Review: Interstellar (2014)

As Les Brown once said: “Shoot for the moon and if you miss you will be among the stars.”

A simple quote that perfectly sums up Christopher Nolan’s Sci-Fi epic Interstellar. With such high aspirations of being a breakthrough in the genre, it feels like maybe he was aiming a bit too high.

Interstellar has just been released on DVD and Blu-ray across the country, offering a slightly altered look on what is usually conceived as a generic sci-fi film, but one cannot help but feel that maybe this project was a tad over-ambitious and in turn proved to disappoint audiences with what it had been hyped to be.

In the pilot’s seat is Matthew Mcconaughey as Cooper, a former NASA test pilot who is now living during a new depression that has hit America. A crop blight, the ending of the manufacturing of automobiles and the disbanding of the armed forces has caused civilization to regress into a failing agrarian society. With cities abandoned and everyone living in rural areas to farm corn, which is the main diet as most other foods are now impossible to crop, the future of the human race appears bleak.

But when Cooper and his daughter Murphey, played by both Mackenzie Foy and Jessica Chastain (of different ages) discover coded messages that point them in the direction of a secret NASA installation is when the story starts to unfold. After coming face to face with Professor John Brand, played by Michael Caine, and his daughter, Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway), Cooper is told about a wormhole that has been discovered that leads to an inhabitable planet, humanity’s last hope of existence.

With a long running time and plot twists that will have people scratching their heads, this film, on paper, sounds like a masterpiece. But sadly, I for one do not agree. The sense that I had from this film is that instead of telling the audiences a story and developing the characters that you are spending over two hours getting to know, it trades all of that in for CGI and mind-bending concepts of time and space. Coupled with sound effects that sometimes drown out speech and deafen to say the least, I feel that maybe this is a movie that was trying to aim too high and unfortunately fell at one of its first hurdles.

The on screen interaction between characters is powerful at times and the story is fairly strong, but unfortunately it seems like just another generic space flick. What is more disappointing is the finale, which I shan’t spoil, that left me feeling underwhelmed. I would probably tell people to watch it for themselves as it may cause a diverse opinion from regular movie-goers, but personally I wouldn’t rant and rave about it.

In a time of films such as Alfonso Curon’s Gravity, along with a few others, I would say it’s difficult to rate against any of the others. Excuse the pun, but you may find yourself drifting aimlessly in the Sea Of Tranquility with this pic.