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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..

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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.”.

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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.

movie review interstellar

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

Scott Foundas

  • Film Review: ‘Black Mass’ 8 years ago
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Interstellar

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

movie review interstellar

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

movie review interstellar

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

movie review interstellar

"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

movie review interstellar

…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

movie review interstellar

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

movie review interstellar

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

movie review interstellar

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

movie review interstellar

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

movie review interstellar

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

movie review interstellar

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

movie review interstellar

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

movie review interstellar

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

movie review interstellar

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

movie review interstellar

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

movie review interstellar

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

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

movie review interstellar

...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

movie review interstellar

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

movie review interstellar

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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Previous Story

  • Entertainment
  • Movie Review

'Interstellar' review

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

movie review interstellar

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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MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY , INTERSTELLAR

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

Review: Interstellar Shows the Wonder of Worlds Beyond

INTERSTELLAR

“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

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Interstellar Review

Time is a circular circle..

Interstellar Review  - IGN Image

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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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 Review

Interstellar

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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Interstellar

  • Paramount Pictures

Summary With our time on Earth coming to an end, a team of explorers undertakes the most important mission in human history; traveling beyond this galaxy to discover whether mankind has a future among the stars. [Paramount Pictures]

Directed By : Christopher Nolan

Written By : Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan

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Interstellar

Matthew McConaughey in Interstellar (2014)

When Earth becomes uninhabitable in the future, a farmer and ex-NASA pilot, Joseph Cooper, is tasked to pilot a spacecraft, along with a team of researchers, to find a new planet for humans. When Earth becomes uninhabitable in the future, a farmer and ex-NASA pilot, Joseph Cooper, is tasked to pilot a spacecraft, along with a team of researchers, to find a new planet for humans. When Earth becomes uninhabitable in the future, a farmer and ex-NASA pilot, Joseph Cooper, is tasked to pilot a spacecraft, along with a team of researchers, to find a new planet for humans.

  • Christopher Nolan
  • Jonathan Nolan
  • Matthew McConaughey
  • Anne Hathaway
  • Jessica Chastain
  • 5.6K User reviews
  • 486 Critic reviews
  • 74 Metascore
  • 44 wins & 148 nominations total

Trailer #4

  • Murph (10 Yrs.)

Ellen Burstyn

  • Murph (Older)

John Lithgow

  • Tom (15 Yrs.)

David Oyelowo

  • School Principal

Collette Wolfe

  • (as Francis Xavier McCarthy)

Bill Irwin

  • Professor Brand

David Gyasi

  • All cast & crew
  • Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

What Is Christopher Nolan's Best Film?

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  • Trivia To create the wormhole and black hole, Dr. Kip Thorne collaborated with Visual Effects Supervisor Paul J. Franklin and his team at Double Negative. Thorne provided pages of deeply sourced theoretical equations to the team, which then created new CGI software programs based on these equations to create accurate computer simulations of these phenomena. Some individual frames took up to one hundred hours to render, and ultimately the whole CGI program reached to eight hundred terabytes of data. The resulting visual effects provided Thorne with new insight into the effects of gravitational lensing and accretion disks surrounding black holes, and led to him writing two scientific papers, one for the astrophysics community, and one for the computer graphics community.
  • Goofs Two characters sustain a fall from an ice plateau, on a steep ice ramp, onto a shadowy ice platform. A moment later, a panoramic shot shows them fighting on a very different place.

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

  • Crazy credits The Warner Bros, Paramount, Syncopy and Legendary Pictures logos are brown and dusty, representing Earth's arid dry state in the film.
  • Alternate versions The 70mm IMAX version is two minutes shorter than the regular 70mm, Digital IMAX, 35mm, and digital projection versions. This is because the end credits are played in an abbreviated slide-show form (rather than scrolling from bottom to top), due to the size capacity of the IMAX platters, which can hold a maximum of 167 minutes of film.
  • Connections Featured in Trailer Failure: Interstellar (2013)
  • Soundtracks Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night (uncredited) Written by Dylan Thomas

User reviews 5.6K

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  • May 8, 2022

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  • Why did Earth change its history books to claim that the Apollo missions to the Moon were faked?
  • How did Cooper figure out NASA's location?
  • What were Plan A and Plan B?
  • November 7, 2014 (United States)
  • United States
  • United Kingdom
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  • Paramount Pictures
  • Warner Bros.
  • Legendary Entertainment
  • See more company credits at IMDbPro
  • $165,000,000 (estimated)
  • $188,020,017
  • $47,510,360
  • Nov 9, 2014
  • $731,079,637

Technical specs

  • Runtime 2 hours 49 minutes
  • Dolby Digital
  • IMAX 6-Track
  • Dolby Surround 7.1

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Interstellar, common sense media reviewers.

movie review interstellar

Ambitious intergalactic drama focuses on a father's promise.

Interstellar Poster Image

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 .

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  • Parents say (42)
  • Kids say (180)

Based on 42 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
  • MPAA rating : PG-13
  • MPAA explanation : some intense perilous action and brief strong language
  • Last updated : May 25, 2023

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movie review interstellar

  • DVD & Streaming

Interstellar

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

Content Caution

movie review interstellar

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.

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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

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.

movie review interstellar

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Don Kaye

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Screen Rant

'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.

Matthew McConaughey as Cooper in 'Interstellar'

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.

Anne Hathaway as Amelia Brand in 'Interstellar'

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.

TARS the Robot in 'Interstellar'

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.

Jessica Chastain and Casey Affleck in 'Interstellar'

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.

_____________________________________________________________

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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Love and Physics

movie review interstellar

By David Denby

Through a wormhole Matthew McConaughey leads a mission to another galaxy in Christopher Nolans “Interstellar.”

“Interstellar,” an outer-space survivalist epic created by the director Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan, with whom he co-wrote the screenplay, is ardently, even fervently incomprehensible, a movie designed to separate the civilians from the geeks, with the geeks apparently the target audience. Nolan’s 2010 movie, “Inception,” offered layers of dreaming consciousness, each outfitted with its own style of action. The film was stunning but meaningless—a postmodern machine, with many moving parts, dedicated to its own workings and little else. In “Interstellar,” however, Nolan goes for a master narrative. Like so many recent big movies, “Interstellar” begins when the earth has had it. The amount of nitrogen in the air is increasing, the oxygen is decreasing, and, after a worldwide crop failure, dust storms coat the Midwest, drying out the corn, the only grain that is still growing. But all is not lost. God or Fortune or a Higher Intelligence (take your pick) has entered the game, and has placed near Saturn a traversable wormhole, a tunnel in space-time, providing an expressway out of the galaxy and on to the countless stars and planets beyond.

The commander of an underground nasa outpost, Professor Brand (Michael Caine), sends a favored pilot, Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), on a mission: Cooper and his crew, including Brand’s daughter, Amelia (Anne Hathaway), are to retrace the flights of three astronauts who a decade earlier were sent to planets thought to be capable of sustaining human life. Are the explorers alive? What did they find? Can the earth’s billions be moved through the wormhole? As the crew members enter the distant passage, with its altered space-time continuum, they testily debate one another, referring, in passing, to theories advanced by Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, and Kip Thorne. (Thorne, a theoretical physicist and a longtime friend of Hawking’s, served as an adviser and an executive producer on the film.) Black holes, relativity, singularity, the fifth dimension! The talk is grand. There’s a problem, however. Delivered in rushed colloquial style, much of this fabulous arcana, central to the plot, is hard to understand, and some of it is hard to hear. The composer Hans Zimmer produces monstrous swells of organ music that occasionally smother the words like lava. The actors seem overmatched by the production.

