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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matt Zoller Seitz

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

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Interstellar (2014)

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

169 minutes

Matthew McConaughey as Cooper

Wes Bentley as Doyle

Anne Hathaway as Brand

Jessica Chastain as Murph

Michael Caine as Dr. Brand

John Lithgow as Donald

Topher Grace

Casey Affleck as Tom

Mackenzie Foy as Young Murph

Ellen Burstyn as Old Murph

Bill Irwin as TARS (voice)

Collette Wolfe as Ms. Kelly

David Oyelowo as Principal

William Devane as Old Tom

Christopher Nolan
Jonathan Nolan

Director of Photography

Hoyte van Hoytema

Original Music Composer

Hans Zimmer

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Interstellar, common sense media reviewers.

Ambitious intergalactic drama focuses on a father's promise.

A Lot or a Little?

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

Ultimately this is a story about the fierce love b

Cooper is an attentive, responsive father who talk

Several scenes of intense, impending peril -- part

Two adults kiss in celebration.

Strong language is infrequent but includes one or

Dell Latitude computer, several close-ups of a Ham

Positive Messages

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

Positive Role Models

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

Violence & Scariness

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

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

Sex, Romance & Nudity

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

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

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

Products & Purchases

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

Parents Need to Know

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

Where to Watch

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Community Reviews

Parents say (44)
Kids say (184)

Based on 44 parent reviews

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

The best movie ever, 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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Interstellar Reviews

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

Full Review | Oct 17, 2023

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

Full Review | Sep 9, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

Full Review | Jul 20, 2023

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

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

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

Full Review | Jun 23, 2023

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

Full Review | Apr 4, 2023

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

Full Review | Feb 27, 2023

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

Full Review | Jan 24, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Full Review | Sep 3, 2020

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‘Interstellar’: The Cinema of Physicists

By Dennis Overbye

Nov. 17, 2014

The Earth is a dying dust bowl where a blight is destroying all the crops and oxygen. Schoolchildren are being taught that the moon landings were faked to bankrupt the Russians, and NASA is a secret agency consisting of a dozen scientists huddling underground. The Yankees are a barnstorming troupe who play games in cornfields and let ground balls go through their legs.

This is the world of “Interstellar,” the space thriller directed by Christopher Nolan, of “Inception” and “The Dark Knight” fame, and written by him and his brother Jonathan, that hit theaters in a tsunami of publicity this month.

I’ve been looking forward to “ Interstellar ” ever since I first heard back in 2006 that physicists led by the celebrated gravitational theorist and Caltech professor Kip Thorne had held a workshop to brainstorm a science-fiction movie. This would be the movie that finally got things right.

The movie stars Matthew McConaughey as an astronaut named Cooper, who leads an expedition to another galaxy in search of a new home for humanity, and, stars among others, Mackenzie Foy, who grows up into Jessica Chastain, as his daughter, Murph (named after the law), who is mad that he left. On one level, it is a heroically realistic tale of space exploration. On another level, it’s a story about father-daughter relationships, as well as a meditation on the human spirit and what happens when humans take their eyes off the stars. But it’s also about quantum gravity and the mysteries of the fifth dimension, and even an astronaut who was at a screening with me confessed that he was confused.

The first time I saw it, I too was confused, and disappointed. Aside from a wonderful view of Cooper’s spacecraft dwarfed by lonely blackness down at the corner of the Imax screen as it passed by a magnificently glowing Saturn, and tense docking sequences similar to certain scenes in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” it was short on the magic and the delicious storytelling twists I expect from the Nolan brothers.

The second time I saw the movie, clued in by Dr. Thorne’s new book, “The Science of Interstellar,” I enjoyed it more, and I could appreciate that a lot of hard-core 20th- and 21st-century physics, especially string theory, was buried in the story — and that there was a decipherable, if abstruse, logic to the ending. But I wonder if a movie that requires a 324-page book to explicate it can be considered a totally successful work of art. The movie’s pedigree goes back to Carl Sagan, a Cornell astronomer and author.

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Interstellar Review

Time is a circular circle..

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

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

Review: Interstellar Shows the Wonder of Worlds Beyond

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Interstellar

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
5.7K User reviews
488 Critic reviews
74 Metascore
44 wins & 148 nominations total

Top cast 45

Murph (10 Yrs.)

Murph (Older)

Tom (15 Yrs.)

School Principal

(as Francis Xavier McCarthy)

Professor Brand

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Jessica Chastain Through the Years

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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, who 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

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November 7, 2014 (United States)
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$165,000,000 (estimated)
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Nov 9, 2014
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Runtime 2 hours 49 minutes
Dolby Digital
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'Interstellar' review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interstellar opens November 5th.

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DVD & Streaming

Interstellar

Action/Adventure , Drama , Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Content Caution

In Theaters

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

Home Release Date

March 31, 2015
Christopher Nolan

Distributor

Paramount Pictures

Movie Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive Elements

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

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

Spiritual Elements

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

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

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

Sexual Content

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

Violent Content

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

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

Crude or Profane Language

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

Drug and Alcohol Content

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

Other Negative Elements

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

Whatever its faults, Interstellar does not lack ambition.

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

And it’s also about love conquering all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Interstellar (2014)

Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar demands for a patient, open-minded and perceptive audience. For this very reason, it is destined to divide. Missing are the exhilarating action set pieces that viewers have come to expect from the director. At its core, Nolan’s three-hour epic is a high concept, science fiction love letter that mourns for mankind’s pioneering past and embraces the transcendent power of love.

Set in the not-so-distant future, Earth’s natural resources are scarce and overrun by a plague known as ‘blight’. Mankind has lost the need for scientists and engineers. Inquisition and expedition are skills that we as a species can no longer afford to indulge. The vast majority of the human race have been reduced to the role of farmers, in an effort to prevent worldwide starvation. Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a former NASA pilot, eyes set permanently towards the heavens, longs for something more than the fate that has mysteriously sentenced the Earth to extinction.

“We’re explorers, not caretakers.”

A series of odd and unexplainable occurrences involving Cooper’s daughter Murphy and a ‘ghost’ that communicates through coded messages, leads Cooper to uncovering a secret NASA base and a last-ditch mission to save the earth. NASA’s remaining scientists have discovered a wormhole, and on the other side, could be the salvation for mankind.

It’s the sort of mind-bending ambitious filmmaking that the director has shown consistently throughout his filmography. But even by his own standards, Interstellar is without question Nolan’s most ambitious (and sentimental) work yet. This film is no Dark Knight or Inception . It can be best described as the modern day equivalent to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey . Both films aim to examine the existential mysteries of our universe and the role of humankind. Each film uses scientific experimentation and intergalactic exploration as the lens by which our existence is questioned. Though thematically and visually similar, what separates the work is how this inquisition is handled.

Kubrick’s film was almost without dialogue for much of its runtime. It was a visual piece of cinema that allowed the audience to reach their own conclusions and understandings privately. Nolan’s film is equally as beautiful on the eyes, but it relishes and embraces the critical scientific debate.

