolan has got plenty of that. He gives us more of his signature universe-manipulations, in which the ground or sea will turn up 90 degrees, like a surreal cliff-face: huge, dreamlike and wrong. It’s exhilarating. But Interstellar’s deep space turns out to be shallower than we expected.

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Interstellar Review

07 Nov 2014

166 minutes

Interstellar

Warning: this review contains mild spoilers

Christopher Nolan is a director whose name has, quite literally, become synonymous with realism. The Nolanisation of cinema, which made the gloomy streets of Gotham a bridge between the fantastical and the commonplace, now grounds countless fancies within the mud of our reality. With Interstellar, arguably his first ‘true’ science-fiction project, Nolan inverts expectation once again, with a film rooted in the mundanity of maths homework but spliced with the fantastic.

Born a year after the Apollo landing, Nolan grew up in the aftermath of the space race, when young eyes still turned upwards in wonder. Decades later, with the Space Shuttle decommissioned and children staring blearily down at the glow of their smartphones, it’s his disappointment at NASA’s broken promise that forms the driving force behind Interstellar.

Opening, tellingly, on a dusty model of the shuttle Atlantis, the film’s near-future setting sees humanity starving, squalid and devoid of hope. Eking out an existence in a post-millennial Dust Bowl, Matthew McConaughey ’s Cooper and his two children — ten year-old daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy) and her older brother Tom (Timothée Chalamet) — lead a life of agrarian survivalism (while, hearteningly, still reading a great many books). But in Cooper we find a new man cut from old cloth: an all-American hero pulled straight from Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff. Played with a drawling, Texan swagger underpinned by startling emotional depth, he is Nolan’s most traditional lead to date, embodying the wide-eyed wonder of the director’s youth; a man for whom we are “explorers and pioneers, not caretakers”, who casts his lot among the stars as the human race’s last, best hope.

With the ailing Blue Planet left behind, Interstellar shifts smoothly into second gear. The black abyss rolls out like Magellan’s Pacific; an unknowable frontier, final in a way that Roddenberry’s never was. According to über-boffin co-producer Kip Thorne, the spherical wormhole (it’s three-dimensional, obviously) and the spinning event horizon of the film’s black hole (named Gargantua) are mathematically modelled and true to life. Sitting before a 100-foot screen, though, you won’t give a toss about equations because Nolan’s starscape is the most mesmerising visual of the year. Gargantua is as captivating as it is terrible: an undulating maelstrom of darkness and light. Like the Hubble telescope on an all-night bender, this is space imagined with a dizzying immensity that would make Georges Méliès lose his shit.

The planets themselves are no less spectacular. Let The Right One In cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema (replacing Nolan regular Wally Pfister) captures the bleak expanse of southern Iceland as both a watery hell with thousand-foot waves and an icy expanse where even the clouds freeze solid. With more than an hour of footage shot in 70mm IMAX, you’ll want to park your arse in front of the biggest screen available to fully appreciate the spectacle.

In contrast to the grandeur of space, the ship itself is a scrapyard mutt. Modular and boxy, the Endurance looks like an A-Level CDT workshop, with no hint of aesthetic flourish or extraneous design. Ever the practical filmmaker, Nolan has constructed a functional, utilitarian vessel. Its robotic crew-members, TARS and CASE, are ’60s-inspired slabs of chrome; AI encased in LEGO bricks that twist and rearrange (manually operated by Bill Irwin — there’s no CG trickery here) to perform complex tasks with minimalist efficiency.

Beneath Interstellar’s flawless skin, the meat is bloodier and harder to chew. The science comes hard and fast, though Nolans Christopher and Jonah shore up the quantum mechanics with generous expository hand-holding. Astrophysics is the vehicle not the destination, however, and Interstellar’s gravitational centre is far more down to Earth. Embodied by Dylan Thomas’ Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night (quoted in the film at several points), this is a defiant paean to the human spirit that first took man to the stars. But far more than Thomas’ villanelle, Interstellar scales the heights and plumbs the depths of humanity, pitting the selfish against the selfless, higher morality against survival instinct. As Cooper, scientist Brand (Anne Hathaway) and crew draw closer to their destination, complications require tough decisions; the sanctity of the mission wars with the hope of a return trip. That the undertaking isn’t quite as advertised doesn’t come as a shock, but the cruelty of the deception lands like a body blow. Nature isn’t evil, muses Brand (played with soulful nuance by Hathaway). The only evil in space is what we bring with us.

When Interstellar began life back in 2006, Steven Spielberg, not Nolan, was the man in the cockpit; a presence still felt in the relationship between Cooper and Murph. The betrayal of a child abandoned is potent from the outset but the guilt is magnified tenfold when the Endurance’s first stop, within the influence of the black hole, means that a few hours stranded planet-side result in two decades passing back on Earth. Cooper’s tortured face as he watches his family unspool through 20 years of unanswered video missives is agony, raw and unadorned. Beneath everything else, this is a story about a father and his daughter, the ten-year-old giving way to Jessica Chastain ’s adult in the blink of a tear-filled eye.

With the endless pints of physics chased by shots of moral philosophy, Interstellar can at times feel like a three-year undergraduate course crammed into a three-hour movie. Or, to put it another way, what dinner and a movie with Professor Brian Cox might feel like. The final act compounds the issue, descending into a morass of tesseracts, five-dimensional space and gravitational telephony. It’s a dizzying leap from the grounded to the brain-bending that will baffle as many viewers as it inspires. More than the monolithic robot and his sarcastic, HAL-nodding asides (“I’ll blow you out of the airlock!”), it’s the psychedelic, transcendental climax that feels most indebted to Kubrick’s 2001; something that will undoubtedly prompt some to accuse Nolan of disappearing up his own black hole.

Inception posed questions without clear answers. Interstellar provides all the answers — you just might not understand the question. This is Nolan at his highest-functioning but also his least accessible; a film that eschews conflict for exploration, action for meditation and reflection. This isn’t the outer to Inception’s inner space (his dreams-within-dreams are airy popcorn-fodder by comparison), but it does wear its smarts just as proudly. Yet for the first time, here Nolan opens his heart as well as his mind. Never a comfortably emotional filmmaker, here he demonstrates a depth of feeling not present in his earlier work. It’s no coincidence that the film’s shooting pseudonym was Flora’s Letter, after Nolan’s own daughter. Interstellar is a missive from father to child; a wish to re-instil the wonder of the heavens in a generation for whom the only space is cyber. Anchored in the bottomless depths of paternal love, it’s a story about feeling as much as thinking. And if the emotional core is clumsily articulated at times (Brand’s “love transcends space and time” monologue being the worst offender), it’s no less powerful for it.