Nolan, who made the recent trilogy of night-city Batman movies, must love the dark. In “Interstellar,” he and the designer, Nathan Crowley, and the cinematographer, Hoyte van Hoytema, send Cooper’s ship, the Endurance, hurtling through the star-dotted atmosphere, or whirling past seething and shimmering clouds of intergalactic stuff. The basic color scheme of the space-travel segments is white and silver-gray on black, and much of it is stirringly beautiful. There’s no doubting Nolan’s craft. Throughout “Interstellar,” the camera remains active, pursuing a truck across a cornfield or barrelling through sections of the Endurance. All this buffeting—in particular, the crew’s rough-ride stress—is exciting from moment to moment, but, over all, “Interstellar,” a spectacular, redundant puzzle, a hundred and sixty-seven minutes long, makes you feel virtuous for having sat through it rather than happy that you saw it. The Nolans provide a pair of querulous robots, the more amusing of which is voiced by Bill Irwin, but George Lucas’s boffo jokiness and Stanley Kubrick’s impish metaphysical wit live in a galaxy far, far away. ****

Cooper has two children back on Earth and, like Leonardo DiCaprio’s Cobb, in “Inception,” he longs to return to his family. That leads to fights with Amelia, who wants to journey on to the planet where her lover, one of the astronauts on the earlier mission, was sent, in the hope of reuniting with him. McConaughey does his stylized, hyper-relaxed drawl, and Hathaway, with short Ph.D. hair, is crisp but also angry and passionate, and the two stars clash with professional skill. Cooper’s side of the argument sets up the movie’s finest scene. After paying a quick visit to a planet in another galaxy, the crew returns to the ship and discovers that on Earth more than twenty years has passed. Cooper watches video messages from his family, including his daughter, Murph, who was a young girl when he left but has grown up to be Jessica Chastain. Through her tears, she lashes out at him, as only Jessica Chastain can lash out, for leaving her. The Nolans take us into the farthest mysteries of space-time, where, they assure us, love joins gravity as a force that operates across interstellar distances. The Earth may die, but love will triumph. For all his dark scenarios, Christopher Nolan turns out to be a softie.

The belief that love, as much as gravity, holds galaxies together, may have held some interest for Stephen Hawking, but in a more attainable setting than on a planet beyond the Milky Way. “The Theory of Everything” tells the story of Hawking and his first wife, Jane Wilde Hawking. The film begins in 1963, when Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) is a graduate student in cosmology at Cambridge University. At a party, he meets Jane (Felicity Jones), who is studying “arts,” as she says, and they begin a charmingly awkward courtship in which she jollies him along as he confesses his modest desire to create “one single unified equation that explains everything in the universe.” But an earlier scene, in which he races a friend around a field, shows something odd about his gait. It is the first sign of motor-neuron disease. As the illness progresses, Hawking takes a bad fall in front of his residence hall, after which he retreats to his room, listening over and over to Wagner’s “Die Walküre,” an opera in which goddesses ride stallions through the air. He is expected to live no more than two years, but Jane, tougher than a British Army officer, marries him and keeps him going.

The couple went on to have three children. In one scene, a male friend at Cambridge carries Hawking up some stone steps and asks him, “Does your disease affect, you know, everything?” Hawking, who is still able to speak a little, says, “Different system.” The film, at its best, doesn’t mince words or scenes about Hawking’s disability. It’s also a revelatory portrait of his strength, including his surprising gaiety, the jokes and the ironies that he drew from God knows what reserves of energy. In this movie, his illness and his productivity are intimately linked.

The film is based on Jane Wilde Hawking’s 2007 memoir, “Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen,” which the screenwriter, Anthony McCarten, and the director, James Marsh, have made into a physically detailed and touching but, all in all, rather conventional against-all-odds bio-pic. Some of the scenes are predictable: The hero commits prodigious feats of casual English genius, such as solving a difficult mathematical problem on the back of a railway timetable. He is wheeled before Cambridge dons and distinguished scientists, many of whom are amazed that the shrunken man at the front of the room, barely able to speak, has a remarkable talent for theoretical speculation. (It isn’t made clear, though, how Hawking does his calculations—his work can’t be all speculation.)

Eddie Redmayne’s performance is astonishing, as eloquent, though in a different way, as Daniel Day-Lewis’s work in “My Left Foot.” Day-Lewis, playing the Irish artist Christy Brown, a man whose mobility is reduced to a single limb, deployed his left foot, a bushy black beard, and minimal, mangled speech to create a ferociously willful and sexually miserable man. Redmayne is a gentler actor; he was the noble youth in “Les Misérables” who sang, in a fine light tenor, the tear-stained but upbeat “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables.” Tall and slender, with freckles and a flattened upper lip, he wears his brown hair in a heavy mop that in this film falls across his forehead to meet enormous black-framed glasses. With his narrow shoulders, he initially looks like an abashed scarecrow. Redmayne uses his eyebrows, his mouth, a few facial muscles, and the fingers of one hand to suggest not only Hawking’s intellect and his humor but also the calculating vanity of a great man entirely conscious of his effect on the world.

Hawking doesn’t discover a unified equation, but he settles for black holes and a comprehensive and remarkably lucrative obsession with time. (“A Brief History of Time” has sold more than ten million copies worldwide.) The movie is a love story and a success story, ending with Hawking’s refusal of a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth, for reasons that aren’t explained. His relationships with women in general here are baffling. We’re puzzled by the black hole in his character that causes him, after twenty-five years of loving marriage, to leave the devoted, accomplished, and beautiful Jane for a young nurse (Maxine Peake) who treats him like a baby, and dominates him. After one brief outburst, Jane doesn’t protest but happily escapes into the arms of a strapping but gentle choirmaster (Charlie Cox). So we have to do a little speculating ourselves: Did Jane want to get out of the marriage? Or did she suppress an entirely understandable rage in order to keep the portrait of the marriage as pleasant (and salable) as possible? “The Theory of Everything” makes a pass at the complexities of love, but what’s onscreen requires a bit more investigation. ♦

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Dream Factory

By Richard Brody

Interstellar Explained - Story, Structure, & the Mysterious Interstellar Ending Explained - StudioBinder

  • Scriptwriting

Interstellar Explained — Plot, Meaning & the Ending Explained

T here’s no doubt about it: Interstellar was one of the most mentally-stimulating blockbusters of the 2010s. As such, a lot of people were confused about the Interstellar plot, high-concept science, and bold ending. It’s time for Interstellar explained – a deep-dive in which we answer some of the biggest questions audiences asked about the film. By the end, you’ll know the plot and meaning like the back of your hand; you might even say we’ll have an “interstellar explanation” for the fourth dimension.