Viewers and critics may find the insistent exposition dumps taxing, while others may marvel at the intellectual theorising with wonderment. Nolan clearly indulges in the science and wants the audience to partake in the investigation. Going as far as hiring theoretical physicist Kip Thorne in an effort to add validity and plausibility to the discussion.

Underlining the audacious concepts and intellectualism is a powerful tale of a father’s endless love for this children; more specifically his daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy).

In agreeing to partake on this impossible mission across dimensions of space and time, Cooper leaves with the knowledge that his children will age and possibly die while he’s away trying to save the world. The severe time dilation allows for Murphy to mature into adulthood (played by Jessica Chastain), while McConaughey’s Cooper stays the same age.

McConaughey’s career transformation continues in full and impressive fashion here as Nolan’s leading man. There’s an endearing charisma to everything he does on screen. The sound design doesn’t always help in understanding his southern drawl, but that doesn’t stop from believing completely in Cooper’s torment and regret that follows him throughout the universe.

The film swells with idealist sentimentality and it’s not hard to envision Steven Speilberg directing this piece as he was originally intended to. Nolan (perhaps channeling his own inner-Speilberg) doesn’t shy away from being unashamedly sentimental in his handling of the family drama. The bending of quantum physics, allows for some truly powerful dramatic moments. While the quantifying of love may be a step too far for some audiences (and scientists), the idea that love can drive, impassion and connect people throughout time and space is a beautiful concept. While the science obviously cannot be proven, the emotions do not lie.

Interstellar longly dreams of a time when humans could reach their vast potential and achieve miracles. It’s an intelligent and moving piece of cinema that forces the audience to engage in something far greater than your average film. It’s an emotionally-charged and richly rewarding experience for those who are open to the ideas of love and hope conquering the limitations of our own knowledge and understanding.

I implore audiences to open themselves up to the challenge.

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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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Den of Geek

Interstellar Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Don Kaye | @donkaye

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

'Interstellar' Review: Christopher Nolan's Latest Might Be Too Ambitious

There's no denying the visceral power and prowess of Christopher Nolan 's Intersellar . The ninth film from the popular director is his most ambitious, and it looks jaw-droppingly gorgeous. The sets, miniatures, and images of space travel and planets all combine to make a film the scope of which rivals any other space movie.

Emotionally, the film comes close to achieving a similarly momentous effect. Interstellar follows Coop ( Matthew McConaughey ), a father forced to leave his family in a possibly mad attempt to preserve the future of humanity by finding another habitable planet. The tale is filled with drama, humor, intense action and surprising plot twists. There's rarely a dull moment in the movie because the story is so compelling and poignant.

But maybe it's all a bit too much. The script, by Nolan and his brother Jonathan, packs ideas and theories in every single scene. Concepts about love, survival, physics, and time burst from the film more prominently than the emotion and visuals. Even with a nearly three-hour runtime, so many ideas are presented that the film rarely has time to focus on one over another. The result is a technical marvel with a powerful narrative that ends up feeling a tad empty because we aren't sure exactly which point it's trying to make.

One of the best things about Interstellar is the manner in which it distinguishes itself from every other space movie. There's no big training sequence, the shuttle take off sequence is truncated, we don't get to space for 40 minutes of screen time. Right off the bat Nolan tells us we're going to see something different. Then once in space (which is where the majority of the movie takes place), everything gets bigger. He's not interested in our solar system. Nolan is interested in something far beyond it.

In the same way Intersellar attempts to stand out as a sci-fi film, it works to distinguish itself from a dramatic angle. On its own the story is direct, with good dramatic tension. Clear goals are presented, then attempted, and then either met or failed leading into the next scene. Anything you may think doesn't match up or feels superfluous eventually pays off in a pretty solid way. Sure there's a misstep here or there, but at its core, Interstellar is always interesting.

One of the biggest complaints in Nolan's earlier films is they rarely include rich female characters. This film has two of them, Coop's colleague Brand, played by Anne Hathaway , and the grown up version of his daughter Murph, played by Jessica Chastain . Each represents a step forward for Nolan as they're well-written and strong characters. Unfortunately, the relationships they develop are much weaker. The relationship between father and daughter Coop and Murph is a strained and incomplete one, but that's demanded by the narrative. Coop and Brand also have a bit of a budding connection which becomes increasingly important as the film goes along. However, it feels like an afterthought as it's casually dropped in with a few short lines of dialogue and then hardly developed.

Then, just when you start to scratch your head about Interstellar , it sucks you back in with its intense action scenes. They're few and far between but when they happen, you'll be glued to your seat. By taking his time to flesh out the story, Nolan earns lots of good will and you never quote know what's going to happen. There are at least two big turns later in the movie that really keep you on your toes and divert from some other issues.

Issues such as the fact he's provided so many different narrative strings and questions, he's forced into some convenient narrative choices near the conclusion. These pay off emotionally but when everything else in the film has been pushing toward unpredictability and originality, they're a little disappointing, albeit understandable.

McConaughey has a lot of heavy lifting to do in Interstellar and he does it well. Obviously he's dynamic, charming and confident, but the real surprise is how he hits all the big dramatic peaks and valleys. Hathaway is steadfast with her limited role and Chastain, in an even more limited role, makes Murph the real star of the movie. She's a force to be reckoned with, infusing multiple layers into the few scenes she has.

As Interstellar ends, there's no doubt you've been on a ride. A thoroughly enjoyable and memorable cinematic experience that's well-made and acted. On those notes, Nolan totally succeeds. Afterwards though, you'll be more inclined to talk about the actions scenes and narrative twists rather than the multitude of themes he's placed throughout the film. That's because it's just too much to talk about. What does love mean? How do we handle time? What does it mean to survive? Is it okay to offer hope when there is none? The film's questions are endless and overwhelming.

Which leads to one last question, do we care? That's a something you'll have to decide. Interstellar is a good film with big flaws that may or may not matter because everything around them is done so well.

/Film rating: 7.5 out 10

Flickering Myth

Geek Culture | Movies, TV, Comic Books & Video Games

Movie Review – Interstellar (2014)

November 5, 2014 by Luke Owen

Interstellar , 2014

Directed by Christopher Nolan Starring Matthew McConaughey, Wes Bentley, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Elyes Gabel, Michael Caine, John Lithgow, Topher Grace, Casey Affleck, Mackenzie Foy, Ellen Burstyn and the voice talents of Bill Irwin

SYNOPSIS: A group of explorers make use of a newly discovered wormhole to surpass the limitations on human space travel and conquer the vast distances involved in an interstellar voyage.

The power of hype is a curious thing – it can make one man weep, make another man sing. Christopher Nolan is sadly a man who suffers from too much hype. Ever since he re-invented the superhero genre with the Dark Knight trilogy and blew people’s minds with the excellent Inception , he is a man whose movies are declared “the best of the year” before a trailer even hits the Internet. Indeed, the trailer for Interstellar prompted the hype train to start rolling out of the station, to the point where the movie currently holds a score of 9.5 on IMDB before its even released. But unlike Gravity last year, Interstellar doesn’t quite meet the hype – but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad movie.

