I got the chance to see Christopher Nolan's new film, Interstellar at the Cinema last Friday so here are a few rambling thoughts on it. If you haven't already seen this movie then look away now as there will be spoilers.
It's always nice to see a piece of fiction promoting the idea of space exploration in age where we seem to be becoming more and more insular. Doctor Who did something similar recently with Kill the Moon, but where that story used the fantasy concept of a moon dragon, this story used concepts rooted in hard science fiction. We have time paradoxes, black holes, gravity and concept of a tesseract. Apparently the filmmakers had a scientific advisor to help, but you don't need to be a science expert to understand this. As with Inception, Nolan has a knack for making complex ideas appear simple enough for the mainstream audience. Besides, most of the concepts are familiar to science fiction terms. I guessed early on the true identity of the "ghost" that was haunting the protagonist because I've been watching Steven Moffat's Doctor Who long enough to be primed to recognise a time paradox.
The special effects used to portray outer space and travel were very well done. The effect of the spinning Endurance spacecraft and seeing space moving were good as well as the ship moving in a different direction. The watery emptiness of Miller's planet. The scenes of Cooper going through the wormhole and ending up in the fifth dimension were very trippy.
The characters were fairly straightforward archetypes, which is the case with characters in a Nolan film. The protagonist, Cooper is the standard adventurer who ends up leaving his two children and father-in-law, behind to go into space, and later comes to regret it. It's very familiar territory.The other main character is Cooper's daughter, Murphy. She gets to grow up and be a scientist. The fact that these two characters reconcile at the end is no surprise. The young father seeing the last moments of his older, dying daughter is visually interesting.
The other cast are fairly decent. We have the obligatory appearance of Michael Caine in a Christopher Nolan film, this time as Dr Brand. But it's always good to see Michael Caine so this isn't really a complaint. Matt Damon made a fairly good cowardly villain as Dr Mann. Not a nasty character as such, but a weak man whittled down until he cracked. The weakest character was Amelia Brand played by Anne Hathaway, the daughter of Dr Brand and potential love interest for Cooper. Despite being a scientist she is made to look irrational to her male crewmembers because she loves Edmund and wants to land on Edmund's world despite the better result from Mann's. The robot TARS was fun though. Good to have a bit of comic relief in a fairly serious film.
The only rough bits to the film. The fight sequence between Cooper and Dr Mann oddly enough felt more comical than serious because of all the messing around in space suits. The other rough bit was the cheesy ending
when Murphy cracks the code to Plan B and starts throwing around the papers and kissing her lab assistant was a bit clichéd. Other funny seen was son coming back after his crop had been burned and just listening to Murphy's gleefulness rather than getting angry.
Overall a fairly decent sci-fi film. Perhaps a bit too long, but another decent film from Christopher Nolan.
8/10
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