Interstellar Ending Explained & Beat Sheet Breakdown

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Interstellar Explanation

Interstellar plot and summary.

Interstellar is a 2014 movie that was directed by Christopher Nolan and written by Christopher Nolan and Jonathan Nolan . The film received four Academy Award nominations for Best Original Score, Best Production Design, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Sound Editing – and the VFX (Visual Effects) were so well regarded that they won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects.

Although Interstellar received good-not-great reviews upon release, it’s since garnered more acclaim and it frequently places on lists of the best sci-fi movies ever made .

Interstellar is about Earth’s last chance to find a habitable planet before a lack of resources causes the human race to go extinct. The film’s protagonist is Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a former NASA pilot who is tasked with leading a mission through a wormhole to find a habitable planet in another galaxy.

Dr. Brand (Michael Caine) explains to Cooper that NASA previously sent another group (Lazarus) to find a habitable planet but they’ve gone silent.

Interstellar Movie Meaning  •  Dr. Brand Explains the Plan

There are two plans in the  Interstellar plot:

  • Plan A involves Cooper transmitting quantum data back to Earth in order to develop a gravitational propulsion theory that will allow spacecrafts to carry people off Earth into the other galaxy.
  • Plan B involves Cooper’s crew finding the remaining Lazarus crew and establishing a colony on another world.

Interstellar Summary & Setting

When is interstellar set.

We don’t know for certain when Interstellar is set, but the script implies that it takes place in the not-so-distant future. We imported the Interstellar script into StudioBinder’s screenwriting software to take a closer look at the film’s setting. This scene takes place near the beginning of the story and gives us a good hint at how many years in the future Interstellar is set.

Interstellar Explained - Baseball Scene - StudioBinder Screenwriting Software

Read the Interstellar Baseball Scene

We can infer by way of deductive reasoning that Interstellar takes place about 40-70 years into the future. How? Well, we know that Major League Baseball was still played when Donald was a kid. And we know that when Cooper was a kid, things were in such a state of disarray that no baseball was played.

So, if we assume that Cooper is about 40, and that things fell apart sometime before he was born, but not so far before that Donald didn’t live through a period of normalcy, then we can deduce that Interstellar is set between the ages of Donald and Cooper — roughly 40-70 years from “modern time” of 2014.

Water Planet - Interstellar Explained

What happens on the water planet.

The Endurance crew decides to scout out Miller’s planet because it was the one that had most recently transmitted data to them. But since the planet is so close to the black hole, time is extremely dilated — every hour on the water planet is equivalent to seven years on Earth.

Cooper, Brand (Anne Hathaway), and Doyle (Wes Bentley) land on the surface and attempt to locate Miller’s transponder. But just as Brand finds the device, a massive wave rolls in, forcing the crew to flee to the courier ship. Doyle dies but Cooper and Brand narrowly escape — and Brand realizes that Miller must’ve died seconds before they arrived because of the severe time dilation.

Cooper’s Family - Interstellar Explained

What happens to cooper’s family.

Cooper leaves his family – daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy/Jessica Chastain), son Tom (Timothee Chalamet/Casey Affleck) and father in-law Donald (John Lithgow) – on Earth in order to lead the NASA mission. In his absence, his family develops a contentious relationship; but we don’t learn about it until Cooper does, 23 years into the future while watching old transmissions.

Interstellar  •  Screenplayed

Murph and Tom become foil characters , aka characters who serve to expose attributes in each other. Murph becomes a NASA researcher who desperately wants to solve the gravitational theory to save the people on Earth while Tom takes over the family farm and largely rejects science and the reality of his situation. Their two opposing worldviews work against each other and expose negative and positive aspects of their character.

Mann’s Planet - Interstellar Explained

Where did matt damon come from.

Matt Damon plays the role of Dr. Mann, the captain of the Lazarus mission. After the failure of the water planet mission, Cooper is left with a difficult choice – go to Dr. Edmunds’ planet or Dr. Mann’s planet.

Let’s go back to the script to read through one of the best scenes – the one in which Cooper has to make the right decision in order to have any hope of executing the mission.

Interstellar Explained - Tough Decision Scene - StudioBinder Screenwriting Software

Read the Interstellar Decision Scene

Cooper chooses Mann’s planet, taking the Endurance on a one-way trip to Matt Damon Town. When the crew arrives, they find Mann in cryosleep. It’s pretty much clear from the get-go that something is wrong with Mann – although considering the fact that he’s been in solitude/cryosleep for years, it’s not hard to see why.

But Mann has more than just a case of cabin fever, he’s full-blown bent on finishing the mission, no matter the cost.

Interstellar Summary

Plan a was a sham.

Back on Earth, Dr. Brand reveals to Murph that Plan A was always a sham and there’s no way the people of Earth could ever escape.

Interstellar Meaning  •  Plan A Was a Sham

Murph transmits a message to Cooper accusing him of knowing Plan A wasn’t possible, effectively leaving her to die. Cooper tells Mann, Brand and Romilly that he’s going to return to Earth to be with his children and the rest of them can stay on Mann’s planet to start a colony.

But Mann’s planet isn’t hospitable – and he needs the ship to go to Edmunds’ planet. In this scene, Nolan intercuts between Cooper’s confrontation with Mann and Murph’s confrontation with Tom.

Interstellar Movie Plot Explained  •  Dual Confrontations

Murph burns all of the crops in order to make Tom understand he needs to leave the farm. Romilly is killed by a trap mine. Brand and Cooper barely escape back to the Endurance.

What happens in the docking scene?

Interstellar Movie Meaning  •  Docking Scene

I love Interstellar but, boy oh boy, we’ve got a cringe-worthy exchange of dialogue here:

TARS: Cooper, it’s not possible.

COOPER: No, it’s necessary.

Not great – but it’s hard to pick holes in a script as sharp as Interstellar . After some impressive piloting, Cooper successfully docks his courier ship in the Endurance.

What is the Interstellar black hole?

The Interstellar black hole is called “Gargantua” due to its gargantuan size. For more on how Nolan and the team made Gargantua with CGI (computer generated imagery), check out this awesome video.

Interstellar Theory  •  Building a Black Hole

When Interstellar was released in 2014, there were no recorded images of a black hole. But in 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope took the first images of a black hole. This is what the central black hole of Messier 87 (a galaxy in the Virgo cluster) looks like.

Interstellar Explained - Black Hole Messier 87

Messier 87 Black Hole via NASA

As it turns out, the scientists and visual artists who worked on Interstellar were pretty close with the design of the black hole. But what is a black hole? To answer that question, we have to first answer the question: what is a wormhole? And to answer that, let’s watch a great analogical scene from the film.

Interstellar Movie Plot Explained  •  Wormholes

A common misconception is that black holes and wormholes are the same thing. But as Romilly (David Gyasi) explains, wormholes are like funnels that connect two distant points in spacetime. Hypothetically, objects could safely travel through a wormhole – but consequently, black holes are areas of spacetime that have such strong gravity that nothing can escape.

Note: I am not a PhD physicist and most of the astronomical science in Interstellar is theoretical.

Breaking Down the Interstellar Black Hole

Interstellar black hole explained.