This review will not divulge any spoilers or plot details so this plot description will be brief. Simply put: it’s the future and the world is coming to an end. In an effort to save it, former astronaut-turned-farmer Cooper joins a team of explorers to find a brave new world. But as they delve further and further into the universes, their expansions and black holes, they learn more and more about life and the way the world works.

Matthew McConaughey is absolutely fantastic, showing an amazing range of human emotions while also keeping that suave Southern-drawl performance he’s become known for. But this is hardly news as it’s been the case with every movie he’s done since the breath-taking Mud . Like his co-star Anne Hathaway, it’s hard to remember a time when these two weren’t knocking performances out of the park and his turn as Cooper is certainly no worse than his last few soft spoken showings. With that said, he does have one superb moment when playing back messages from his family that is as riveting as it is heart-breaking and could rival any of the best seen all year. Everyone pulls out first class performances, no matter how big or small their role, and with a director and master like Nolan behind the camera, this is to be expected.

What’s most impressive about Interstellar however is not just the scope of Nolan’s ideas, but how that vision is translated to the big screen. Every facet of this world has been designed to the letter, from the decks of the spaceships to the landscapes of the worlds they travel too. So much time, thought and effort has been put into Interstellar ‘s design and that is shown on screen in full glory. The robot TARS is a particular stroke of design brilliance, a monolith looking device that is surprisingly agile and quick due to an original and clever design. TARS is not an over-the-top robot “from the future” as seen in other science fiction films, he’s a grounded idea that is completely plausible. But for all of its small intricacies, sometimes it’s just the awesome landscapes that are the most awe-inspiring thing about the movie. Interstellar is the sort of movie that needs to be seen on the biggest screen possible because Nolan’s universe is too big for just the regular cinema auditorium.

But for all the great acting and brilliant visuals, Interstellar falls victim to two major problems – the story and the runtime. At just under three-hours long, Interstellar is a long and arduous film because you feel every minute of it. Like The Wolf of Wall Street and Transformers: Age of Extinction , Interstellar is just too long for its own good and there is only so much the gorgeous visuals and stellar performances can cover up before the movie starts to feel a bit tedious. An argument could be made for a tighter edit, but that wouldn’t have helped because Interstellar ‘s biggest failing is in its meandering and mishmash story.

Interstellar is a movie about ideas and exploring those ideas. Nolan has been rightly praised in the past for making “smart blockbusters” like Inception and The Dark Knight , which challenged their audiences to not just sit there and watch the flashing colours but rather focus and take in the story and characters. The problem with Interstellar is that there are too many ideas. The film is unfocused and flits between being about family issues, loneliness and isolation, theory of relativity, love as the only sure entity and what its like to move between the space between spaces with no real fluidity. It posits an idea, discusses it briefly and then moves on to the next. All of the ideas presented are fine and in some cases brilliant, but it makes Interstellar feel disjointed, baggy and unsure of itself. Prometheus was criticised for feeling like the first novel of a sci-fi writer who wanted to get all of his ideas into his first book in case he didn’t get a second, and while this a lot better than the awful Prometheus , Interstellar also suffers from the same affliction. The film is at its best when it’s focused on the repercussions this trip has on Cooper’s family because this is where McCounaughey, Hathaway as well as Casey Affleck and Jessica Chastain shine, but everything else feels like mostly white noise. It also doesn’t help that for a long portion of the movie, it’s runs a “disaster after disaster” routine which feels like Armageddon , only without the fun and levity.

You can’t argue that Interstellar isn’t a technical marvel and a joy to watch on the big screen, but the film is narratively empty. It poses a lot of questions, but they vary from interesting to laugh out loud silly. The movie will have a lot of buzz due to the name of the director attached, but this could be the man’s first truly average movie. It’s not atrocious, but it’s not outstanding either. It aims high and it should be applauded for trying, but it never reaches its lofty goals. Interstellar is the cinematic equivalent to being in the company of a sharply dressed person who has very little to say – there is only so much you can talk about their nice suit before the conversation runs dry.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★

Luke Owen is the Deputy Editor of Flickering Myth and the host of the Flickering Myth Podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @LukeWritesStuff.

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Love and Physics

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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Freaky Friday 2 Makes Me Feel A Little Better About Mark Harmon Not Returning To NCIS

Upcoming naruto live-action movie already has one major advantage over one piece, nicolas cage's monster movie with 79% rt score gets streaming release date, 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.

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

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

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

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

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 .

Interstellar

From Christopher Nolan, Interstellar imagines a future where the Earth is plagued by a life-threatening famine, and a small team of astronauts is sent out to find a new prospective home among the stars. Despite putting the mission first, Coop (Matthew McConaughey) races against time to return home to his family even as they work to save mankind back on Earth.

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Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar Is Big, Long, Ridiculous — and Lots of Fun

In his florid sci-fi opera Interstellar, Christopher Nolan aims for the stars, and the upshot is an infinite hoot — its dumbness o’erleaps dimensional space. It’s hugely entertaining, though. Matthew McConaughey is the pilot turned farmer turned hero-astronaut named (wait for it) Coop, whose bond with his nervy redheaded daughter, Murph (Mackenzie Foy as a girl, Jessica Chastain all growed up), is tighter than the insides of an atom, perhaps even the key to transcending the law of relativity. It must be transcended because Earth (in an unspecified near future) is parched, dust-smothered, dying (no reason given — but why ask why these days?), and mankind needs to find another hospitable planet, stat. The mix of wonky physics, mysticism, and genetically modified corn is so clunky it’s … fabulous.

Nolan (who wrote the script with his brother, Jonathan) clearly wants Interstellar to be a great American epic — The Grapes of Wrath II: The New Vintage. His dust-covered cars and farmhouses evoke the dust bowl of the ’30s, but the odd personal computer reminds us that people have the technology to do more than huddle like Steinbeck’s Okies. The problem is that mankind has lost faith in science, to the point where Murph’s schoolbooks say the Apollo missions of the 20th century were hoaxes to force the Soviets into a bankrupting space race. Coop chafes at the contraction of mankind’s horizons (“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!”), but his view of science is limited by what’s measurable, quantifiable. It’s young Murph who’s convinced there are forces that can’t yet be explained — among them a “ghost” in her book-lined bedroom she’s sure is sending coded messages.

I doubt Stephen Hawking could make sense of all the loop-de-loops to come, but at least Interstellar has a clear emotional through-line. Eventually, a professor played by Michael Caine enlists Coop to pilot a spaceship to another galaxy through a wormhole next to Saturn that was put there (he thinks) by benevolent five-dimensional beings. (“This world was never enough for you, Coop.”) But the prospect of humanity perishing seems abstract beside the reality of leaving the distraught Murph for decades — or forever. How can he shake her faith in the one thing she knows to be real — a father’s love? But how can he not go? “Mankind was born on Earth,” Caine intones, as Hans Zimmer’s music rises. “It was never meant to die here.”

