 Tagline: The end of Earth will not be the end of us. From director Christopher Nolan (Inception, The Dark Knight trilogy) comes the story of a team of pioneers undertaking the most important mission in human history. Academy Award winner Matthew McConaughey (Dallas Buyer's Club) stars as ex-pilot-turned-farmer Cooper, who must leave his family and a foundering Earth behind to lead an expedition traveling beyond this galaxy to discover whether mankind has a future among the stars. Academy Award winner Anne Hathaway (Les Miserables) and Academy Award nominee Jessica Chastain (Zero Dark Thirty) also star in the landmark film critics are calling "a must-see masterpiece." (New York Post) Storyline: In the near future, Earth has been devastated by drought and famine, causing a scarcity in food and extreme changes in climate. When humanity is facing extinction, a mysterious rip in the space-time continuum is discovered, giving mankind the opportunity to widen its lifespan. A group of explorers must travel beyond our solar system in search of a planet that can sustain life. The crew of the Endurance are required to think bigger and go further than any human in history as they embark on an interstellar voyage into the unknown. Coop, the pilot of the Endurance, must decide between seeing his children again and the future of the human race. Written by Warren D'Souza Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Martin Liebman, March 17, 2015 -- Interstellar's ambitions are both clear and vague, complex and simple, powerful and poignant, purposeful and hopeful. The film evokes the style and structure of the best of Star Trek and Shyamalan with a substance comparable to that of 2001 and that drives as deep, if not sometimes more deeply, than Stanley Kubrick's legendary film. Director Christopher Nolan's (the Dark Knight trilogy) Interstellar may not be quite so ahead of its time as Kubrick's masterwork was back in 1968 in terms of its technical merits but the film does strive to match, and sometimes overtakes, it in terms of its core narrative in which the fantastical gives way to the fantastically complex as it explores -- throughout space and both in a moment and over a number of years -- core ideas surrounding the true strength and bond of the human condition, a bond which the film says cannot be severed by either time or space, a bond which can overcome even the most impossibly complex scenario. Sometimes convoluted, sometimes impractical, sometimes too fast, occasionally too slow, consistently epic, ofttimes surreal, unfailingly mesmerizing, and always focused on a greater goal and always moving towards a simple yet evolved endgame dynamic, Interstellar dazzles on multiple levels and leaves the audience in awe of its boldness, complexity, intelligence, and even entertainment value but at the same time questioning if it couldn't have been a little tighter, meant a little more, dug a little deeper, found a slightly more consistent rhythm, discovered an even better way to tell an important and meaningful yet complicated tale that echoes with a profound sense of purpose and the need to explore it further on more intimately personal emotional and intellectual levels. Very mild spoilers follow, the kind that only hint at small bits and pieces that make up the greater 'Interstellar' experience. This is a movie best watched as blindly as possible the first time around. Multiple viewings, armed with one's own insight into what the movie has to say, tries to say, succeeds at saying, and fails at saying will aid necessary subsequent interpretations. Yet these mild spoilers -- even as they're merely allusions -- may influence one's perception of the movie as it unfolds. Proceed with caution, or skip to the technical Blu-ray review in the video and audio sections and come back later for the rest. A near future world is covered in dust. Wheat and okra crops have been wiped out, leaving only corn to grow with any sort of healthy consistency. Life goes on, but not life exactly as it once was. There's no more military, no more wide acceptance into college, no more spending on expensive programs. Life is about survival, though certainly simple pleasures like baseball remain. It's a challenging life, not an impossible one. One day, a dust storm rolls through town. Murph (Mackenzie Foy) and her father Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) find a pattern in the dust as it lays on her bedroom floor, much like the pattern that she frequently finds on her bookshelf, which she calls the work of a "ghost." Cooper and Murph decipher the code and realize it's pointing them to a spot on the map. They soon discover that the point leads them to the last remnants of NASA, working in a secretive underground operation. NASA knows the planet is doomed and is preparing a space flight to follow up on previous leads about potential relocation sites in another galaxy that has been opened to them by way of a mysterious wormhole that has recently appeared within the solar system. Cooper is asked to pilot the mission; he's a former test pilot and the best chance the flight has of succeeding. He leaves for the stars and leaves behind his son Tom (Timothée Chalamet), his father-in-law Donald (John Lithgow), and a distraught Murph, who strongly believes the ghost is urging him to stay home. His crew consists of Brand (Anne Hathaway), Romilly (David Gyasi), Doyle, (Wes Bentley), and two robots, TARS (voiced by Bill Irwin) and CASE (voiced by Josh Stewart). Interstellar manages to pack in a dense and fully realized