RETRO REVIEW: INTERSTELLAR

In the near future, widowed aerospace engineer-turned-farmer Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) struggles to keep his family and farm afloat in the midst of food scarcity, a savage corn crop blight and mega dust storms caused by climate change. Volunteering for a deep space voyage to locate another viable planet for human colonisation, Cooper weighs the cost of potentially saving humanity but having to leave his children for what may be in Earth time, a decades long mission. Unable to say no, the dutiful Cooper pilots the spaceship Endurance, along with fellow astronauts Doyle (Wes Bentley), Amelia (Anne Hathaway) and Romilly (David Gyasi), into a wormhole located near Saturn. Through the rift in space-time, they reach a distant galaxy with several viable planets. A black hole in the new galaxy distorts time on one of the unexplored planets, causing an hour to equal seven years back on earth, harking back to Inception’s multi-layered, time distorted denouement. As Coop and the crew search far flung worlds, they know time is running out for Earth, as video messages the crew receive, show their loved ones aging at a pace. Alternately intimate and emotional then vastly epic in scope, Nolan is at his most ambitious here, trying to knit the disparate threads of this story into a coherent whole. Clearly inspired by Kubrick’s 2001 and Ridley Scott’s vision of space travel, Nolan’s reach inevitably exceeds his grasp and the film falters at minor points as the script creaks under the weight of its own ambitions but there are a great many moments in this film where it transcends its genre conventions and achieves a pure cinematic profundity and sense of overwhelming awe that place it firmly in the rarefied air of the masterworks that inspired it.