Interstellar is packed with Go For It lines like that. There are about 37 recitations (I lost count) of Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night … Rage, rage against the dying of the light!” As Coop’s fellow astronaut, Anne Hathaway delivers a wet-eyed speech (while the camera slowly dollies in) on the interstellar power of love. Can it be that the heart knows more than the scientific mind? That’s certainly how the film is shaped. Dramatically speaking, every decision Coop makes about mankind’s future home is dwarfed by his — and our — fear of letting Murph down. What gives the movie its urgency is that she’s aging more rapidly than he is, especially when he lands on a planet where every passing hour equals seven years on Earth.

By the end of the three-hour Interstellar, you might wonder if 21 years has passed in the outside world too. But the first half at least goes by quickly. Nolan’s frames are unusually clean (even with all the dust), and the special effects are as convincing as in any NASA documentary. In space, the ringed mother ship — a great, segmented wheel — spins so lyrically that you don’t even need the “Blue Danube” waltz. Though the wisecracking robot, TARS, seems a throwback to kiddie sci-fi shows, the design is elegant, like two mini 2001 monoliths attached in the middle and striding around like Gumby. McConaughey is a good sci-fi hero, his stoner-cowboy drawl making even his overexplanatory lines sound flaky, and though Hathaway still has the look of a drama-camp kid eager to prove herself, there’s something dear about her. She has gumption. Foy and Chastain are an excellent tag-team Murph (though Chastain basically recycles her Zero Dark Thirty performance), and Matt Damon pops up on an ice planet to look shifty and bite his lip to keep from breaking into his peerless McConaughey impression.

The second half is where the sputtering begins, the Nolans being firmly wedded to spatial flips, temporal permutations, and intricacy for intricacy’s sake. There’s a flurry of crosscutting between Coop in space and Murph on Earth that’s first bewildering and then riotously inane. My hunch is that, given their clout, no one is permitted to examine the Nolans’ scripts for what a scientist might term “massive narrative anomalies.” But the incoherence might be — paradoxically — a key to their prized status in certain quadrants of the internet galaxy, where billions of words will be devoted to filling in the gaps and figuring out, say, how to reconcile the characters’ rates of aging. I wonder if the Nolanoids will even care that what should be the triumphant climactic scientific achievement happens offscreen, and that the ending is so goopy it makes you grateful that back in the day Stanley Kubrick opted for arty obscurity. But the movie is still gobs of fun if you’re in the right frame of mind. The Nolans, ever ambitious, even throw in baseball as a symbol for mankind’s hopeful past. Interstellar is the new woo-woo touchstone: Starfield of Dreams.

*This article appears in the November 3, 2014 issue of New York Magazine .

Postscript: Christopher Nolan’s movies are defended so angrily (and with such high levels of abusive) on the internet that I find myself grateful for divergent viewpoints, such as this outrageous Esquire U.K. putdown of some of our most beloved cinematic works. I must say that I disagree about the first Matrix movie — I think it comes closer to the spirit of Philip K. Dick than many Dick adaptations. But it’s always fun to throw a bit of snark the Nolanoids’ way.

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Interstellar Movie Review — Christopher Nolan’s most epic, but human movie yet

Interstellar is a visual masterpiece that has a human touch that propels it to greatness. it is perhaps one of the best space movies ever made..

Christopher Nolan isn’t one known to be taciturn when it comes to his movies. Even his smaller movies like Momento have grand structures bolstering their simple plots. However, Interstellar is easily is first brush with the epic — unless you consider the full Dark Knight trilogy as one. On paper, it should not work. A sweeping narrative covering different times and worlds would be eaten up by audiences. That’s why Gravity found so much success financially and at the Oscars. But Nolan does something completely different with Interstellar . He introduces science in a way that isn’t watered down or ignored. His film, according to astrophysicists, is completely plausible. Though that fact makes the movie a hard one to digest for viewers, the end result is an incredible study of human nature and our desire to survive.

Food is running out. The world is becoming overpopulated. The Yankees look nothing more than a high school baseball team. A crop blight is threatening the very existence of the human race. Nolan drops into this terrifyingly realistic future plagued with dust storms and the risk of the world simply ending within grasp. With this, the nation turns its attention to farmers and away from the sciences and engineers to save the world.

Check Out: “Sleeping Giants” Book Review: A Unique, Engaging Sci-fi Thriller

However, Joseph Cooper ( Matthew McConaughey ) who was once a pilot for NASA, maintains his faith in STEM. After a dust storm, a mysterious gravitational disturbance leads him back to the formerly disbanded agency. He discovers that NASA, led by Dr. Brand (Nolan regular Michael Caine ) and his daughter Dr. Amelia Brand ( Anne Hathaway ) have discovered a wormhole. “One system with three potential worlds,” as Amelia puts. it. Something, or someone, has given the human race a chance to live by presenting them with potential new planets to call home.

Cooper is given the seemingly possible decision to leave his children forever, potentially, or save the humanity from extinction. Choosing the latter, he embarks into an incredible mission on the ship Endurance. He, along with Amelia, Dr. Doyle ( Wes Bently ), and Dr. Romilly ( David Gyasi ) set off to assess the three worlds to choose where to start a new civilization.

Back on earth, Murphy Cooper ( Jessica Chastain ), who grows up while her father is gone, begins to help Dr. Brand determine the formula to get humans off of earth in a mass exodus.

While wormholes and other worlds seem like the work of science fiction, the science is very real. Though throughout the movie it sometimes gets a little confusing, with a little thinking you can piece it together. Essentially, it’s the Neil DeGrasse Tyson of movies. The science is explained in a non-condescending way.

One of the most surprising elements of Interstellar is not the story or the science, but the sentimentality. It’s shockingly emotional and often heartbreaking. In fact, parts of it gutted me. Whether it’s surprising because of the director or the premise is anybody’s guess. However, the grasp it has on humanity is both refreshing and welcome. Especially in the science fiction genre, a human factor is usually missing. But Nolan and the screenplay exhibit human nature for all its beauty and destruction.

We have an innate desire to survive. That’s why the people on earth in Interstellar begin to lose faith in the dream to leave the planet. They are thinking of how they can solve the problems on Earth. The very idea of the movie is thinking of a way to save our race. However, the movie explores the selfish motivations we also innately have. The way it is explored is surprising and devastating.

But it’s not just the screenplay and direction that exudes that. The ensemble was tasked with accessing emotions that humans would actually feel in these situations. Overall, the entire cast is phenomenal. However, there are three standouts for me. The first is Matthew McConaughey . I think it’s very unfortunate that he won his Oscar for Dallas Buyers Club. Not to take away from that performance. His performance in Interstellar is an incredible meditation on one of the hardest questions for humans: how much will you sacrifice for the greater good. There is no better way to show this than when he is watching messages from his kids as the years go by. This is the best performance of his career.

Check Out: “Arrival” Movie Review: One of the Best Sci-Fi Movies of the Decade

The other two performances that stood out were the two actresses that portrayed Murph. Mackenzie Foy breaks any stigma surrounding child actors with a really naturalistic and heartbreaking performance. She has these knowing gazes that foreshadow the scientific curiosity that follows her throughout her life. Jessica Chastain is an incredible presence as the older Murph. She carries over the knowing gazes, but adds the emotional baggage of years of abandonment by Coop. It is easily one of her most memorable performances.

