Interstellar: A stunning spatial thriller

Interstellar

Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Michael Caine, Bill Irwin, Ellen Burstyn

Rated: 8/10

Mystery thrillers unfolding in another galaxy are somewhat hard to stitch together. Interstellar, however, has both its physics and chemistry right as it hires a single dad to navigate the light years in search of a planet that could house the dying humanity of famine and pollution-hit Earth.

The credit goes to director Christopher Nolan that for the most part of its elongated existence on screen, Interstellar keeps you engaged and on the edge of your seat.

That the story is way out of imagination and the situational sequences hang tenuously between two far removed solar systems, gives wings to Nolan’s blockbuster ambitions. But for the last 15 minutes or so of this epic three-hour science fiction, the going is both spatially and emotionally exciting. Down the line, it also emerges as a visual treat, be it the killer duststorms arising in the horizon or the tsunami waves that threaten to engulf their spaceship on an alien planet deluged with water.

The dizzying balance that Nolan successfully maintains between human agony and spatial impossibilities — both won over in the end — is something that gives this play-to-the-gallery film an appealing veneer. It also gives it the required depth.

Relationships between Nature and man and man and daughter carry as much gumption as the emptiness and isolation of being when these characters navigate the light years and get sucked into the black hole of loneliness — all in search of an alternative planet of life which apparently lies somewhere beyond Saturn and accessible through a tricky wormhole.

All the space jargon, put together fictionally by a qualified quantum physicist hired by Nolan, sits lightly on your shoulders as the film spends considerable time on Earth before spinning into outer space with a charming but unkempt Matthew McConaughey at the helm and a striking Anne Hathaway as his deputy. The journey, ordered in my an ageing Dr Brand played delightfully by Nolan regular Michael Caine, aims to conquer everything, except time with seven minutes in space translating into 23 years on Earth!

However, the haunting connect between father McConaughey in space and his daughter Chastain on Earth, compels you to feel with a gravity that is often missing in space. To have used flashback flashes through narrating oldies to unfold the entire interstellar event to viewers turns out to be a masterstroke of genius on Nolan’s part.

Altogether, the film is stunning, engaging, compelling, endearing and thrilling. That’s rare in spatial mounts and you could call it the fifth dimension of cinema, something that Nolan’s astronauts go hunting in their iron-clad spaceship.

Source: Sunday Pioneer, 9 November, 2014