As a light-year-spanning quest to save the human race, this is the director’s broadest canvas by far, but also his most intimate. And against the alien backdrop of black holes, wormholes and strange new worlds, Interstellar stands as Nolan’s most human film to date.

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Den of Geek

Interstellar Review

Director Christopher Nolan’s long-awaited sci-fi epic Interstellar arrives. Read our review!

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“Haunting” is the word that keeps lingering as I reflect on Christopher Nolan’s new movie, Interstellar , over and over again in my mind. There is a somber tone to the film, an elegiac mood that is one of its most powerful assets. We feel the shroud of despair and apathy surrounding the people of Earth as it becomes clear that the planet is essentially turning against us, and we also experience the intense loneliness and isolation of the small crew of astronauts who travel an unimaginable distance on a last-chance mission to save the human race from extinction.

When Interstellar is at its best — which is frequent, but not constant — that mood has an emotional pull to it that bolsters the other plot elements which are designed to tug at your heart. It also suffuses the film’s often brilliant visuals, which effectively capture the grandeur of traveling across the universe while simultaneously detailing just how unimaginably small and alone we are against that vast and seemingly endless darkness. Nolan throws a lot of ideas — and a lot of movie — at us for Interstellar ’s nearly three-hour running time.

Matthew McConaughey stars as Cooper, a former NASA test pilot and widower who now runs a farm where he lives with his children Murph (Mackenzie Foy) and Tom (Timothee Chalamet), as well as his father-in-law Donald (John Lithgow). It’s the near future and an agricultural blight has descended upon the planet, destroying every crop but corn. There are hints that traditional institutions of society have been or are being dismantled as survival becomes the prime objective, but it’s undeniable that even that goal may elude humankind’s grasp.

The key to keeping the human race alive comes in the shape of a reconfigured remnant of NASA, to which Cooper and Murph are led to by a series of what must be described for now as inexplicable events. There they find a small team led by Professor Brand (Michael Caine) and his daughter Amelia (Anne Hathaway) who have detected the appearance of a wormhole near Saturn. Its origin is unknown, yet it was apparently meant to be found: it tunnels through time and space to a distant galaxy where planets exist that could support human life.

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Previous probes through the wormhole by solo explorers have returned ambiguous messages and data at best. Cooper is reluctantly persuaded by the Brands to pilot a new and perhaps final four-person mission, knowing that the titanic distances they travel will bend time in a way that decades may pass on Earth and Cooper may very well never see his children again. But the death of humanity is almost assured if a habitable planet — and a way to somehow transport our species there — is not found soon.

To delve much deeper into the plot (the script was co-written by Nolan and his brother and frequent collaborator Jonathan) would demand the revelation of spoilers that I’m not prepared to give away. But what happens throughout the rest of the film is a balancing act between the personal, emotional, and intimate story of Cooper and his family, and the larger canvas of what is easily the most complex “hard sci-fi” film in a long time. Cooper and his crew — Amelia plus scientists Romilly (David Gyasi) and Doyle (Wes Bentley) — venture to other worlds, grapple with the effects of relativity and even tangle with a black hole, while back home characters age, some die, and others strive to find their own answers to the same questions the crew of the Endurance are trying to solve untold light years from home.

Like many of Nolan’s films before this one — including The Dark Knight , Inception, and The Dark Knight Rises — the filmmaker’s desire to tell us as much story as he possibly can occasionally gets tripped up by both his own heavy-handedness, as well as leaps in logic or story structure that can test one’s suspension of disbelief. The Nolans’ script is big and ragged and feels bloated in some ways: there are scenes — most of them on Earth — that could be compressed or dismissed altogether with a cleverly thought-out image or perhaps a bit of exposition, although this is already an exposition-heavy movie. The director’s propensity for stacking up climaxes or set-pieces and then cross-cutting between them actually works to his detriment here (unlike, say, in Inception ), because it lessens the impact of what is happening in his main story, with Cooper and the crew (I hate to imagine a scenario where an actress like Jessica Chastain could have her role diminished considerably in a film, but that’s kind of the case here).

And yet despite those issues and a penchant for repetition when it comes to his key themes (by the fourth time we hear the main verse from Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” I found myself thinking, “Okay, we get it.”) I can’t help but be dazzled, occasionally moved by, and haunted (that word again) by Nolan’s galactic adventure. I ultimately have the same relationship with this movie that I have with most of his previous ones, especially the Batman blockbusters and Inception : their sheer ambition, production value, scope, and earnestness outweigh their flaws in the end.

Nolan to me is really a darker, more serious-minded and adult-oriented version of Steven Spielberg when he’s working in genre, only with two or three endings in his films instead of one contrived happy one that is grafted onto the story like a reverse appendectomy. He shares the same desire to go as big as possible and show the audience sights they’ve never seen before, and he believes in the story he’s telling and the theme he’s trying to get across, even if he lacks some of the skills necessary to transmit them as effectively as possible. And yet he is also still capable of a quietly devastating moment like the one in which the crew of the Endurance find out just how much of an effect the theory of relativity and the distortion of time has on one short trip to a planet’s surface (it all comes down to just two words of dialogue and nothing else).

There are some big ideas in the movie, and their visual components are handled brilliantly from start to finish. On a pure filmmaking level,  Interstellar is jaw-dropping and almost demands to be seen in IMAX. The film is so immersive that you will feel like you’re flying through that wormhole or plunging into that black hole. Cinematographer Hotye van Hoytema ( Her ) and production designer Nathan Crowley ( The Dark Knight Rises ) do a splendid job in creating and filming our blighted future Earth, the mysterious expanses of space and the surfaces of the planets that the Endurance visits. Nolan’s trademark requirement that everything be grounded and functional has led to a hybrid of miniatures, fully constructed sets, and CG that is pretty much seamless.

Once again, he has also surrounded himself with a strong cast who make the most out of roles that are, to some degree, more archetypal in nature. McConaughey shines as Cooper, playing a character who seems closer to the actor himself that some of his other recent work, and centering the film with his innate decency and everyman worldview. Hathaway is striking as Amelia Brand, whose icy, guarded exterior hides a vulnerable core. The scene-stealer of the lot is actor-comedian Bill Irwin, who controls the movement of the crew’s two robot companions, TARS and CASE, and voices TARS with a delightful blend of dry humor and matter-of-fact observational wit (CASE, who is the more reserved personality, is voiced by Josh Stewart).