yet fundamentally familiar future world in its opening minutes, sharing a good deal of information in relatively short order but, in these early moments, making every line and shot matter as it almost effortlessly builds towards the more fascinating realms of its core story. As the movie inches ever further away from its "Disaster movie" underpinnings and closer to its true narrative purposes that eschew typical genre convention, it opens up to explore a much more satisfying field of view that's not concerned with imminent destruction or the physical salvation of lives but instead a broader examination of the connection shared by humanity. There, the hero, or heroes, are defined not so much by their outward actions but by their inward essences and how they use that internal guide to not only reach point B from point A but also to bend their will and broaden their understanding of themselves, and everything around them, to accomplish their goals of togetherness, understanding, and yes, even salvation, though not necessarily in the traditional usage of the terms. In many ways, the film uses the idea of the wormhole and the simple demonstration of unrelated but overlapping points on a folded plane not so much to depict part of the science behind the film but rather to demonstrate the driving force that is its exploration of mankind through the prism of both the shared and disparate experiences of place and time between Cooper and his daughter Murphy. It's a complex narrative to be sure and one that's difficult to explore without spoiling the movie in its total, but needless to say there's a wonderful bit of storytelling and multifaceted detail that the audience will find both compelling and evolving with every watch. As with the "Disaster movie" underpinnings that carry the early part of the movie, much of its middle stretch -- and a little further back into the first act, and through parts of the third -- operate under the "what's out there?" pretext, that sense of awe and wonder at discovering the unknown. Yet the movie takes even these broader strokes and gradually manipulates them to mean something else, again on a more intimate level or, at least, concerning the collective structure of the human race. For example, salvation through death and destruction is a recurring theme. In one of the most interesting stretches in the film, it juxtaposes -- spoiler alert -- Matt Damon's Mann (and it's no coincidence he's named "Mann") on another world with Jessica Chastain's Murph on Earth. Both, simultaneously, engage in acts of destruction with the goal of their conception of a greater good in mind, though certainly with Mann the story runs a fair bit deeper. Nevertheless, it's a beautiful parallel that contextualizes a dueling philosophy on several levels, about finding a way to see a raw goal succeed but also contrasting a larger dynamic that runs through the film, particularly its "Plan A" and "Plan B" narrative driving force. This segment stretches to both ends of the human condition: the seemingly unending destruction that's marked mankind's history, the thematic idea of Newton's third law about moving forward only by leaving something behind, and the unquenchable thirst to live and move on at any cost, contrasting actions taken on behalf of the greater good and actions taken on behalf of oneself and how they can sometimes work in tandem and sometimes on disparate, incompatible levels. There's no doubt that the movie can get more than a little convoluted as it approaches, and works through, its third act and its final resolution of a core story that challenges man to understand the greater universe and, in turn, himself, on a plane of existence far beyond one's general perception and grasp of life and what it means to live under the broader, accepted conditions that has defined mankind since (presumably) its beginning. Interstellar is presented in a way through which the process means more than the truth. Whatever science facts it gets right or wrong, no matter how far it stretches believability or the boundaries of known laws on multiple planes, doesn't really matter. What matters is that connection the movie makes, the more emotional and even spiritual themes it explores. It uses all the grandiose pieces that support it to get to the final resolution, the final truth, through a story made of grand visions of space and time but also the inward emotional turmoil, the tangible pain, the lingering doubt, the constant fear, the evolving perception, the need to connect and reconnect that defines characters, relationships, and and mankind itself, not to mention the truth that nothing -- not disaster, not certain death, not the distance of space, not the onward march of time -- can stop that pursuit of that connection and, ultimately, the connection itself. Interstellar is also a broader technical marvel. Nolan has rightly chosen substance over style, practicality over flash, people over the power of an artificial epic scale. The movie feels large, involved, and detailed without sacrificing a tangible realism. The movie is more than comfortably familiar both on Earth and through the technology used to stretch beyond. Some of it is vague, but it all works together in a beautiful, harmonious relationship with the individuals and the ideas they, and their story, carry on through to the end where it's not rockets and gadgets and gizmos but rather the simplest -- yet also the most complicated -- concept of the human bond that comes to define the movie. Still, Nolan has spent the appropriate resources