“Do not go gentle into that good night/Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
Christopher Nolan’s moving, pretentious, inspiring, frustrating and overlong sci-fi effort Interstellar addresses time, existence, transcendence, and the limitless possibility of the universe. So it’s only fitting that during Interstellar, Nolan repeats Dylan Thomas’ beautiful quote ad infinitum, with the desperate grasp of a man finally finding meaning in an infinite, inky blackness.
Set in the not-too-distant future, Nolan’s dust-covered Earth isn’t doing well, and the next generation is destined to starve or suffocate. Former NASA pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is recruited by an off-the-grid space mission, and taken to the cosmos, where the mission is to try and find humanity a new home – leaving his own behind in the process.
Nolan worlds prove endlessly awe-inspiring. Earth is presented as striking and silty, and his visions of space and other planets are breath-taking. Black holes are glimmering spheres of petroleum rainbows; other worlds are covered in glistening frost or glacially paced sky-eclipsing tidal waves. Meanwhile, the epic, vaguely hymnal score reflects the film’s foundation in both science and faith.
Interstellar stumbles in its exposition, as hokey science, painfully scripted philosophical ideologies and obvious foreshadowing prove lofty and alienating. But the cosmological is grounded in the personal. McConaughey beautifully captures his character’s determination as well as the fear and loss that overcome him when he realises that mere hours in space can lose him decades on Earth; that by trying to save his children, he has abandoned them.
Amidst explorations of ego, manipulation, loss, regret, bitterness and possible extinction, Nolan occasionally gropes, but always manages to find light. In dust storms, in black holes, in the darkness of space, in the ruins of destroyed relationships – and in people. Always, in people.
IN CINEMAS NOW.