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Credit also to composer Hans Zimmer, who likewise goes very big in his scores — especially for Nolan — and whose trademark style on the  Dark Knight   films has been aped and parodied for the past few years. The score here is just as grandiose, but he employs as his main instrument the organ, which provides the perfect musical equivalent for the film’s tone and can embody both the finality of death and the infinite mysteries of the heavens at the same time. I loved his work here — I’m a huge fan of the organ — even if the music and some of the sound effects frankly drowned out large swaths of dialogue at the screening I attended (although I understand that this was most likely an issue with the theater itself — the TCL Chinese in Hollywood — than the film).

Interstellar is a huge film and strives to do what science fiction does at its best: show us some truth about the human condition through the filter of scientific discovery or theory. It doesn’t succeed as well as it could; its worst moments are clunky and disjointed, but its finest moments are extraordinary. This is top-notch filmmaking by a director who wants to make the most ambitious film he can in whatever genre he’s working in. Interstellar may not be as mind-blowing as many of us hoped, and may be too manipulative for others, but Christopher Nolan reaches for the stars with this one, and his journey is just rich enough to keep us along for the ride.

Interstellar opens on IMAX screens on Wednesday, November 5 and in theaters everywhere on Friday, Nov. 7th.

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Don Kaye | @donkaye

Don Kaye is an entertainment journalist by trade and geek by natural design. Born in New York City, currently ensconced in Los Angeles, his earliest childhood memory is…

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• DVD & Streaming

Interstellar

• Action/Adventure , Drama , Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Content Caution

In Theaters

• November 5, 2014
• Matthew McConaughey as Cooper; Anne Hathaway as Amelia; Wes Bentley as Doyle; David Gyasi as Romilly; Jessica Chastain as Murph; Matt Damon as Dr. Mann; Mackenzie Foy as Young Murph; Michael Caine as Professor Brand; Casey Affleck as Tom

Home Release Date

• March 31, 2015
• Christopher Nolan

Distributor

• Paramount Pictures

Movie Review

Everything has its time, we’re told in Ecclesiastes. And for planet Earth, it’s time for death.

Not that you’d know it from a cursory glance. In fact, most folks hope the old girl is on the road to recovery decades after an environmental cataclysm wiped out most of the globe’s food supply. Now, severely depopulated and humbled, we’re getting back to the basics: growing food, maintaining shelter, spending time with family. A few of us might even take in a ball game on a lazy afternoon.

But a nitrogen-eating blight is again cutting down crops, one by one. Wheat, rice, okra … nothing survives the disease these days except corn, and that may not last much longer. Massive dust storms sweep across the land, choking out light and life alike. And even as people push through day by day, it seems society has lost something critical: it’s desire to explore, to search for something better.

“We used to look up in the sky and wonder at our place in the stars,” former astronaut Cooper says. “Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.”

And that place in the dirt for Coop means scraping together a living as a farmer instead of continuing his career as an astronaut. It means having to deal with his high-tech combines taking off in their directions instead of doing what he’s programmed them to do. And listening to his 10-year-old daughter, Murphy, saying there’s a ghost in her room. Then, when a dust storm blows through Murph’s open window, it seems the grime has made strange patterns on the floor … as if it—the dirt itself—was trying to tell them something.

It is, actually. And Coop discovers the dusty lines are binary code that, when translated, become coordinates on a map. When he and Murph go there, they find a massive, secret science facility—perhaps humanity’s last real hope. The scientists and engineers who work there, led by Coop’s old NASA associate Dr. Brand, have found a mysterious wormhole near Saturn that leads to a new galaxy. They’ve already sent a dozen intrepid scientists through the hole and to some promising planets beyond, but they need another ship to now shoot through, retrieve data from the 12 and return home with it.

And, Brand tells Coop, they could sure use a good pilot to fly the thing. If all goes well and the theory of relatively works as it ought, he could get back home in, oh, a few decades or so—looking no worse for wear and ready to save whatever’s left of humanity.

If not … well, Coop should give Murph an extra-long hug goodbye.

Positive Elements

Coop and the mission scientists, Amelia Brand (daughter of the good doctor), Romilly and Doyle, accept this bold mission through the wormhole in a selfless effort to save humanity. They do so without any guarantees of success or safety. They know the odds are long, but they’re determined to give it a shot.

But to undertake this worthwhile mission means Coop will leave behind his kids, whom he clearly loves more than anything. Throughout the movie we see just how much he cares for them, even from afar, and how much it hurts him to leave them. And even though Murph’s angry with her dad for leaving, the love the two share proves to be a pivotal element in the tale’s resolution. Indeed, Interstellar posits that love , not wormholes or black holes, is the mightiest force in the universe.

Spiritual Elements

One whole wall of Murph’s room is devoted to a bookshelf, and there are times when the thing seems to be a little haunted. Books tumble to the floor, seemingly on their own. A lunar lander model is knocked over. Murph tells her father that it’s a ghost. Coop says that ghosts aren’t real—but clearly something’s going on. So he asks Murph to document what she sees and treat it like a scientific problem.

[ Spoiler Warning ] Murph’s ghost does have a sorta-science-like explanation, as do all the other oddities we see here. For all its talk of love and its sometimes spiritual-feeling vibe, Interstellar appears to embrace a primarily humanist worldview. We hear references to evolution. And though scientists talk about a mysterious “they” helping us from a distant galaxy, neither god nor alien make an explicit appearance. Our saviors, the story suggests, are us.

Still, the initial flights through the wormhole to save humanity are called the Lazarus Projects, named after the man Jesus raised from the dead.

Sexual Content

Cooper is a widower. His father-in-law suggests he should woo a local teacher and do his part to repopulate the Earth. “Start pulling your weight,” he jokes.

Violent Content

Astronauts fight, one pushing another off a cliff, and the two wrestle in their space suits. One cracks the visor of the other’s helmet, hoping to murder him. Other folks expire in explosions. One is killed after being thrashed around by a giant wave of water. Humans and human-sounding robots sacrifice their lives/existences for what they see as a greater good.

We hear something of the disaster that befell Earth and know it must’ve resulted in catastrophic death. And we hear about/know about other, closer-to-home deaths as well, some of them natural, others not so much. Coop and his kids nearly drive into a lake while racing after a drone. Someone sets fire to a field of corn as a diversionary tactic. Someone else brandishes a tire iron.