I think the Interstellar black hole scene is where a lot of people got lost. Up until that point, everything made a good amount of sense:

  • Wormholes allow people to travel long distances through spacetime
  • Differences in gravity and relative velocity cause time dilation
  • Planets need key life-sustaining elements to be hospitable

But the Interstellar black hole scene is where Nolan dove deep into theory – and there’s no way to tell whether he was “right” or “wrong” because we have no idea what exists beyond the event horizon.

The event horizon, as it relates to Einstein’s theory of relativity, is the point in a black hole where nothing can escape nor be observed. 

So, for Interstellar, Nolan said, “Let’s send Cooper beyond the event horizon and see what happens.” Let’s look to the film to see what happened — it's abstract and minimalist but a truly thrilling sequence.

Interstellar Gargantua Explained

Many theoretical physicists believe that the event horizon serves as a barrier to the unknown physics of a black hole’s singularity. It could be compressed spacetime, antimatter, etc. In the case of Interstellar, the singularity is a portal to the fourth dimension. But what is the fourth dimension? Let’s listen to Carl Sagan explain.

Carl Sagan Explains the 4th Dimension

So if we’re really trapped inside of a fourth dimension, how can we escape? Well, perhaps the answer exists beyond the event horizon.

Interstellar Movie Explained

Interstellar ending explained.

How does Interstellar end? In order to save Brand, Cooper slingshots around Gargantua to generate enough energy to send the Endurance to Edmunds’ planet. As a result, he slips into the black hole and beyond the event horizon. There, he finds himself trapped in the fourth dimension – a tesseract styled as a never-ending bookshelf.

Interstellar Ending Scene Explained

But Cooper realizes that he’s able to interact with Murph through spacetime. He asks TARS to relay the quantum data to him, which he communicates through morse code. Murph picks up on the morse code because she was fascinated by the gravitational anomalies in their house ever since she was a kid.

Turns out, those anomalies were caused by Cooper interacting through another dimension – sending himself on a mission to get the quantum data. Don’t just take my word for it – for more on the Interstellar ending explained, let’s listen to Neil deGrasse Tyson.

deGrasse Tyson Interstellar Last Scene Explained

The questions raised in this scene aren’t just plot-filler, they’re some of the most profound questions in the universe – epistemological themes, or stances taken on how we understand the world are hallmarks of Christopher Nolan’s directing style .

Interstellar Movie Explained (Continued)

Interstellar ending explained: part ii.

After Cooper successfully communicates the quantum data to Murph, he’s kicked out of the tesseract. Some time later, he wakes up on “Cooper Station” – a space station that’s orbiting Saturn. There he finds Murph on her deathbed; having saved humanity from extinction with the quantum data. Let’s read through their final conversation together.

Interstellar Explained - Ending Explained - StudioBinder Screenwriting Software

Read the Interstellar Ending Scene Explained

The Interstellar meaning lies somewhere between astronomical science and intimate human connection. It’s simultaneously a story about traversing the stars and fighting for what you love. For many critics, it’s this dual-narrative structure that makes the story so good – even if it can be a little scientifically vague and cheesy.

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  • Mastering the Shot List Like Christopher Nolan →
  • How Nolan Uses Circles to Warp Sight & Sound →

What is Tenet About?

Interstellar isn’t the only Christopher Nolan movie that left audiences scratching their heads. His 2020 film Tenet is just as, if not more confounding than Interstellar . In this next article, we break down the plot of Tenet and analyze some of the film’s biggest events.

Up Next: Tenet Movie Plot Explained →

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17 comments

First off, this is a sham. Interstellar cannot be explained. Ranks up there with Unicorns and Rainbows. And the ‘cringeworthy’ dialogue that was mentioned I find needful and required, given the scenario, but that might be me. And thousands of others who quote that line on a daily basis. Lastly, it’s a movie, not real life. Just enjoy it. Sheesh.

How do you explain Copper ending up in the Cooper land and everyone inhabiting the new planet? Not clear from the explanation.

Really the movie is very interesting,give us the opportunity to think more deeply the universe system is working beyond the the formality of something we called past.

I agree, makes you think and we do not know much about the universe.

It’s so much deeper than that.

It would have been a great movie if Brand (Anne Hathaway) character wouldn't have turned it into a soap opera with her dialogue on "feelings beats science" bullshit. Feelings don't belong in science and distort the reality, just look at how many people react illogically during this pandemic. You don't prove anything based on feelings in science, otherwise you turn it into something else: Religion.

Great visuals and well acted but the plot is way more complicated than it needed to be and I don't think the movie excels at helping you follow it. I had to read a good synopsis afterwards and I was left shaking my head. IMO, the plot could have been simplified while still maintaining the same effect.

Who’s to say feelings can’t be based on science.

it was the soundtrack that led me to the movie. I have never seen such a science fiction that provokes emotion while simultaneously, telling a story about traversing the stars using astronomical science. I was emotional, not because I wanted to watch an emotional movie, but because I felt I could grasp the message which is a thin line between astronomical science and intimate human connection.

Florin, Being that space travel does and will rely on humans for the foreseeable future, there was great reason to include human emotions and responses in the name of love in the movie. No matter how much technology is used, you can’t take out the human element. Yeah, I agree maybe they overdid it a bit, and Edmund was a bit of a tangent but feelings had an undeniable effect on the endurance’s mission.

good summary

Tq for good review

i loved this film. i streamed it two nights in a row.. I am a little familiar with physics, and that definitely helped. but the gravity question (which they do solve by sending a probe over the event horizon and then relay the data back to earth, and via Dad, into her watch) was fascinating and also a great sequencing of an impossible riddle. The story lines were great as was the time/ merge with both events climaxing almost together. the space shots and the black hole — wow!!

Incredibly thought provoking, and although most tend to not understand, the plot fillers while Cooper was within the fifth dimension gave such an emotional thrill ride. After crossing the event horizon, the scientific element isn't meant to be understood, because we aren't able to convey the unexplainable. But incorporating the fifth dimension to transmit a message, along with making it "home" to see his daughter before she died brought the emotional climax that was needed for a satisfying ending to this story. Now it's time for me to find part II.

I found it just as the engine of 2001

I think we can all agree that the movie was profound enough that it got you all into a conversation.

This article had interesting analysis and helpful explanation of wormhole vs blackhole. One problem is that the name Romilly is thrown into paragraph with zero previous explanation as to who this character is. Same thing with Miller. You write they decide to "scout" out Miller's planet. Who is that? Zero prior explanation.

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Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, dune: part two.

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The word that will likely be used most often to describe Denis Villeneuve ’s “Dune: Part Two” is “massive.” Expect a whole lot of variations on the words “epic” and “spectacle” too. Whatever big words you apply to the result, Villeneuve undeniably did not approach Frank Herbert ’s beloved sci-fi novel with modest aspirations, and it’s his ambition, along with the top tier of behind-the-scenes craftspeople with whom he collaborated, that have paid off in this superior follow-up to the Oscar-winning 2021 film. While that beloved blockbuster often felt like half a film, “Dune: Part Two” locates significantly higher stakes on Arrakis, while injecting just enough humor and nuanced themes about power and fanaticism to flavor the old-fashioned storytelling. More than a simple savior or chosen one story, “Dune: Part Two” is a robust piece of filmmaking, a reminder that this kind of broad-scale blockbuster can be done with artistry and flair.

