Get Reel | Film review: Interstellar soars and astonishes before fizzling out predictably
Director Christopher Nolan takes viewers through a wormhole into a galaxy beyond our own in his latest cinematic epic
Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Michael Caine
Director: Christopher Nolan
Category: IIA
Oscar winners Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway headline – and a few other Academy Award honorees also are part of – the star-studded cast of this sci-fi drama that’s set in a near future when humanity is imperiled due to the Earth having been ecologically ravaged.
Nonetheless, there’s little question that filmmaker Christopher Nolan is the main man behind this super ambitious blockbuster epic, with its director and co-scriptwriter (along with his brother Jonathan) looking to be credited for all of the film’s inspired high points – and also being held responsible for its staggering lows.
Interstellar begins fairly innocuously in a part of the world where cornfields still dominate the landscape but ever larger and worsening dust storms provide signs that terrible disaster looms. At a time when people struggle to grow enough food crops for humanity to live on, the likes of engineering graduate and flying ace Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) have turned his hands to farming, with his stoic son Tom (Timothée Chalamet) reconciled to spending his adulthood tending to the family farm.
A widower who also has a spirited young daughter, Cooper tries to care for his two children the best way he can, even if it includes trying to convince Murph (played by Mackenzie Foy as a child, and Jessica Chastain as an adult) that a poltergeist has not taken up residence in her room. As improbable as it sounds, Cooper’s investigations into what’s actually happening in Murph’s room leads the two of them to a hitherto secret facility established by Nasa scientists whose head, Professor Brand (Michael Caine), is an old acquaintance of his.