Crude or Profane Language

One f-word, six s-words and a dribble of other profanities, including “a–,” “b–ch,” “d–n” and “h—.” God’s name is paired once with “d–n,” and Jesus’ name is abused twice.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Coop and his father-in-law share a beer.

Other Negative Elements

A scientist deceptively continues to tell folks for years that there’s hope for them, long after he’s given up on that dream and moved on to a colder, more heartless plan. Other characters also mislead, often for reasons they think are good. And even the computers have their “honesty” parameters set at 90% because (as one computer tells us) being completely honest with emotinal humans is often a mistake.

Whatever its faults, Interstellar does not lack ambition.

This epic story is director Christopher Nolan’s biggest movie to date, however you want to define the word “big.” (And that’s saying something, since this is the man responsible for The Dark Knight trilogy as well as Inception and Memento .) Interstellar is nearly three hours long. It’s visually massive. And it’s devoted to huge cosmological themes predicated on mind-bending physics. (Kip Thorn, one of the world’s foremost experts on the theory of relativity, was an executive producer.)

And it’s also about love conquering all.

It’s a fascinating film, even if it tries to do a little too much. And it will inspire lots of different reactions from moviegoers. Some will see the majesty of the universe and the mighty hand of God at work behind it all. Others may take it as a humanist-minded scientific screed, one that goes out of its way to say we’re on our own out here in interstellar space.

It seems pretty obvious that the movie wants its explanations to reside in the naturalistic, humanistic realm: There are no moments of divine transcendence here, not even the subtle nods we see in Gravity to the eternal soul and prayer. And yet, even for its lack of interest in theology, there’s still something deeply spiritual undergirding this work.

The adventure that Coop and his fellow scientists go on contains the barest of hints of biblical narrative: They, like Noah, are trying to save a remnant of creation. They, like Moses, are looking for a “promised land,” one seemingly pointed to via an incredibly providential wormhole. One, as a mirror of Jesus, sacrifices himself to save the world and is even figuratively resurrected long after he should be dead. In Interstellar , we see humanity’s “best” fail. And we see what we know to be God’s best for us, bound up in love and family, transcend every law of physics imaginable.

Love is a mystical but very real force in Interstellar . To see God behind it requires only one small step for moviegoers.

Interstellar has its problems, of course. Though it’s not designed to expand the PG-13 universe, the language can be sometimes a bit harsh, and flurries of violence are disquieting, especially given their unnatural-feeling contexts. And if that small step toward God I mentioned isn’t taken, the movie’s worldview becomes problematic as it sits undefined and unredeemed. So Interstellar is a film that practically demands discussion.

“Mankind was born on Earth,” Coop says, “but it was never meant to die here.” And the grandly scientific, often confusing concepts in Interstellar can’t be allowed to uncritically blink out of existence the minute we stand up during the credits either.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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'interstellar' review.

Interstellar is an imaginative movie, but a heavy-handed mix of personal sacrifice and theoretical physics doesn't leave much room for subtle storytelling.

Interstellar is an imaginative movie, but a heavy-handed mix of personal sacrifice and theoretical physics doesn't leave much room for subtle storytelling.

In the not-too-distant future of Interstellar , Earth has been ravaged by an environmental disaster known as the Blight - forcing humanity to abandon technology and the dreams of discovery, in order to focus on basic survival. To that end, former NASA pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a widowed father of two, is now a farmer tasked with growing one of the planet's last remaining sustainable crops: corn. In a time when humankind has been asked to put aside personal desire in the interest of a greater good, Cooper has attempted to make peace with farm life, providing for his teenage children, Tom (Timothée Chalamet) and Murph (Mackenzie Foy), as well as his aging father-in-law (John Lithgow). Yet, even as conditions become increasingly dire on Earth, Cooper's thirst for scientific discovery remains.

However, when Cooper is reunited with an old colleague, Professor Brand (Michael Caine), he is offered a new chance to fulfill an old ambition. Informed that the situation on Earth is much more serious than he previously knew, Cooper is asked to leave his family behind (in an increasingly dangerous world) and set out on an uncertain journey into space - to find humankind a new planet.

Director Christopher Nolan has built a career on cerebral storytelling - starting with his feature debut,  Following , in 1998. Since that time, the filmmaker has delivered one thought-provoking drama after another ( Insomnia , Memento ,  The Prestige , and Inception ) - while also setting a new bar for comic book adaptations with a contemplative three-film exploration of Batman (and his iconic villains). As a result, it should come as no surprise that Nolan's  Interstellar  offers another brainy (and visually arresting) moviegoing experience - one that will, very likely, appeal to his base (those who spent hours pouring over minute details in the director's prior works); however, it may not deliver the same casual appeal that made Inception  and The Dark Knight  cross-demographic hits.

Interstellar is an imaginative movie, but a heavy-handed mix of personal sacrifice and theoretical physics doesn't leave much room for subtle storytelling (or particularly memorable action). For a film that is rooted in the love between a father and his daughter, Interstellar  offers surprisingly cold (and often stiff) drama - albeit drama that is buoyed by high-minded science fiction scenarios and arresting visuals. Nolan relies heavily on lengthy scenes of surface-level exposition, where characters debate or outright explain complicated physics and philosophical ideas, to educate the audience and ruminate on humanity (both good and bad) in the face of death and destruction.

It's a smart foundation to juxtapose personal desire and our place in the larger universe - as well as evolved levels of understanding we have yet to achieve - but unlike Nolan's earlier works, the filmmaker's passion is most apparent in his science (based on the theories of physicist Kip Thorne) - rather than his characters. This isn't to say that Interstellar doesn't provide worthwhile drama, but there's a stark contrast between the lofty spacetime theories and the often melodramatic characters that populate the story.

Viewers who reveled in McConaughey's philosophical musings on  True Detective will find the actor treading similar territory as Cooper. McConaughey ensures his lead character is likable as well as relatable, and manages to keep exposition-heavy scenes engaging. Still, despite a 169 minute runtime, Interstellar never really develops its central heroes beyond anything but static outlines - and Cooper is no exception. Viewers will root for him, and come to understand what he cherishes and believes about humanity, but any major revelations come from what happens to him - not necessarily what he brings to the table or how he evolves through his experiences.

The same can be said with regard to the supporting cast. Everyone involved provides a quality turn in their respective roles, but they're shackled by straightforward arcs - limited exposition machines that add to the film's thematic commentary and/or advance the plot, but aren't particularly well-realized or as impactful as Nolan intends. To that end, in a cast that includes Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Casey Affleck, and Matt Damon, two of the most memorable characters are actually non-humans - quadrilateral-shaped robots, TARS and CASE, that aid the crew on their adventure (and inject much-needed humor into the proceedings).