to make a beautiful, bold, and satisfying frame in which the more intimate journey unfolds. The film's physical scale effortlessly blends into its most intimately emotional bits and character details. The entire thing feels fully organic and effortless, save for Hans Zimmer's score that sometimes feels too drummed up, too invasive, too much and upsets the film's balance of precision and detail with an overpowering march that sometimes subtly sounds like klaxons blaring underneath the action and, elsewhere, like the music is trying to give an unnecessarily hard edge to a delicate moment in the movie and sometimes even devours dialogue and surrounding sonic details. That said, the movie is otherwise a technical masterpiece that's every bit as much fun to look at as the greater movie is to understand. Ultimately, and despite everything that's clearly good with the movie -- the many physical, emotional, and metaphysical areas it so complexly, and often gracefully, explores -- and some of the things that aren't quite clearly bad but do leave one questioning parts of the movie -- a sometimes wayward score, later scenes that feel a little out of touch, a general sense that there's just more to explore, more to grasp, more it could have done to fully immerse the audience both in its greater universe and its most intimate corners alike -- it doesn't feel fully fair, or even completely right, to pen a review after a single viewing, or two in a single day, as was the case for the purpose of this review. Consider this review, then, an initial gut reaction, which is all one can really -- honestly -- give following a movie of this technical scope and, much more importantly, emotional and metaphysical scale. Even decades removed from release, movies like 2001 continue to thrive under the watchful eye of scrutiny, the hopeful vision of interpretation, the continued dissection, reassembly, and further dissection of its many moving and stationary parts alike. Interstellar seems destined to follow suit, not only because of a shared bond of style and outer space setting but because of the complicated endeavors in which both undertake that extend well beyond the basic confines of question-and-answer and enter, and pursue, an entire realm of thought-provoking possibilities. Also then consider this review a peek inside the door, a brief overview of what's immediately noticeable inside and a quick reaction to what's been seen but that deserves a much deeper, more prolonged examination in the years to follow. Interstellar may not quite appear to be a total masterwork on the matters of which it explores, at least upon initial viewing, though it's certainly clear after one or two views that the film stands as tall as anything else out there by way of its grace and grandeur on one hand and its lofty ideas on another. Add to that its superficially accessible yet inwardly deep and complex themes not about time and space but the bondings of humanity that exist beyond the physical realm and even the raw lifeblood of family. The film doesn't shy away from exploring with purpose, traversing, in the story, untold distances yet in fact places much closer than the stars. The film necessarily wades through some choppy waters at times that interrupt flow, not content, but the film is certainly a legitimate spectacle of sight and sound but more important a firm, graceful, deep, and satisfying journey through the human condition. No movie is perfect. Interstellar frequently comes as close as any, but sometimes -- infrequently -- drifts a little too far away. It's a film that, on the individual level, will either draw closer to or drift further from greatness as it's watched, studied, pondered, dissected, and enjoyed both the first time around and over the years and decades to come. Paramount's Blu-ray release of Interstellar is, much like the film, mildly flawed but more often than not close to perfect. Video and audio are generally striking though not without a few setbacks. Supplements are many but viewers will likely be disappointed by the absence of a commentary track, or two, that could have examined, on one hand, the raw technical nature of the Interstellar experience and, on the other, the more profound themes that run through it. Nevertheless, this release earns my highest recommendation. This is a movie everyone should see at least once, preferably twice, and give it time to sink in, love it or hate it or still unsure, after the fact. [CSW] -4.7- Finally writer/director Christopher Nolan, his producer wife Emma, and his co-writer brother Jonathan delve into emotions to match their precise filmmaking, and the result is sublime. Scientists are already decrying the details, but really who cares? This story is about survival, and hope, and the familial bonds that make our lives worth fighting for against impossible odds. This film is a full broadside sensory assault. If you are a fan of films that really make you think then this is the film for you. Cast Notes: Ellen Burstyn (Murph [older]), Matthew McConaughey (Cooper), Mackenzie Foy (Murph [10 Yrs.]), John Lithgow (Donald), Timothée Chalamet (Tom [15 Yrs.]), David Oyelowo (School Principal), Collette Wolfe (Ms. Hanley), Francis X. McCarthy (Boots [as Francis Xavier McCarthy]), Bill Irwin (TARS [voice]), Anne Hathaway (Brand), Andrew Borba (Smith), Wes Bentley (Doyle), William Devane (Williams), Michael Caine (Professor Brand), David Gyasi (Romilly). IMDb Rating (03/13/15): 8.8/10 from 526,112 users Top 250: #22
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