Masterpiece isn’t a word I take lightly. I’ve said it in probably two reviews on this blog ( Boyhood and Moonlight – the former I’m less inclined to continue using that phrase). However, I’d call Interstellar a masterpiece of filmmaking. It’s as grand as it is introspective and as grounded as it is existential. By the end of the nearly three-hour running time — it goes by in a flash — you feel as if you’ve experienced something that is so rarely captured on film. If not for the plot or performances, watch it for the stunning visuals that haven’t been seen on the silver screen since perhaps 2001: A Space Odyssey. I think a decade from now we’re going to look back and wonder how we fell asleep to such a grand and sweeping epic.

★★★★★ out of 5

Get Interstellar on DVD, Blu-Ray, or Digital on Amazon or stream for free with Amazon Prime!

Karl Delossantos

Hey, I'm Karl, founder and film critic at Smash Cut. I started Smash Cut in 2014 to share my love of movies and give a perspective I haven't yet seen represented. I'm also an editor at The New York Times, a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, and a member of the Online Film Critics Society.

Karl Delossantos https://smashcutreviews.com/author/karldelogmail-com/ 12 Years A Slave Movie Review — A Beautiful, Unflinching Film
Karl Delossantos https://smashcutreviews.com/author/karldelogmail-com/ 2014 Oscar Nominations: Snubs and Surprises
Karl Delossantos https://smashcutreviews.com/author/karldelogmail-com/ 2014 Oscar Predictions: Best Picture (Updated 2/16)
Karl Delossantos https://smashcutreviews.com/author/karldelogmail-com/ 2014 Oscar Predictions: Best Director (Is Alfonso Cuarón a Lock to Win?)

One of the best sci-fi movies ever just crashed Prime Video’s top 10

‘Interstellar’ is one of the most beautiful movies I've ever seen

Anne Hathaway, Matthew McConaughey, and Wes Bentley in

As a streaming writer, it’s my job to cover movies worth watching on the best streaming platforms . One standout service includes Prime Video , and it so happens to have one of the best sci-fi movies ever in the top 10. The movie in question is Christopher Nolan’s epic sci-fi masterpiece "Interstellar," and it currently sits at the No. 7 spot (as of June 20).

There’s something about a good sci-fi movie that feels comforting but exhilarating at the same time. Getting transported into another world is the best part of this genre, and “Interstellar” is one thrilling adventure that I can go on again and again, without ever getting sick of it. And, its spot on Prime Video’s top 10 suggests audiences still appreciate it.

If you’re unfamiliar with this classic movie (which would be surprising) and want more details before watching, you’ve come to the right place.

What is ‘Interstellar’ about?

"Interstellar" is set in a dystopian future where Earth is plagued by environmental disasters, dwindling food supplies, and severe dust storms. And, humanity faces the threat of extinction. The protagonist, Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), is a former NASA pilot who lives with his two children. His daughter also believes their house is haunted by a "ghost" that communicates with them through strange gravitational anomalies.

One day, these anomalies lead Cooper to a secret NASA facility, where they meet Professor Brand (Michael Caine) and his daughter, Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway). Professor Brand reveals that NASA has been working on a plan to save humanity by finding a new habitable planet in another galaxy.

Cooper is then recruited to pilot the spacecraft Endurance, along with a team of scientists including Amelia Brand, Romilly (David Gyasi), and Doyle (Wes Bentley). The team goes on a dangerous journey through the wormhole to explore three potential planets: Miller's planet, Mann's planet, and Edmunds' planet, each named after the astronauts who explored them.

Of course, most space adventure movies never go to plan. As the mission progresses, they face various challenges that test their endurance and sanity, ultimately questioning what it means to save the human race.

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‘Interstellar’ is a grand sci-fi epic with sheer force

"Interstellar" is widely praised for its ambitious blend of scientific accuracy, emotional storytelling, stunning visuals, and powerful performances by a talented cast. All of these positive elements make it a remarkable and enduring piece of cinema (in my opinion, although most people who love the sci-fi genre would also agree).

Beyond its scientific nature, "Interstellar" is deeply emotional. The relationship between Cooper and his daughter, Murph (Jessica Chastain plays adult Murph), is essentially the movie’s emotional core since it explores love, sacrifice, and the human connection. It will bring tears to your eyes one minute and give you goosebumps the next. Even family and friends have said “Interstellar” does an excellent job at making you feel something, whether it’s good or bad.

“Interstellar” has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 73%, and personally, I don’t think that’s high enough. But it seems like critics praised the movie more over time. Movie Mom’s Nell Minow said: “Ambitious, provocative, thoughtful, and highly entertaining--all things considered (believe me, ALL things are considered), it holds together very well.”

Meanwhile, Steven Rea from Philadelphia Inquirer summarized this movie perfectly: “Interstellar is an experience. Nolan's vision of our galaxy, and galaxies beyond, is daunting, majestic; the hardware of space travel looks right, almost familiar.”

While I can keep praising this movie, we should acknowledge its initial feedback from audiences. After the movie was released in 2014, it became quite divisive among viewers. This was due to the complex scientific concepts that felt too ambitious at the time. The same goes for its three hour runtime, which might put some people off watching it (and I can understand why).

But movies like “Oppenheimer” prove that a lengthy duration doesn’t impact such a compelling narrative. When a movie is as engaging as “Interstellar," you don’t often notice how much time has passed since you pressed play.

So, even if you’ve seen this sci-fi movie before, this is your sign to watch it again. And if you’ve never heard of it, now is your chance to stream it on Prime Video . With it being such a great movie, I wouldn’t be surprised if it took the No.1 spot from “Oppenheimer”.

In the mood for more? Check out these best Netflix sci-fi movies to stream right now or watch darker sci-fi movies on Prime Video .

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Alix is a Streaming Writer at Tom’s Guide, which basically means watching the best movies and TV shows and then writing about them. Previously, she worked as a freelance writer for Screen Rant and Bough Digital, both of which sparked her interest in the entertainment industry. When she’s not writing about the latest movies and TV shows, she’s either playing horror video games on her PC or working on her first novel.

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Clay.Bell I’m assuming the author of this article has never seen or read any actual science fiction. This is fantasy, not sci-fi. It contains zero science and a plot thinner the line between fake articles and bad advertising. This movie is unwatchable; horrible dialog, pointless twists and just lame deus ex machina. I really expect more from a site like Tom’s Hardware than publishing crap advertising for crap products. Reply
ZorakMantis99 So many people have somehow been fooled into thinking this is a good movie. It's a mess. Watch more movies and get some perspective. Reply

Clay.Bell said: I’m assuming the author of this article has never seen or read any actual science fiction. This is fantasy, not sci-fi. It contains zero science and a plot thinner the line between fake articles and bad advertising. This movie is unwatchable; horrible dialog, pointless twists and just lame deus ex machina. I really expect more from a site like Tom’s Hardware than publishing crap advertising for crap products.