“Dune: Part Two” picks up so closely on the heels of the first film that the Fremen are still transporting the body of Jamis ( Babs Olusanmokun ) home again after he was bested in the fight with Paul Atreides ( Timothee Chalamet ). After the massacre of House Atreides, Paul chose to go with the Fremen, much to the consternation of his mother Jessica ( Rebecca Ferguson ). Thinking both Paul and Jessica were taken by the desert and all hopped up on violence after destroying the Atreides interlopers, House Harkonnen amplifies its attack on the Fremen, leading to a few remarkably staged battles between the warriors and soldiers. Villeneuve and his team deftly fill the first hour with battle sequences that counter the firepower of the Harkonnen military and the Fremen tribal combatants, who often literally emerge from the earth to destroy them. Bodies fall from the sky as enormous ships burst into flames in a way that feels nearly operatic. Amidst the chaos, Dave Bautista cannily sketches Rabban Harkonnen as a wartime leader who is in way over his bald head while Stellan Skargard leans even harder into a sort of blend between Nosferatu and Jabba the Hutt.

As the battle between the Fremen and the Harkonnens for control of Arrakis serves as the backdrop for “Dune: Part Two,” Paul’s arc from nervous young man at the beginning of the first film to potential leader plays out in the foreground. A Fremen tribal leader named Stilgar ( Javier Bardem ) is convinced that Paul Atreides is the chosen one that has been foretold among his people for generations. Even as so much of the mythology points to Paul’s savior role, the Emo King tries to blend into the Fremen, forming a relationship with a young warrior named Chani (Zendaya). Paul passes the tests put in front of him by the Fremen, takes on the tribal name of Muad’Dib, and vows vengeance against the Harkonnens who were behind his father’s death.

On another planet, an Emperor named Shaddam IV ( Christopher Walken ) counsels with his daughter Irulan ( Florence Pugh ) and a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother ( Charlotte Rampling ) on the state of Arrakis. It’s revealed early on that Shaddam basically sent House Atreides to its destruction, meaning he’s on that vengeance list that Paul’s been keeping, while Irulan serves as a sort-of narrator for “Dune: Part Two,” dictating some of the political developments into a device that’s really designed to keep audiences with the plot.

If the interstellar politics aren’t enough, writers Villeneuve and Jon Spaihts inject a nice dose of religious fanaticism for the inevitable think pieces too. Lady Jessica becomes a powerful religious figure of her own among the Fremen, guiding her son’s ascendance in a manner that feels nefarious and unsettling. “Dune: Part Two” is not a traditional hero’s journey in that it’s constantly questioning if being led by an outsider from another culture is the right move—Chani sure doesn’t think so, and Zendaya subtly finds notes to make viewers wonder what a happy ending would be for these characters. As Jessica and Paul learn more about Fremen history and culture, they threaten not to lead it as much as dismantle and own it. There’s a big difference.

While the plotting in “Part Two” is undeniably richer than the first film, its greatest assets are once again on a craft level. Greig Fraser , who won the Oscar for cinematography the first time, tops his work there with stunning use of color and light. It’s in the manner the sun hits Chalamet’s face at a certain angle or the wildly different palettes that differentiate the Harkonnens and the Fremen. The browns and blues of the desert culture don’t feel arid as much as grounded and tactile, while the Harkonnen world is so devoid of color that it’s often literally black and white—even what look like fireworks pop like someone throwing colorless paint at a wall. Hans Zimmer ’s Oscar-winning score felt a bit overdone to me in the first film, but he smartly differentiates the cultures here, finding more metallic sounds for the cold Harkonnens to balance against the heated score for the Fremen. Finally, the effects and sound design feel denser this time, and the fight choreography reminds one how poorly this has been done in other blockbuster films.

As for performers, Chalamet is likely to be the most divisive element, often feeling a bit flat for someone believed to be the Neo of this world. However, those choices add up in a way that makes thematic sense, enhancing the uncertainty of Paul’s rise. Zendaya is solid—although she lacks chemistry with Chalamet that would have helped—but it’s Ferguson’s slippery performance and Bardem’s playful one that really add flavors here that weren’t in the first outing. Finally, Austin Butler leans hard into the exaggerated role of Feyd-Rautha, playing the sociopathic nephew of the Baron with all the scenery-chewing intensity that a character like this needs to work, finding the emotional void to balance out against Chalamet’s tempestuous inner monologue.

“Dune: Part Two” has been compared to “ The Empire Strikes Back ” in the run-up to its release, and that’s not quite right. The better comparison is “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers,” another film that built on what we knew about the characters from the first film, added a few new ones, and really amplified a sense of continuous battle and danger. Like both films, a third chapter feels inevitable. Critics will have to come up with a new synonym for massive.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Film credits.

Dune: Part Two movie poster

Dune: Part Two (2024)

Rated PG-13

166 minutes

Timothée Chalamet as Paul Atreides

Zendaya as Chani

Rebecca Ferguson as Lady Jessica Atreides

Josh Brolin as Gurney Halleck

Austin Butler as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen

Florence Pugh as Princess Irulan Corrino

Dave Bautista as Beast Rabban Harkonnen

Christopher Walken as Emperor Shaddam Corrino IV

Stephen McKinley Henderson as Thufir Hawat

Léa Seydoux as Lady Margot Fenring

Stellan Skarsgård as Baron Vladimir Harkonnen

Charlotte Rampling as Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam

Javier Bardem as Stilgar

Tim Blake Nelson as Count Hasimir Fenring

Anya Taylor-Joy as Alia Atreides

  • Denis Villeneuve
  • Jon Spaihts
  • Frank Herbert

Original Music Composer

  • Hans Zimmer

Director of Photography

  • Greig Fraser

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10 Highest-Grossing Original Sci-Fi Movies, Ranked

  • Standalone sci-fi films can achieve massive box office success, rivaling even the biggest franchises like Avatar and Star Wars.
  • Armageddon, The Day After Tomorrow, and Ready Player One are among the highest-grossing original sci-fi movies to date.
  • Interstellar, The Martian, and Inception are critically acclaimed and commercially successful sci-fi films that have earned impressive worldwide earnings.

While box office earnings do not determine how great a film is, these numbers ultimately help keep the business going. Whether we're talking space travel flicks or haunting disaster films, the sci-fi genre is a beloved one in the film industry, and countless movies that fall under the category have garnered massive amounts of money. This is particularly true if we're also counting sequel and prequel films.

As such, slightly more impressive than huge movie franchises such as Avatar , Star Wars , and Jurassic World made massive numbers all around the globe is the fact that some standalone movies have managed to do just the same. This is not to discredit all the work put into said franchises but rather to celebrate how standalone films in the genre can also be huge box-office successes. From Armageddon to Hi, Mom , these are the highest-grossing original sci-fi movies to date, according to The Numbers .

'Armageddon' (1998)

Worldwide earnings: $554,600,000.

Blending the sci-fi and disaster genres, Michael Bay 's entertaining though slightly melodramatic adventure thriller Armageddon follows a group of deep-core driller misfits, including Ben Affleck , recruited by Bruce Willis ' renowned Harry Stamper to save the planet after discovering that an asteroid the size of Texas will soon impact Earth.