Interstellar is also playing in IMAX theaters and the added charge is definitely recommended. Much of the film was shot with actual IMAX cameras and the filmmaker makes worthwhile use out of the increased screen space and immersive sound - especially when the crew visits alien worlds. IMAX won't be a must for all viewers, but given that the film's visuals (many of which relied on practical sets and effects) are one of Interstellar 's biggest selling points, moviegoers who are excited about Nolan's latest project shouldn't hesitate in purchasing a premium ticket.

Casual filmgoers who were wowed by the director's recent filmography may find that Interstellar  isn't as accessible as Nolan's prior blockbuster movies - and dedicates too much time unpacking dense scientific theories. Nevertheless, while the movie might not deliver as much action and humor as a typical Hollywood space adventure, the filmmaker succeeds in once again producing a thought-provoking piece of science fiction. For fans who genuinely enjoy cerebral films that require some interpretation, Interstellar  should offer a satisfying next installment in Nolan's well-respected career.

That said, for viewers who are simply looking to get lost in a thrilling adventure with memorable characters (from the director of Inception and The Dark Knight ), Interstellar  may not provide enough traditional entertainment value to balance out its brainy scientific theorizing. On many levels, it's a very good film, but  Interstellar  could leave certain moviegoers underwhelmed - and feeling as though they are three-dimensional beings grasping for straws in a five-dimensional movie experience.

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Interstellar  runs 169 minutes and is Rated PG-13 for some intense perilous action and brief strong language. Now playing in IMAX theaters with a full release Friday, November 7th.

Confused about Interstellar 's ending? Read our  Interstellar Ending & Space Travel Explained article.

Let us know what you thought of the film in the comment section below. If you’ve seen the movie and want to discuss details about the film without worrying about spoiling it for those who haven’t seen it, please head over to our  Interstellar   Spoilers Discussion . For an in-depth discussion of the film by the Screen Rant editors check out our  Interstellar  episode  of the  Screen Rant Underground Podcast .

Agree or disagree with the review? Follow me on Twitter @ benkendrick  to let me know what you thought of  Interstellar .

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Movie Review: Interstellar (2014)

• Howard Schumann
• Movie Reviews
• 18 responses
• --> November 9, 2014

When I was growing up, reading science fiction from such authors as Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke meant discovering new worlds of imagination and wonder. Sadly, what passes for science fiction today is mostly a reflection of a world imprisoned by fear. Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar , a visually thrilling film of almost three hours in length, does its best to recapture the wonder of space exploration as envisioned by its earliest dreamers, but even though it falls short, it has the courage to see the possibility of a world beyond our three-dimensional model, a world where love transcends time and space.

Co-written by Nolan and his brother Jonathan, Interstellar opens sometime in the future with the Earth in the midst of an environmental disaster and the survival of humanity threatened. Dust storms have destroyed the wheat harvests leaving only corn to save the planet from starvation. Cooper (Matthew McConaughey, “ Dallas Buyers Club ”), a single father and former NASA pilot, now works as a farmer to support his teenage son Tom (Timotheé Chalamet, “ Men, Women & Children ”) and daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy, “ The Conjuring ”). “We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars,” he tells his father-in-law (John Lithgow, “ The Campaign ”). “Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.”

Murph tells her dad, however, that she has seen a ghost in her room that hangs around her bookcase, disturbing objects. When this poltergeist sends a coded message with directions to an underground NASA base, Coop again begins to look up at the sky. He soon discovers that one of his old teachers, Professor Brand (Michael Caine, “ The Dark Knight Rises ”) directs the NASA facility and has a startling story to tell him. Years earlier, five-dimensional beings created a wormhole near the planet Saturn to allow mankind to be transported to a galaxy far, far away when it became necessary.

Initial probes identified three potential planets that might be capable of sustaining life and Brand wants Coop to pilot a large ring-shaped ship called The Endurance to rescue a stranded astronaut, find the most suitable planet for colonization, and complete the mission. One of the problems identified by Professor Brand, however, is that there is a nearby black hole that will skew time so that one hour spent on the planet’s surface is the equivalent of seven years on Earth.

To undertake the mission, Cooper must leave his son and daughter behind with uncertainty as to whether he will ever come back or what age his children will be when he returns. Though the parting is swift, it is not without tears. Leaving his family behind, Coop is accompanied by Professor Brand’s daughter Amelia (Anne Hathaway, “ Les Misérables ”), two astronauts (David Gyasi and Wes Bentley), and the android TARS (voiced by Bill Irwin). Stunning state-of-the art visual technology and the cinematography of Hoyte Van Hoytema bring outer space closer than ever.

We are stunned when the crew encounters mile-high tidal waves rolling over the ship, when we witness the docking with another ship that has spun out of control, visit a planet filled only with water, and another where the surface is blocked by frozen clouds in the atmosphere. There are also emotional high points. For example, when the abandoned astronaut, Dr. Mann (in a surprise appearance by a major star) is overjoyed at being rescued but soon loses his grip on reality. In another moving sequence, Cooper views communications from home that span a period of twenty years (Jessica Chastain plays his grown-up daughter) and realizes that his children have given up the idea of ever seeing him again.

Interstellar maintains its tension throughout but, unfortunately, is hampered by poor sound mixing, banal dialogue, and a convoluted story that gives your brain a good working over but is inordinately filled with scientific jargon that eventually becomes off-putting. McConaughey does a creditable job in the lead role, however, but somehow remains aloof and never quite draws us into his character. Both Hathaway and Chastain do the best with the roles they are given, but their characters are seriously undeveloped.

Regardless of its flaws, Interstellar is a welcome change from standard Hollywood fare and is definitely worth seeing. Though you may have other interpretations of its meaning, to me the film is about humanity turning away from what is crumbling before our eyes and, rather than endlessly reciting Dylan Thomas’ poem about “going gentle into that good night,” letting go of our rage and welcoming the ineffable beauty of the light.

Tagged: astronaut , Earth , explorer , family , space

I am a retired father of two living with my wife in Vancouver, B.C. who has had a lifelong interest in the arts.

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'Movie Review: Interstellar (2014)' have 18 comments

November 9, 2014 @ 2:29 am OKeeps

Contrary to what’s being said Interstellar is not Nolan’s best work.

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November 9, 2014 @ 2:46 am tropicslumberparty

To think humanity survival was because of one mans psychosis is a definite mind-trip.