ZorakMantis99 said: So many people have somehow been fooled into thinking this is a good movie. It's a mess. Watch more movies and get some perspective.

player711 Read the Kip Thorne book, "The Science of Interstellar". Physics is hard. The movie tries to push the envelope on some things that are not well understood yet. That is what makes the movie so good. That is what makes Alixs' review correct. Reply

player711 said: Read the Kip Thorne book, "The Science of Interstellar". Physics is hard. The movie tries to push the envelope on some things that are not well understood yet. That is what makes the movie so good. That is what makes Alixs' review correct.

View All 6 Comments

10 best sci-fi book-to-movie adaptations, ranked

Astronauts walk in space in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Sci-fi is a popular genre in literature due to its thought-provoking nature. Beyond thrilling adventures through space or fantastical realms, sci-fi books explore profound topics like the potential impact of artificial intelligence, the challenges of space exploration, and the ethical dilemmas of scientific progress. Fueled by these themes, readers are left to think beyond the page and imagine what the future holds.

10. The Hunger Games (2012)

9. the war of the worlds (1953), 8. annihilation (2018), 7. dune (2021), 6. the martian (2015), 5. jurassic park (1993), 4. interstellar (2014), 3. the iron giant (1999), 2. children of men (2006), 1. 2001: a space odyssey (1968).

That’s why sci-fi books are popular source materials in the realm of film — they bring extraordinary worlds, characters, and stories to life in a way books can’t. With breathtaking visuals and immersive sound design, sci-fi movies allow audiences to truly experience stories like a televised battle royale in a dystopian world, the invasion of terrifying alien creatures, and the thrill of being sucked into a black hole.

Based on Suzanne Collins’ hit young adult novel, The Hunger Games sees a brave young woman named Katniss Everdeen volunteering to join a televised death match. Alongside her fellow tribute, Peeta Mellark, Katniss uses her resourcefulness and valor to survive the treacherous arena, making alliances and enemies along the way.

Fans of the book, as well as those who weren’t familiar with it, were impressed by the adaptation. The film does an excellent job of capturing the bleak world of the books, especially during emotional scenes like the Reaping and the death of a beloved character. The Hunger Games balances action with moments of character development and social commentary, making it a must-watch sci-fi book-to-movie adaptation for viewers of all ages.

Stream The Hunger Games on Apple TV+.

H.G. Wells’ influential sci-fi novel comes to life in The War of the Worlds . In it, a scientist named Dr. Clayton Forrester becomes a reluctant hero when he witnesses the arrival of Martian war machines that lay waste to Earth. Alongside his lover, Sylvia Van Buren, Forrester desperately searches for a way to defeat the seemingly invincible invaders in a riveting fight for survival.

For its time, the film’s special effects were groundbreaking as that viscerally showcased the Martian war machines’ destructive power. Byron Haskin’s masterful adaptation of the sci-fi novel transcends the genre as it explores humanity’s ingenuity and desire for survival, becoming a reminder that even in the face of seemingly insurmountable threats, the human spirit endures.

Stream The War of the Worlds on Prime Video.

Based on Jeff VanderMeer’s visionary novel, Annihilation takes viewers on a suspenseful journey into the unknown. Biologist Lena joins a daring team venturing into “The Shimmer,” a mysterious and ever-expanding zone where the laws of physics seem to break down. As they explore deeper, the team encounters bizarre mutations in the flora and fauna, with each discovery more unsettling than the last.

Annihilation keeps viewers on the edge of their seats with its suspenseful buil-up to an enigmatic climax. Deep within The Shimmer, Lena confronts a strange entity, leaving the true purpose and nature of the zone shrouded in mystery. The scene with the horrifying, scream-mimicking bear exemplifies the film’s ability to blend body horror with moments of profound sadness. Annihilation is an excellent adaptation as it isn’t afraid to dive deep into the novel’s core themes of self-destruction and transformation, making for an emotionally resonant experience for every viewer.

Stream Annihilation on Paramount+.

In 2021, visionary director Denis Villeneuve took on the monumental task of adapting Frank Herbert’s legendary Dune . In the epic sci-fi saga, House Atreides unexpectedly finds itself betrayed by the Imperium and attacked by House Harkonnen after being bestowed the desert planet Arrakis. Without an army and left to survive in the harsh environment of the planet, Paul Atreides and his mother must make their way to the Fremen, the indigenous people of Arrakis.

Burdened by visions of the future and burgeoning superhuman abilities, Paul’s fate hangs in the balance. While it’s not entirely faithful, Dune is an adaptation that works on all levels. Critics and audiences have lauded Villeneuve’s meticulous approach, which brings Frank Herbert’s world to life with stunning visuals. Moments like the Gom Jabbar test and the sandworm encounter have been delivered with a level of detail and intensity that immerses viewers in Paul’s harrowing experiences.

Stream Dune on HBO Max.

Ever wondered what it takes to survive alone on Mars? Ridley Scott’s The Martian , based on Andy Weir’s gripping novel, throws astronaut Mark Watney into this very predicament. Presumed dead after a ferocious Martian storm, Watney finds himself stranded on the red planet. But Mark is no ordinary astronaut. Drawing on his ingenuity and botanical expertise, he cultivates food in the barren Martian soil, defying the odds and demonstrating the power of human resourcefulness.

The film’s commitment to scientific accuracy is evident — from consulting NASA experts on Martian conditions to ensuring the potato-growing process is realistic. Stunning visuals showcase the stark beauty of the red planet, while meticulous attention to detail in space technology adds to the film’s immersive quality. More than just getting the science right, the movie is injected with humor and has a relatable protagonist that everyone can root for.

Stream The Martian on TruTV.

Can science bring dinosaurs back from extinction? Should it? Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park wades into these ethical quandaries. The movie tells the story of the ambitious John Hammond, who creates a theme park populated by cloned dinosaurs. To showcase his achievement, he invites a team of experts, including paleontologists Dr. Alan Grant and Dr. Ellie Sattler. But when the park’s security systems fail, the experiment becomes a matter of life and death as the dinosaurs rampage free.

The story escalates into a desperate fight for survival, as a colossal T. rex attacks the tour vehicles, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake. But the nightmare doesn’t end there. The cunning velociraptors launch a relentless pursuit, forcing those who are alive to use all their skills and ingenuity to survive. Jurassic Park is an unforgettable cinematic experience, a landmark blend of action, wonder, and cautionary tale about the power of science. No wonder Jurassic Park has spawned a successful movie franchise .

Stream Jurassic Park on Peacock.

In Christopher Nolan ‘s Interstellar , love becomes a lifeline across the desolate expanse of space. As Earth succumbs to an ecological disaster, a single flicker of hope remains in the form of a wormhole near Saturn. An astronaut named Cooper leads a daring mission through the cosmic anomaly, carrying the weight of humanity’s future on his shoulders. His odyssey becomes a grand exploration of the cosmos as he confronts the awe-inspiring mysteries of black holes and the mind-bending effects of time dilation.