Bay's Oscar-nominated feature has received great acclaim for its Sound, Sound Effects Editing, Visual Effects and Diane Warren 's Original Song performed by Aerosmith , "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing." Funnily enough, Liv Tyler , the daughter of the band's lead vocalist, stars in the film. Bay's feature impressed a few critics and audiences alike. Although its Rotten Tomatoes scores are quite divisive despite its sophisticated technology, Armageddon ranks among the highest-grossing films in the genre , ultimately gathering over $554 million at the box office.

Release Date July 1, 1998

Director Michael Bay

Cast Liv Tyler, Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, Will Patton, Steve Buscemi, Billy Bob Thornton

Rating PG-13

Runtime 151

Genres Sci-Fi, Thriller, Action, Adventure

Watch on DirecTV

'The Day After Tomorrow' (2004)

Worldwide earnings: $555,840,117.

This 2004 film stars Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal and follows a climatologist largely ignored by U.N. officials when presenting his concerning environmental research about a superstorm that later develops and causes havoc throughout the world. In the meantime, his son Jack is trapped in New York with his friend Laura ( Emmy Rossum ) and must travel by foot from Philadelphia.

While Roland Emmerich 's movie is not among the best in the science fiction category, The Day After Tomorrow had people queuing up to see it and made over $555 million at theaters all around the globe. Although a tad mediocre and despite all the criticism, it is worth noting that Emmerich's film is still a decent effort with a storyline that will likely keep fans of the disaster movie genre engaged.

'Ready Player One' (2018)

Worldwide earnings: $579,055,653.

Among Steven Spielberg 's most overlooked works is Ready Player One , an action-adventure with science fiction elements set in an alternate 2045 when the world is on the brink of chaos and collapse. The movie follows Tye Sheridan 's Wade Watts, a young man who joins a contest in an expansive virtual reality created by James Halliday , who has died and promised his fortune to the first person to discover a digital Easter Egg hidden somewhere in the OASIS.

Spielberg's mind-bending odyssey is action-packed enough to keep fans of the novel by Ernest Cline on which the film was based intrigued. However, the YA dystopian film from the 2010s features too many pop culture references for its good. As a consequence, it can come across as a bit dated, which isn't necessarily a good thing for movies set in the future. Still, Spielberg's film has made impressive numbers at the box office ( via The Numbers ).

Ready Player One

Release Date March 28, 2018

Director Steven Spielberg

Cast Ben Mendelsohn, Tye Sheridan, Simon Pegg, Lena Waithe, T.J. Miller, Olivia Cooke

Runtime 140

Genres Sci-Fi, Action, Adventure

Watch on Netflix

'I Am Legend' (2007)

Worldwide earnings: $587,790,539.

One of Will Smith 's most iconic (and best-performed) roles to date is in I Am Legend , a post-apocalyptic sci-fi horror set in the aftermath of a plague that kills most of humanity and transforms everyone left into monsters. Robert Neville is the sole survivor in New York City and attempts to find a cure alongside his dog Sam. The film has garnered popularity for its ending.

I Am Legend is not only the seventh highest-grossing movie of 2017 but also the 7th highest-grossing original science fiction feature of all time ( via The Numbers ). While hardly a masterpiece, Francis Lawrence 's frightening, better-than-average blockbuster is never boring and guaranteed to keep some audience members up at night with its haunting, gripping premise.

I Am Legend

Release Date December 12, 2007

Director Francis Lawrence

Cast Darrell Foster, willow smith, Charlie Tahan, Salli Richardson-Whitfield, Will Smith, Alice Braga

Runtime 101

Genres Drama, Sci-Fi, Thriller, Action, Horror, Documentary

Rent on Amazon

'Interstellar' (2014)

Worldwide earnings: $647,074,146.

This Matthew McConaughey -led Christopher Nolan movie is a beloved one in the genre for a reason; the thought-provoking Interstellar earns a spot among the filmmaker's best efforts to date. It tells the story of former NASA pilot Cooper, who is recruited by a NASA physicist ( Michael Caine ) to go through a wormhole across the galaxy alongside a team of skilled researchers in search of a new inhabitable planet as Earth is embroiled in catastrophic blight and famine.

With $647,074,146 under its belt , Interstellar is one of the most critically and commercially successful science fiction movies ever made . On top of its brainy plot, Nolan's least Nolanesque feature tackles human connection and time, often highlighting how love is the only thing that transcends it. The acclaimed feature was nominated for a total of five Oscars at the Academy Awards and ended up winning Best Visual Effects.

Interstellar

Release Date November 7, 2014

Director Christopher Nolan

Cast Matthew McConaughey, Michael Caine, Jessica Chastain, Anne Hathaway, Casey Affleck, Bill Irwin

Runtime 169 minutes

Genres Drama, Sci-Fi, Adventure

Watch on Amazon Prime

'The Martian' (2015)

Worldwide earnings: $653,609,107.

Like Interstellar , The Martian also sees humanity off of Planet Earth. This time, a team that includes Matt Damon , Jessica Chastain , and Sebastian Stan are on Mars to carry out tests on the surface of the planet when a message comes through Earth warning of a fast-approaching storm. All the astronauts blast off from Mars except for Mark Watney, who is left behind and presumed dead after the catastrophe.

At its core, The Martian is an excellent study of loneliness and isolation that also explores human error and survival, making for an inspiring and thoroughly absorbing viewing experience throughout. As such, it is not the least surprising that Ridley Scott's movie is one of the most successful sci-fi films at the box office , with over $635 million in earnings . The movie has received accolades for its direction, visual effects, and scientific accuracy.

The Martian

Release Date October 2, 2015

Director Ridley Scott

Cast Jeff Daniels, Michael Pena, Sean Bean, Matt Damon, Kristen Wiig, Jessica Chastain

Runtime 144 minutes

Rent on Apple TV

'2012' (2009)

Worldwide earnings: $757,677,748.

Looking back, one of the funniest aspects — perhaps not so funny back then — about 2012 was the huge influence it had on the media's speculation of the year being presaged as the end of the world. This 2009 Roland Emmerich movie (his second effort to make it to this list) that had everyone panicking follows a geologist ( Chiwetel Ejiofor ) and novelist Jackson Curtis ( John Cusack ) as they struggle to survive an eschatological sequence of events.

Grossing over $757 million at worldwide cinemas, 2012 was the fifth highest-grossing film of its year and received mixed reviews from critics. The popular disaster movie is far from being a remarkable watch. However, even if it lacks a proper, strong script and falls under the predictable and cheesy viewing, 2012 is filled with visual thrills to keep less exigent audience members intrigued.

Release Date October 10, 2009

Director Roland Emmerich

Cast Tom McCarthy, Thandiwe Newton, Oliver Platt, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Amanda Peet, John Cusack

Runtime 158

'E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial' (1982)

Worldwide earnings: $439,454,989.

The second Spielberg on this list is none other than the iconic family adventure E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial . The film stars Henry Thomas and follows a troubled child who attempts to help a gentle and friendly alien escape from Earth and return to his home planet. However, things go downhill when E.T. falls sick, ultimately resulting in government intervention.