November 9, 2014 @ 6:03 am Carl Sr.

What an exhausting movie. So much abstraction to comprehend it practically begs to be seen multiple times.

November 9, 2014 @ 3:24 pm Starth

Yep, and it absolutely needs to be experienced in a theater too.

November 9, 2014 @ 8:31 am Tamora

Beautiful movie.

November 9, 2014 @ 9:45 am Lowell

“Go big or go home” – Christopher Nolan

Not sure if he can top this but I can’t wait to see what he’s got planned for us next…

November 10, 2014 @ 12:34 am R3d M3rcury

The production is definitely big no doubt about it. The story however, pretty much follows the same recycled path we’ve walked before and is hampered with underdeveloped characters.

November 9, 2014 @ 9:58 am MattRiggins

This makes Gravity look like childs play. The sequence when McConaughey was trying to dock the ship to the spinning station was so much more intense than anything Bullock went through.

November 9, 2014 @ 3:27 pm Starth

The blackhole sequence was even more exhilarating.

November 9, 2014 @ 12:00 pm dickie

Matt Damon you selfish son of a bitch.

November 10, 2014 @ 5:57 pm Deb

That WAS such the surprise.

November 9, 2014 @ 6:31 pm Roman

Care to explain the ending to me?

November 9, 2014 @ 11:11 pm General Disdain

Absolutely.

November 9, 2014 @ 6:53 pm ZappaEnthusiast

I’m usually one to faun over the Hans Zimmer Chris Nolan collaboration but I thought the deafening bass overpowered a lot of the dialogue. Loved the movie otherwise.

November 12, 2014 @ 2:39 am Tom Watson

This review is pure fucking garbage. Hazy generalizations and plot summary. Just give up and put your time into something else.

November 12, 2014 @ 11:08 pm General Disdain

Like comment trolling, slick? Now go back to your hole lest we sic the billy goats on you . . .

November 19, 2014 @ 7:23 pm Howard Schumann

Sorry you didn’t like my review, Tom. Now if you could offer something constructive instead of childish insults, your comment might be of some use.

May 17, 2015 @ 9:15 pm Sick Boy

I liked “Interstellar” immensely but I cannot subscribe to its main premise – that it’s the humans who could or should carry life over to other worlds once this one is spent. Evolutionary speaking – humans cannot exist outside a pretty narrow margins set within the current biosphere, not without immense technological backup which is neither practical nor feasible. If anything is to be sent up there – it’s the viruses and the bacteria, lifeforms that have a much, much better shot at fast adapting to any new conditions they meet. And they’re already traveling with Voyagers I and II. If it’s not enough for some because it will not be your kids, just remember that we have more in common with viruses than any organic entity has with the inorganic ones.

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Exploring how Interstellar became a timeless masterpiece embedded in time

C hristopher Nolan's space adventure film Interstellar has left a lasting impact on cinema since it was released in 2014. Nolan's ability to blend complex narratives with stunning visuals and the acting prowess of its talented cast took audiences on a transcendent journey through the cosmos.

The film is about a near future where famines have ravaged Earth, and the human population has plummeted, facing extinction. Joseph Cooper, a former NASA pilot turned farmer along with a team of scientists, embarks on a perilous mission through a wormhole near Saturn.

As Earth's resources dwindle and the planet becomes increasingly uninhabitable, their objective is to find a habitable planet for humanity to colonize. However, for the mission, they must give the ultimate sacrifice of time to their loved ones.

Interstellar , starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Michael Caine, Jessica Chastain, and Matt Damon was praised by critics and audiences for its theme, ambition, and execution.

Interstellar 's storyline took the audience on an unforgettable journey

In 2067, humanity is on the brink of extinction due to ecocide. Former NASA pilot Joseph Cooper embarks on a daring journey through a wormhole near Saturn leading to three potentially habitable planets, each orbiting the supermassive black hole Gargantua. Copper and his team navigate the complexity of time dilation, relativity, cosmic uncertainty, and the mysteries of space to reach these planets.

The team makes the ultimate sacrifice of time with their loved ones, including Cooper who left his father and two children behind. They face perilous challenges and emotional trials, but the bond of love and sacrifice drives them forward.

During the mission, a few crew members die, some are left behind, and Cooper falls beyond the black hole's event horizon. However, the bond of love transcends space and time and gets Cooper back to his daughter after 89 years.

Interstellar provokes existential questions and explores humanity

It sensitively portrays a possible dystopia and warns about the desperate journey that humanity would have to take if we weren't cautious. The film also intrigued the future of human exploration, and the possibility and perhaps the necessity of interstellar travel.

Interstellar explores the interconnectedness of all existence and the lengths to which individuals would go to ensure the survival of their species and loved ones.

It engagingly blends science and humanity

Interstellar did not stay back from showcasing the rigor of science and mathematical complexity. To stay as true to science as possible, Nolan hired Kip Thorne, a theoretical physicist and Nobel Laureate as the scientific consultant and executive producer of the film.

The film kept the themes of love and humanity wrapped inside the wonders of scientific prowess. And eventually professed the use of science for progress but, with necessary caution.

Interstellar is inspired by several sci-fi books and films, most notably Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of the Arthur C. Clarke novel, 2001: A Space Odyssey .

Interstellar is an epic tale of love, loss, and redemption

Interstellar is not an action spectacle, it is a film about love and sacrifice. While it's set in space and has some of the most spectacular sequences put to film, at its heart the film is a love story between Cooper and his children.

The scientific complexity of the film is overwhelming, as it deals with the profound mysteries of the universe and the human condition. But Nolan seamlessly weaves it together with deeply emotional storytelling.

Cooper goes on a journey to save humanity but sacrifices the most important thing in his lifetime with his children. The perilous journey takes him to unknown worlds and puts him and his team against the ambiguity of space and time. But in the end, his special connection with his daughter Murph becomes the vessel to save humanity.

Love emerges as the central theme of the film, not just as a personal bond between characters, but as a cosmic force transcending space and time.

Interstellar's commitment to scientific accuracy

While Interstellar takes creative liberties for the sake of effective storytelling, it remains grounded in scientific theories and speculations. Caltech physicist and Nobel Laureate Kip Thorne and producer Lynda Obst conceived the scientific scenario and premise of the film.

Jonathan Nolan, after working on the script for four years, recommended his brother as a suitable director for the film. The result of these collaborations is a narrative that balances scientific realism with imaginative speculation, inviting audiences to contemplate the mysteries of the cosmos.

