Review of Interstellar (2014) by Adpirtle — 19 Jun 2015

Interstellar is a film about, above everything else, humanity's need for exploration. It's hard to miss this fact, what with all of Matthew McConaughey's monologues on the topic in the film's first half hour or so. The blighted, dying future Earth is practically a metaphor for its navel-gazing population, so blind to the fact that they're literally farming themselves to death that they actually rewrote the history books to discourage wasteful wanderlust. So it comes as little surprise that explorers are the ones plotted to save the species in spite of itself.

However, getting past the heavy-handed setup is worth it, because once the crew of Interstellar's interstellar vessel takes off, so does the movie. The visuals are always great and sometimes amazing. The care with which the film's universe is rendered is apparent. Kip Thorne, Interstellar's science adviser, really earned his paycheck here. The actual science is less perfect, but if you can ignore all the hand-waving at the beginning and ending of the film, the rest might actually teach you a thing or two.

It goes without saying with a cast like this that the performances are all solid, including an unexpectedly disturbed turn by Matt Damon. Christopher Nolan shoots this film in signature stylistic fashion, and his musical right-hand man Hans Zimmer provides a suitably rousing score. The ending is more than a little derivative, but it serves.