This iconic science fiction tale of friendship, connection, and loyalty is among the best of the genre and had one of the longest theatrical runs of all time . As such, Spielberg's nine-time Oscar-nominated film ranks third place among the highest-grossing standalone science fiction films , earning an impressive $439,454,989 . On top of its moving, heartfelt premise, E.T. features beautiful cinematography, as expected from the director, and a remarkable score; these characteristics make the movie appealing and timeless.

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

Release Date June 11, 1982

Cast K.C. Martel, Robert MacNaughton, Drew Barrymore, Dee Wallace, Peter Coyote, Henry Thomas

Runtime 115 minutes

Genres Family, Sci-Fi, Adventure

'Inception' (2010)

Worldwide earnings: $825,793,570.

Like Interstellar , Inception is a top-notch Christopher Nolan feature that provides food for thought. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead role, the 2010 feature sees a thief with the ability to enter people's dreams and steal secrets from their subconscious. The plot thickens, however, when Cobb is offered the seemingly impossible task of planting an idea in someone's mind.

Often regarded as one of the best films of the 2010s , this well-acted, must-see science fiction movie, which meditates on themes of interpretation, the malleability of time, and communication, deservedly won four Oscars: Best Cinematography, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Visual Effects. It is not difficult to grasp why Nolan's movie is so popular. In addition to all the critical acclaim, Inception was a commercial hit and made over $825 million worldwide .

Release Date July 15, 2010

Cast Ken Watanabe, Elliot Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy

Runtime 148

Genres Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller, Action, Adventure

'Hi, Mom' (2021)

Worldwide earnings: $841,674,419.

Jia Ling 's autobiographical slapstick comedy drama resorts to science fiction elements to tell the heartwarming story of a girl who travels through the 1980s to meet her present-day injured mother and recreate an emotional, sisterly bond with her after concluding she has not been a good enough daughter.

Despite not being as popular in the mainstream Western media (its receipts were mostly from China) as other movies on this list, Hi, Mom is the highest-grossing science fiction movie of all time , as well as the third-highest-grossing non-English film ever made. It also held the record for the highest-grossing movie by a solo female director until last year's Barbie . Hi, Mom tackles universal themes of sisterhood, maternity, and familial love.

Release Date February 12, 2021

Director Ling Jia

Cast He Chen, Teng Shen, Xiaofei Zhang, Ling Jia

Runtime 128 minutes

Genres Romance, Comedy

Hi, Mom is not available for streaming, renting, or purchasing at this time.

NEXT: The 12 Highest-Grossing Romance Movies of All Time, Ranked

10 Highest-Grossing Original Sci-Fi Movies, Ranked

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‘the empire’ review: bruno dumont’s artsy space spoof is beautifully crafted and certifiably insane.

The director of 'Humanity' and 'Li'l Quinquin' returns to Berlin's main competition with a sci-fi satire starring Fabrice Luchini and Camille Cottin.

By Jordan Mintzer

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Berlinale Competition Brandon Vlieghe in 'L’ Empire'

Out of the many movies you could imagine emerging from the mind of French auteur Bruno Dumont, a Star Wars parody was probably somewhere at the bottom of the list.

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In the press notes, the director claims The Empire is supposed to be a prequel to The Life of Jesus . That seems like a major stretch, although it does feature some of the same stunning landscapes and impressive widescreen photography, this time courtesy of DP David Chambille (who shot Dumont’s last few features). The difference here is that those landscapes are occasionally interrupted by the arrival of a giant floating ship that looks exactly like the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris and houses a powerful interstellar Queen, appearing in the form of a hologram, played by Call My Agent ’s Camille Cottin .

Are you a little thrown off? Well good, because Dumont isn’t trying to make anything real or believable. That’s pretty much been his modus operandi for a decade now, with his recent output consisting of two nutso Joan of Arc biopics , a goofy belle époque murder mystery called Slack Bay and the modern media satire France , which was the tamest of the bunch.

As for the plot, just like in Star Wars it involves forces of good and evil. Good is represented by the church (there’s always been a mystical side to Dumont’s work) and evil by the monarchy, with veteran Fabrice Luchini playing a Darth Vader-like figure called Belzébuth. The latter is dressed in a court jester’s costume that looks like a cast-off from Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland . In one scene, Luchini sits on the throne in his floating castle and watches what looks like a giant, gyrating butt dance around to a three-piece jazz band.

Back on Earth in the seaside city of Boulogne-sur-Mer, the epic battle centers around a child named Freddy, whom both good and evil believe is a future king called the Margat. His father, Jony (Brandon Vlieghe), has been raising him to service Belzébuth, and he’s aided by the very extraterrestrial-like newcomer Line (Lina Khoudri). But their plans are thwarted by Jane (Anamaria Vartolomei from Happening ), a Princess Lea dressed in a bikini and accompanied by a rebel (Julien Manier) who goes around town decapitating people with his light sword.

The Empire is light years away from the works of Lucasfilm, and yet when you take a step back and look past all the weird northern Frenchiness, it can feel pretty close at times. It’s too bad, then, that Dumont couldn’t make something more entertaining so that the satire would go down smoothly.

Like his other recent films, this one isn’t easy to sit through, though it’s definitely original and, per custom, impeccably made. You can accuse Dumont of many things, including testing the viewer’s patience, but at least he hasn’t sold out yet and gone over to the dark side.

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Christopher Nolan Hops Over To Paris For Honorary César In Final Days Of ‘Oppenheimer’ Academy Awards Campaign

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Senior International Film Correspondent

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Christopher Nolan at 2024 Césars

Christopher Nolan touched down in Paris on Friday evening to receive an honorary César award at the 49th edition of France’s top film awards.

In attendance with producer and wife Emma Thomas, the Paris trip comes in the final days of the front-running Academy Award campaign for Oppenheimer , which is nominated in 13 categories.

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Nolan has a strong following in  France .  Inception  sold 5M tickets there to gross close to $40M, while e made around $20m at the box office.

The Oscar-winning director said the country had a special place in his heart as one of the first country’s to show his first film Following and also get behind his second film Memento .

“No-one in the world wanted to show it but Philippe   Hellmann at UGC decided to play it at the Grand Rex and the success it had there changed my life… ever since I have had a great appreciation for the French audience and distributors.”

He spoke with awe about the care the landmark Paris cinema had then taken to give Interstellar a 70mm screening, bringing a projector from Normandy and taking out seats to accommodate it.

“When I asked how long it was to run in that format they said it was just for the premiere,” he said, adding that the Grand Rex had also laid on 70mm screenings for Oppenheimer .”

“When I tell them this story in Hollywood to shame them and to encourage this type of respect they don’t believe me,” he said.

Nolan was in the running to return home with a second César trophy with his Oscar-tipped movie Oppenheimer  nominated in the awards’ Best Foreign Film category.

In an unexpected result, the prize went to Canadian director Monia Chokri’s  The Nature of Love , which also beat Marco Bellocchio’s  Kidnapped,  Aki Kaurismäki’s  Fallen Leaves  and Wim Wenders’  Perfect Days .