Interstellar utilizes Einstein's theory of relativity as the narrative cornerstone and references theories like Murphy's law , Tsiolkovsky Rocket Equation , time dilation, and the Einstein-Rosen bridge . It also features futuristic AI robots and spacecraft based on the International Space Station.

The final sequence of the film shows a human space habitat that resembles O'Neil's Cylinders , a theoretical space habitat model proposed by physicist Gerard K. O'Neil in 1976.

The film's scientific accuracy was praised by scientists like Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Michio Kaku, and several others.

Time Travel and exploring dimensions

Interstellar delves into the mind-bending concept of time travel with remarkable depth and ingenuity. The film uses the hypothetical concept of space travel through a wormhole and explores how time alters perception when astronauts venture near black holes.

Each minute spent on distant planets equates to days spent on Earth. Cooper's team mission on Dr. Miller's Ocean Planet lasted over a couple of hours, but in that time 23 years had passed on Earth. And Cooper is left crying in front of a screen playing video messages from his children, who are now grown adults.

The production teams also designed three spacecraft - the Endurance, a ranger, a lander, and two robots, CASE and TARS to showcase realistic machinery capable of exploring space and other dimensions. The works of renowned architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe heavily inspired the designs of these machinery.

The making of Gargantua for Interstellar

The film features a rapidly spinning supermassive black hole called Gargantua. It is orbited by potentially habitable planets that Cooper and team are set to explore.

To bring Gargantua to life the visual effects team referenced several academic journals on black holes under Thorne's supervision. The effects were created in Double Negative studio where engineers wrote new CGI rendering software to create accurate stimulations. Some individual frames took up to 100 hours to render, totaling 800TB of data.

Kip Thorne in his book, The Science of Interstellar has explained Gargantua in detail and mentioned that several of the visual effects were toned down severely from what it would've actually looked like.

Impending apocalypse on Earth

As a film set in 2067, Interstellar paints a bleak picture of the future . In the film, humanity is facing an existential crisis due to The Blight, an agricultural phenomenon that has caused widespread failure of crops and famine. It would soon increase the Nitrogen level to such an extent that everyone would die of suffocation.

This was due to a combination of environmental factors such as climate change, soil degradation, overpopulation, and the depletion of natural resources. The film is a cautionary tale against ecocide.

How Hans Zimmer's score breathed life into the film

Interstellar had three primary settings, the uncertainty of life on Earth , the emptiness of space, and the unforgiving nature of the new worlds. Hans Zimmer's score masterfully conveys the humane feelings in each setting.

In an interview, Hans Zimmer said that Nolan did not tell him the story of the film, instead gave him a letter that told the story of a father leaving his child for work. This simple prompt was converted into an epic score with the use of unconventional instruments, such as a 1926 Harrison & Harrison organ.

Zimmer also uses simple melodies to convey the emotions of love, desperation, and loss of time. The ticking sound every 1.25 seconds on the ocean planet sequence denoting the passing of one day on Earth is a testament to his genius.

Apart from Zimmer, Academy Award-winning audio engineers Gregg Landaker and Gary Lizzo, and sound editor Richard King worked on enhancing the audio experience of the film.

How did the Nolan Brothers write Interstellar?

Christopher Nolan wrote the script of Interstellar with his brother and frequent collaborator Jonathan Nolan, who went to the California Institute of Technology for the necessary research, where he studied relativity. He drew inspiration from dystopian films like Wall-E and Avatar to write a story about a dystopian future.

Chris Nolan after joining the project, did his research and worked and reworked the script with his brother. Together they even went to NASA to understand the workings of the space agency.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter , Nolan said the project was originally developed by Lynda Obsta, an astrophysicist at CalTeach, who is friends with Kip Thorne.

"The project was originally developed by Lynda Obst. She's great friends with Kip Thorne, an astrophysicist at CalTech, and their dream was to make a science-fiction film where the more outlandish concepts were derived from real-world science. They originally developed the film with Steven Spielberg at Paramount and they hired my brother to come up with a story and a script. He and I talk about everything, whether or not we're working on it together, so I'd been hearing about it over the four years he worked on it, and I really felt that there was an extraordinary opportunity there to tell a very intimate story of human connection and relationships and contrast it with the cosmic scale of the overall events."

Nolan continued:

"So when I had the chance to get involved, I wanted to jump on it because I feel that those kinds of opportunities are very few and far between, where you really see what something could be, in terms of what the balance is between the emotional side of the story and the scale of the thing, the vastness of what the story tries to encompass."

Interstellar's visual mastery and spectacle

Visually stunning and meticulously crafted, Interstellar has some of the most incredible sequences ever put on film. Every frame, from the vast emptiness of space to the majestic beauty of distant planets , is a work of art.

Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema shot the film on 35mm film in Panavision anamorphic format and IMAX 70mm photography .

Nolan's use of miniatures, practical effects, and innovative techniques, combined with Hoytema's use of lenses, and the awe-inspiring work by the visual effects team, creates an immersive cinematic experience that lingers long after the credits roll.

Final thoughts

The portrayal of space travel in Interstellar is both thought-provoking and visually stunning, cementing its status as a seminal work of science fiction cinema. Nolan's intricate storytelling challenges viewers to contemplate the fluid nature of time, captivates them in the majestic visual spectacle, and immerses them in the humane quest for survival in the face of existential threats.

The film weaves together profound themes of love and loss with masterful performances to create an unforgettable cinematic odyssey.

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Glen Powell’s starstruck dad told Matthew McConaughey he has a photo of him next to his bed

“I’m like, ‘Stop doing this, Dad. Whatever this is, stop.’”

Glen Powell still worries that his first encounter with Matthew McConaughey was not alright, alright, alright.

The Anyone but You star recalled meeting the Interstellar actor for the first time during his appearance on Friday's episode of The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon , explaining that at the time he and his father were visiting a Texas ranch owned by Richard Linklater, the filmmaker with whom he worked on Fast Food Nation , Everybody Wants Some , Apollo 10 ½ , and the upcoming Hit Man . (Linklater also made Dazed and Confused , The Newton Boys , and Bernie with McConaughey.)

“We’re taking a walk around the property, and I go, ‘Hey, can we go to the library where we kinda rehearsed all that stuff [for Everybody Wants Some ]?’” Powell said. “And [Linklater] goes, ‘Y’know, I think Matthew’s in there.’ And I said, ‘Matthew — maybe, maybe it’s McConaughey. Maybe it’s the Matthew.’ So I kinda open the door, and there’s this kinda sliver of light that hits this guy, and he’s like, ‘Hey, hey, woah, woah, hold on!’”