Interstellar is lauded for its grounded portrayal of space travel, particularly the mind-bending effects of relativity. Sequences like the black hole Gargantua and the time dilation on the water planet attempt to highlight its scientific accuracy. Interstellar also takes on questions about the nature of time and the possibility of venturing beyond our solar system. Throughout the film, viewers are left to wonder: Will Cooper find a way to connect with his loved ones across vast distances and secure humanity’s future, or will they be forever separated by the vastness of space?

Watch Interstellar on Prime Video.

Imagine befriending a 50-foot metal giant! That’s the extraordinary premise of The Iron Giant , a heartwarming animated film based on Ted Hughes’ novel. Taking place during the Cold War of the 1950s, the story centers on young Hogarth Hughes, who discovers a massive, sentient robot hiding near his town. As Hogarth forms a unique bond with the Iron Giant, he must protect it from a paranoid government agent who sees the robot as a threat.

Critics have praised the movie for its emotional depth and timeless messages. The animation, blending traditional and computer-generated techniques, creates a visually stunning backdrop for the story. The Giant’s final act of sacrifice, with him saying the line “You stay. I go. No following,” stands as one of animation’s most heartbreaking moments. Despite being a box office flop, The Iron Giant has become a cult classic due to its touching story and excellent hand-drawn animation.

Rent The Iron Giant on Apple TV+.

English author P.D. James is known for detective novels like Death in Holy Orders and The Murder Room , but perhaps her most famous movie adaptation is Children of Men . In it, humanity faces a chilling reality — global infertility. Theo Faron, a jaded bureaucrat thrust into a life-or-death mission, is tasked with protecting the world’s only pregnant woman. He must navigate a crumbling society and ruthless forces to safely deliver her to a rumored sanctuary.

This dystopian masterpiece by Alfonso Cuarón weaves a tapestry that reflects the anxieties of our times — immigration, terrorism, and environmental collapse. It’s elevated by iconic single-take action sequences, like the escape from a refugee camp, which plunge viewers into the heart of the film’s chaotic urgency. The movie dares to ask: In the face of such a bleak future, could a single glimmer of hope, like the arrival of a new life, reignite humanity’s will to survive?

Rent Children of Men on Apple TV+.

Stanley Kubrick was always an innovator who aimed to redefine what a movie can be. This is evident in his 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey , which is an adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s story The Sentinel . Mysterious monoliths appear throughout history, seemingly influencing human progress. The movie focuses on the Discovery One spacecraft, manned by Dr. Dave Bowman and Dr. Frank Poole. Their mission takes a turn when the advanced AI, HAL 9000, begins to malfunction.

As tension mounts and a deadly confrontation unfolds, the film culminates in a mind-boggling sequence where Bowman transcends space and time. 2001: A Space Odyssey is an unforgettable exploration of humanity’s past, present, and future. As the film journeys from prehistoric origins to the exploration of Jupiter, it tackles complex themes like evolution, artificial intelligence, and the mysteries of the universe. This Kubrick masterpiece continues to cast a long shadow, influencing generations of filmmakers and captivating audiences even today.

Stream 2001: A Space Odyssey on HBO Max.

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Any dad worth his salt has at least a small soft spot for the war movie. The stereotypical father is likely obsessed with military history, and loving a great war movie goes part and parcel with understanding these fights and how they really unfolded.

If you're looking for great war movies, there's plenty of them to be found on Netflix. Picking the right one to check out this Father's Day might be a challenge, though, which is why we've put together this list of the perfect titles to choose from as you settle in for this year's festivities. 1917 (2019) 1917 - Official Trailer [HD]

June is a blockbuster month for HBO and Max, boasting the highly anticipated second season of House of the Dragon, Julio Torres' whimsical Fantasmas, and the intriguing docu-series Ren Faire. But amid the streaming service’s impressive catalog, Tig Notaro’s and Stephanie Allynne’s Am I OK? stands out as the must-watch film, especially since we celebrate Pride Month in June.

Am I OK? is a dramedy that stars Dakota Johnson as Lucy, a woman who slowly comes to the realization that she’s queer. With her best friend Jane (Sonoya Mizuno) by her side, Lucy embarks on a relatable journey of self-discovery, navigating the often-awkward world of dating and learning to embrace her true self. Dakota Johnson delivers an unforgettable performance

It's hard to remember a time now when superhero movies weren't a constant fixture of American life. The rise of Marvel Studios and cinematic universe-style storytelling has resulted in well over a decade's worth of constant comic book movies and TV shows. Before game-changing filmmakers like Christopher Nolan and Sam Raimi brought their unique voices to the superhero genre in the mid-2000s, though, comic book movies weren't nearly as frequent or omnipresent in Hollywood as they are now.

In 1989, for instance, they were still few and far between. Most of the superhero films that had been released before that year were, with a few exceptions, viewed as either cheesy, cheap, or disposable. None of them — not even Richard Donner's Superman — were seen as an avenue for meaningful artistic cinematic expression. But that all began to change when Tim Burton's Batman hit theaters 35 years ago this week.

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Film academy invites 487 to join including duncan crabtree-ireland, lily gladstone, chris silbermann and celine song.

This is the highest number of invitations issued by the Academy since 2020, when 819 went out.

By Scott Feinberg

Scott Feinberg

Executive Editor of Awards

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Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, Lily Gladstone, Chris Silbermann and Celine Song

Four hundred and eighty-seven members of the global film community — among them Killers of the Flower Moon star Lily Gladstone , Past Lives filmmaker Celine Song , CAA managing partner Chris Silbermann , and SAG-AFTRA national executive director and chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland — are receiving invitations on Tuesday to become members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences , the organization announced this morning.

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NASA’s Voyager 1, the most distant spacecraft from Earth, is doing science again after problem

FILE - This illustration provided by NASA depicts Voyager 1. The most distant spacecraft from Earth stopped sending back understandable data in November 2023. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California announced this week that Voyager 1’s four scientific instruments are back in business after a technical snafu in November. (NASA via AP, File)

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DALLAS (AP) — NASA’s Voyager 1, the most distant spacecraft from Earth, is sending science data again.

Voyager 1’s four instruments are back in business after a computer problem in November, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory said this week. The team first received meaningful information again from Voyager 1 in April, and recently commanded it to start studying its environment again.

Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 is drifting through interstellar space, or the space between star systems. Before reaching this region, the spacecraft discovered a thin ring around Jupiter and several of Saturn’s moons. Its instruments are designed to collect information about plasma waves, magnetic fields and particles.

Voyager 1 is over 15 billion miles (24.14 billion kilometers) from Earth. Its twin Voyager 2 — also in interstellar space — is more than 12 billion miles (19.31 billion kilometers) away.

This story was first published on June 14, 2024. It was updated on June 17, 2024 to correct the metric distance Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft are from Earth.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Megalopolis’ Lands at Lionsgate for U.S. Release After Divisive Cannes Premiere

By Rebecca Rubin

Rebecca Rubin

Senior Film and Media Reporter

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‘Inside Out 2’ Surpasses ‘Dune 2’ as Highest-Grossing Movie of Year With $724 Million Globally 2 days ago
Box Office: ‘Inside Out 2’ Scores $100 Million in Sensational Second Weekend 2 days ago

Francis Ford Coppola’s sci-fi epic “ Megalopolis ,” which proved to be wildly divisive after its Cannes Film Festival premiere, has finally found a distributor. Lionsgate has signed a deal to distribute the film in theaters in the U.S. and Canada.