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    movie review interstellar

  3. Interstellar Movie Review

    movie review interstellar

  4. Interstellar Review

    movie review interstellar

  5. Interstellar Review

    movie review interstellar

  6. Interstellar movie review & film summary (2014)

    movie review interstellar

VIDEO

  1. INTERSTELLAR First-time Theatre Experience

  2. Movie review -interstellar

  3. Physicist Reacts to 5 Times Interstellar Got Physics Wrong

  4. ඔලුව විකාර වෙන කාලතරණ කතාව

  5. Film Review: Interstellar #movie #film #scifi #filmreview #scifimasterpiece #filmcritique

  6. Καλή ή Κακή;

COMMENTS

  1. Interstellar movie review & film summary (2014)

    Reviews Interstellar Matt Zoller Seitz November 03, 2014 Tweet Interstellar Now streaming on: Powered by JustWatch 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.

  2. Interstellar

    Interstellar represents more of the thrilling, thought-provoking, and visually resplendent filmmaking moviegoers have come to expect from writer-director Christopher Nolan, even if its...

  3. 'Interstellar' Review: Christopher Nolan's Film Starring Matthew

    Directed by Christopher Nolan Adventure, Drama, Sci-Fi PG-13 2h 49m By A.O. Scott Nov. 4, 2014 Like the great space epics of the past, Christopher Nolan's "Interstellar" distills terrestrial...

  4. Film Review: 'Interstellar'

    By Scott Foundas Warner Bros. To infinity and beyond goes "Interstellar," an exhilarating slalom through the wormholes of Christopher Nolan 's vast imagination that is at once a science-geek...

  5. Interstellar review

    The good news is that this flawed but frequently awe-inspiring movie about wormholes and black holes does not implode into a dark star of disappointment; if it's spectacle you want, then...

  6. Interstellar

    Interstellar Reviews All Critics Top Critics All Audience Verified Audience Akhil Arora AkhilArora.com Humbling and epic in scope, designed and conceptualised brilliantly, but a tad too...

  7. 'Interstellar' 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...

  8. Interstellar review: Nolan's biggest spectacle

    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,...

  9. Interstellar (2014)

    5,633 Reviews Hide Spoilers Sort by: Filter by Rating: 10/10 Out of this world kosmasp 31 May 2015 A lot has been said and written about Interstellar. You can obviously take apart any movie that is out there. You'll either love this one or you won't.

  10. 'Interstellar': Film Review

    'Interstellar': Film Review Christopher Nolan aims for the stars in this brainy and gargantuan sci-fi epic By Todd McCarthy October 27, 2014 8:00am Interstellar Paramount Pictures/Photofest

  11. Interstellar Movie Review: Christopher Nolan's Journey Into Space

    By Richard Corliss October 29, 2014 11:28 AM EDT "We've forgotten who we are," says Matthew McConaughey's Cooper. "Explorers, pioneers — not caretakers." That could be Christopher Nolan speaking...

  12. Interstellar Review

    Interstellar Review ... Yet, it is the simple story of a father's love for his daughter and hers for him that drives the film. Ultimately, Interstellar is an entertaining, if wonky, science ...

  13. 'Interstellar' Movie Review

    By Peter Travers November 5, 2014 Anne Hathaway in 'Interstellar.' Melinda Sue Gordon/Paramount and Warner Bros. It's damn near three hours long. There's that. Also, Interstellar is a space...

  14. Interstellar Review

    Release Date: 06 Nov 2014 Running Time: 166 minutes Certificate: 12A Original Title: Interstellar Warning: this review contains mild spoilers Christopher Nolan is a director whose name has,...

  15. Interstellar

    Interstellar - Metacritic. 2014. PG-13. Paramount Pictures. 2 h 49 m. Summary With our time on Earth coming to an end, a team of explorers undertakes the most important mission in human history; traveling beyond this galaxy to discover whether mankind has a future among the stars. [Paramount Pictures] Adventure. Drama.

  16. Interstellar (2014)

    5.6K User reviews 486 Critic reviews 74 Metascore Top rated movie #21 Won 1 Oscar 44 wins & 148 nominations total Videos 31 Trailer 2:28

  17. Interstellar Movie Review

    Interstellar Movie Review | Common Sense Media Parents' Guide to Interstellar By Sandie Angulo Chen, Common Sense Media Reviewer age 12+ Ambitious intergalactic drama focuses on a father's promise. Movie PG-13 2014 169 minutes Add your rating Parents Say: age 13+ 42 reviews Any Iffy Content? Read more Watch Our Video Review Watch now

  18. Interstellar

    Christopher Nolan Distributor Paramount Pictures Reviewer Paul Asay 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.

  19. Interstellar (film)

    Plot In the near future, humanity is facing extinction following a global famine caused by ecocide. [8] Cooper's family, which includes his children, Tom and Murph, and his father-in-law Donald, engage in farming, like most of humanity.

  20. How Christopher Nolan's Interstellar Is So Much Better 10 Years Later

    Despite this, Interstellar wasn't received nearly as well in 2014 as it is now. Interstellar still received positive reviews, but many critics claimed that the film didn't hold up to some of Nolan's other works. The film was pointed out to be confusing, clunky, and over-sentimental, with this complexity being something that is praised now.

  21. Interstellar Review

    Read our review! "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 ...

  22. 'Interstellar' Review

    By Ben Kendrick Published Nov 5, 2014 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.

  23. "Interstellar" and "The Theory of Everything" Reviews

    Nolan's 2010 movie, "Inception," offered layers of dreaming consciousness, each outfitted with its own style of action. The film was stunning but meaningless—a postmodern machine, with ...

  24. Plot, Meaning & the Interstellar Ending Explained

    Interstellar Explanation Interstellar plot and summary. Interstellar is a 2014 movie that was directed by Christopher Nolan and written by Christopher Nolan and Jonathan Nolan.The film received four Academy Award nominations for Best Original Score, Best Production Design, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Sound Editing - and the VFX (Visual Effects) were so well regarded that they won the Oscar ...

  25. Dune: Part Two movie review & film summary (2024)

    The word that will likely be used most often to describe Denis Villeneuve's "Dune: Part Two" is "massive." Expect a whole lot of variations on the words "epic" and "spectacle" too. Whatever big words you apply to the result, Villeneuve undeniably did not approach Frank Herbert's beloved sci-fi novel with modest aspirations, and it's his ambition, along with the top tier ...

  26. 10 Highest-Grossing Original Sci-Fi Movies, Ranked

    Grossing over $757 million at worldwide cinemas, 2012 was the fifth highest-grossing film of its year and received mixed reviews from critics. The popular disaster movie is far from being a ...

  27. 'The Empire' Review: Bruno Dumont's Bonkers Sci-Fi Satire

    The director of 'Humanity' and 'Li'l Quinquin' returns to Berlin's main competition with a sci-fi satire starring Fabrice Luchini and Camille Cottin. By Jordan Mintzer Out of the many movies you ...

  28. Christopher Nolan Feted With Honorary César

    Christopher Nolan touched down in Paris on Friday evening to receive an honorary César award at the 49th edition of France's top film awards.. In attendance with producer and wife Emma Thomas ...