Todd Owyoung/NBC via Getty; Todd Owyoung/NBC via Getty

Powell said McConaughey was using the space to work on his memoir Greenlights . “He goes, ‘Wait, I know you, I know you. Glen, I know you,’” he remembered. “Then my dad did not see him yet. So he steps out into the light, out of the door, and then [McConaughey] goes, ‘Now, who are you?’ And my dad goes, ‘Oh, I have a picture of you next to my bed.’”

Powell was horrified. “I look at my dad. I’m like, ‘Stop doing this, Dad. Whatever this is, stop,’” he said before explaining the backstory behind his dad’s strange confession. “There’s this University of Texas magazine called The Alcalde . McConaughey is on the cover. So he goes, ‘No, no, no, I have the University of Texas magazine next to my bed.’”

Fortunately, McConaughey was as enthusiastic about the magazine. “Matthew goes, ‘That is my favorite photo shoot I have ever done in my whole life, lemme tell you,' and he grabs him by the shoulder, and they become best friends,” Powell said. "Very charming man."

Watch the full Tonight Show clip above.

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• ‘Godzilla X Kong’ Rises To $361M WW, ‘Kung Fu Panda 4’ Tops $400M & ‘Dune: Part Two’ Passes $660M; ‘Boy And The Heron’ Soars In China – International Box Office

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2024 Global Box Office Projection Revised Upwards By Analysts On Eve Of CinemaCon

Refresh for latest …: A busy holdover weekend for wide studio releases was led by the trio of Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire , Kung Fu Panda 4 and Dune: Part Two . And, in a soaring performance, Hayao Miyazaki’s Oscar winner The Boy and the Heron swooped into China helping the market set a new Qingming holiday record. 

Meanwhile, Best Picture Oscar winner Oppenheimer , boosted by its release in Japan, has now become Christopher Nolan’s biggest movie ever at the international box office .

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'Godzilla x Kong' Jump To $31M+; 'Monkey Man' Sees $10M+, 'First Omen' Still Jinxed With $8M+ - Sunday Box Office

Latin America leans in on horror and the prequel performed best in Mexico where it opened No. 3 with $1.6M. Rounding out the Top 5 are Indonesia ($700K), UK ($700K), Korea ($600K) and Brazil ($600K).

Also, Universal began rollout in just 27 markets on Dev Patel’s directorial debut, Monkey Man . The action thriller reached $2.6M in early overseas play, with the UK the top start at $1M (comping above the first John Wick ). The global bow is $12.7M . International markets will continue to be added over the next few weeks including France and Korea. 

Back to the behemoths, Warner Bros/Legendary’s Godzilla x Kong roared for another $59.3M in 69 overseas markets, seeing a 53% drop after Easter weekend’s very strong debut . The international cume is now $226M for $361.1M global through Sunday. Of the worldwide total, IMAX reps $34M.

In like-for-like offshore markets and using today’s exchange rates, the beasts are tracking 40% ahead of Godzilla , 23% higher than Meg 2: The Trench , 15% above both Dune: Part Two and M:I7 , 9% over Godzilla vs Kong and roughly on par with Kong: Skull Island .

France and Germany were new this session with $2.9M and $2.7M, respectively. The latter was 90% bigger than the launch of Godzilla vs Kong .

Elsewhere, after the sophomore session, GxK has topped the full runs of GvK and Kong: Skull Island in Latin America.

The Top 5 markets to date are China ($92.2M), Mexico ($23.7M), UK ($11.2M), India ($10.2M) and Australia ($7.4M).

There are still nine markets to open including the Middle East and Japan.

Universal/DreamWorks Animation’s Kung Fu Panda 4 added another three markets this weekend as staggered rollout continues. The frame came in at $27.4M in a total 76 (-34% in the holdovers). This lifts the international cume to $244.4M which is well above KFP3 and How to Train Your Dragon 3 at the same point in release. Globally, the cume is now $410.4M .

Among the new markets was New Zealand at $761K including previews. With $736K in Taiwan , where some cinema closures and aftershocks from last week’s devastating earthquake deterred some family moviegoing, the film delivered the biggest opening day of the franchise and the biggest animation opening of 2024.

In China , KFP4 also benefited from the Qingming Festival holiday, seeing strong uplift on Thursday and Friday. With $42.7M to date, the movie has now surpassed the lifetimes of  Frozen ,  Finding Dory ,  Sing, Toy Story 4, Moana  and  Minions: The Rise of Gru in the market. 

Mexico  added $2M this weekend for a cume through Sunday of $31.8M, performing well above previous titles in the franchise and now having topped the full runs of Puss in Boots: The Last Wish ,  Hotel Transylvania 3, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse  and  Inside Out.

In the  UK , there was strong midweek play during school holidays. The local cume is $16M, topping  Ice Age 5  and  Hotel Transylvania  and remaining No. 1 in the market. 

Top 5 to date are China ($42.7M), Mexico ($31.8M), UK ($16M), Germany ($13.3M) and Italy ($10.3M). 

Markets still to come include Korea on April 10.

Warner Bros/Legendary’s Dune: Part Two added $11.2M in 73 offshore markets for another good 42% drop. The overseas cume is closing in on $400M with $395.8M through Sunday. Globally, the total is $660.7M to date. IMAX’s worldwide cume is $139.4M, of which $75.1M is from international (in France, Dune 2 is now the second biggest IMAX title ever, behind Avatar: The Way of Water ).

Overall, the Top 5 international markets to date are China ($47.7M), UK ($46.3M), Germany ($37.6M), France ($36.4M) and Australia ($21.1M).

Universal’s Best Picture Oscar winner Oppenheimer , which released in Japan for the first time last weekend, has now become Christopher Nolan’s highest grossing film of all time internationally with $638.4M to date. The global total is now $968.3M .

Japan added $1.6M in its sophomore frame to total $5.5M to date. This is well above  Interstellar , in line with  Dunkirk  and just off  The Dark Knight Rises . It’s also ahead of Dune: Part 2 and double Dune at the same point in release. 

As we noted last weekend, the Japan release was delayed given sensitivity to the subject matter, however Oppenheimer was received with the biggest opening for a Best Picture Oscar winner since Lord of the Rings: Return of the King . The IMAX local total is $1.6M.

Sony’s Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire trapped another $7.1M from 31 markets for an offshore cume of $49.3M . Global is $138.2M through Sunday. Still to release are France, Brazil, Italy, Korea and Saudi Arabia. 

MORE…

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