It will be released on Sept. 27. “Megalopolis” is playing in Imax, but it will likely share screens with Christopher Nolan’s 10th anniversary “Interstellar” rerelease. It’ll also have to relinquish those coveted premium large format screens a week later, as “Joker: Folie à Deux,” which was filmed with Imax cameras, lands on Oct. 4.

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Off to the Stars, With Grief, Dread and Regret
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Interstellar (2014)
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ඔලුව විකාර වෙන කාලතරණ කතාව
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COMMENTS

Interstellar movie review & film summary (2014)
The film's widescreen panoramas feature harsh interplanetary landscapes, shot in cruel Earth locales; some of the largest and most detailed starship miniatures ever built, and space sequences presented in scientifically accurate silence, a la "2001." But for all its high-tech glitz, "Interstellar" has a defiantly old-movie feeling.
'Interstellar' Review: Christopher Nolan's Film Starring Matthew
"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.
Film Review: 'Interstellar'
Film Review: 'Interstellar' 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 ...
Interstellar (2014)
LordPatrickson Interstellar. Need I say more. Rated 5/5 Stars • Rated 5 out of 5 stars 06/10/24 Full Review Reynaldo Via Loved the big screen and stadium seating and balcony option Rated 5/5 ...
'Interstellar': Film Review
A grandly conceived epic that engrosses but never quite soars. While it technically occupies the realm of science fiction, this gargantuan enterprise brushes up against science fact—or at least ...
Interstellar Movie Review
Interstellar Movie Review:58 Interstellar Official trailer. Interstellar. Community Reviews. See all. Parents say (44) Kids say (184) age 12+ Based on 44 parent reviews . Melissa M. Parent. July 4, 2021 age 11+ Awesome movie. Kids will love it for different reasons as they grow up.
Interstellar
Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 27, 2023. Nolan's most openly emotional film, he fully lived up to his "Stanley Kubrick's eye and Steven Spielberg's heart" identity with this ...
'Interstellar': The Cinema of Physicists
The second time I saw the movie, clued in by Dr. Thorne's new book, "The Science of Interstellar," I enjoyed it more, and I could appreciate that a lot of hard-core 20th- and 21st-century ...
Interstellar Review
Interstellar has been very consciously designed as an in-theatre event. In fact, viewers will rob themselves of a crucial piece of the film's appeal if they choose to experience it for the first ...
Interstellar Movie Review: Christopher Nolan's Journey Into Space
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 ...
Interstellar (2014)
Interstellar: Directed by Christopher Nolan. With Ellen Burstyn, Matthew McConaughey, Mackenzie Foy, John Lithgow. 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.
'Interstellar' review
Interstellar is sometimes confusing, melodramatic, and self-serious, but Nolan managed to make a space epic on a human scale. opens November 5th. It has the grand scope of Stanley Kubrick's 2001 ...
Interstellar (film)
Interstellar is a 2014 epic science fiction drama film directed by Christopher Nolan, who co-wrote it with his brother Jonathan.It stars Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Bill Irwin, Ellen Burstyn, Michael Caine, and Matt Damon.Set in a dystopian future where Earth is suffering from catastrophic blight and famine, the film follows a group of astronauts who travel through a ...
Interstellar
Movie Review. Everything has its time, we're told in Ecclesiastes. And for planet Earth, it's time for death. ... 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 ...
Interstellar (2014)
November 16, 2014. Shayne Travis Grieve. 2014, Review. No Comments. Christopher Nolan's Interstellar demands for a patient, open-minded and perceptive audience. For this very reason, it is destined to divide. Missing are the exhilarating action set pieces that viewers have come to expect from the director. At its core, Nolan's three-hour ...
'Interstellar' Movie Review
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 ...
Interstellar Review
Movies Interstellar review October 30, 2014 | By Ryan Lambie. Movies Interstellar is the Closest Thing to Christopher Nolan's Superman You'll Ever See November 5, 2019 | By Mike Cecchini.
'Interstellar' Review: Christopher Nolan's Latest Might Be Too ...
Read our Interstellar review. ... Interstellar is a good film with big flaws that may or may not matter because everything around them is done so well. /Film rating: 7.5 out 10.
Movie Review
Interstellar, 2014 Directed by Christopher Nolan Starring Matthew McConaughey, Wes Bentley, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Elyes Gabel, Michael Caine, John Lithgow, Topher Grace, Casey Affleck ...
"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 ...
'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.. 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.
Christopher Nolan's Interstellar Is Big, Long, Ridiculous
Is Big, Long, Ridiculous — and Lots of Fun. By David Edelstein. Anne Hathaway and Matthew McConaughey in Interstellar. Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon/Warner Bros. Entertainment/Paramount Pictures. In ...
Interstellar Movie Review
Interstellar Movie Review — Christopher Nolan's most epic, but human movie yet. Interstellar is a visual masterpiece that has a human touch that propels it to greatness. It is perhaps one of the best space movies ever made. Christopher Nolan isn't one known to be taciturn when it comes to his movies. Even his smaller movies like Momento ...
Interstellar's 10 Best Scenes, Ranked
Interstellar is an underappreciated film in Christopher Nolan's filmography, and it is so much better 10 years after it was originally released. Dr. Mann Reveal
One of the best sci-fi movies ever just crashed Prime Video's top 10
Meanwhile, Steven Rea from Philadelphia Inquirer summarized this movie perfectly: "Interstellar is an experience. Nolan's vision of our galaxy, and galaxies beyond, is daunting, majestic; the ...
10 best sci-fi book-to-movie adaptations, ranked
MGM. Sci-fi is a popular genre in literature due to its thought-provoking nature. Beyond thrilling adventures through space or fantastical realms, sci-fi books explore profound topics like the ...
NASA has again delayed Boeing Starliner's return to Earth
NASA announced Friday night that it is again delaying the return to Earth of Boeing Starliner's spacecraft and two astronauts from the International Space Station.
Oscars: Film Academy Invites 487 People From Movie Business to Join
Film Academy Invites 487 to Join Including Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, Lily Gladstone, Chris Silbermann and Celine Song. This is the highest number of invitations issued by the Academy since 2020 ...
NASA's Voyager 1, most distant spacecraft from Earth, does science
Movie reviews Book reviews Celebrity Television Music Business. Inflation Personal finance Financial Markets Business Highlights ... (24.14 billion kilometers) from Earth. Its twin Voyager 2 — also in interstellar space — is more than 12 billion miles (19.31 billion kilometers) away. ___ This story was first published on June 14, 2024. It ...
Francis Ford Coppola's 'Megalopolis' Gets U.S. Release in September
Francis Ford Coppola's sci-fi epic "Megalopolis," which proved to be wildly divisive after its Cannes Film Festival premiere, has finally found a distributor. Lionsgate has signed a deal to ...

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