Each new Christopher Nolan film plays as a monumental achievement. Here's a director who isn't chained to one particular genre. He challenges himself to make a visually sumptuous film that makes viewers think as well as be entertained. Interstellar is Nolan's biggest film yet. It's a brave and ambitious attempt to make his own version of Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's filled with a number of ideas and concepts that would prove a challenge to grasp for most regular folk.

Of course, that's not to say that the film is inaccessible. The science of the film -- which mostly involves quantum physics and the theory of relativity -- is balanced out by more humane concepts like love and the familial bond. The humanity and emotional resonance makes all of the events in the various storylines easier to digest. There are a few logical gaps that run throughout the (long, though engrossing) film, but its epic scope and grandeur tends to cover a lot of that up. Its confidence to run through these various ideas is remarkable enough to warrant praise. Nolan almost matches Kubrick in his attempt.


The film has three clearly delineated acts: The Earth bound start, the space bound complication, and the solution to the big problem for its ending. This justifies its nearly three hour-long running time. Nolan has to spend time hooking the audience into each act in order to propel the story forward. This is the Earth of the near future (no specific year is mentioned, though it's conceivable that events are occurring in the middle of this century). Suffice it to say that the future is bleak. The world is running out of food due to a blight that is systematically destroying its crops. When the story opens, we follow the Cooper family, with father and widower Joseph "Coop" (Matthew McConaughey), his father Donald (John Lithgow), and his young kids "Murph" (Makenzie Foy) and Tom (Timothee Chalamet).

There's the implication that the world has also been devastated by some kind of worldwide war that has eliminated all governments and forced once-great programs like NASA to go underground. A nice, easily overlooked detail about this future is the sinister-looking action of changing children's textbooks to say that the Moon landing was faked, all designed to force the Soviet Union to pour money into their space program and go bankrupt in the process. Dust storms are the norm where the Coopers live; Earth's atmosphere is rapidly running out of breathable oxygen and is slowly being replaced by suffocating nitrogen.


Things are so dire that NASA scientists are asking Coop -- one of their few remaining pilots -- to undertake a scouting mission to find a suitable planet for the people of Earth to colonize. This is the principal idea of the NASA group led by Professor Brand (Michael Caine), Coop's former mentor. Coop would be saving the world, but at the huge expense of possibly never seeing his children alive again. 



The film doesn't dwell on this difficult decision for Coop for very long, eager to get to the space sequences, but the sense of abandonment is palpable. Coop and his crew would be looking towards the needs of the many over the needs of the few. Spending the first hour or so of the film on Earth to show what is at stake for all involved is a great move that naturally links to the complications of the second act.





The mission to the planets beyond our galaxy is made possible by a black hole that materialized next to Saturn. The wormhole is a gateway to planets on the other side. The mission of the Endurance/Ranger space vehicles is meant to follow the initial scouting missions of twelve NASA astronauts who were supposed to identify the planet or planets that would prove hospitable to human life. The presence of the black hole also allows the film to realistically depict a phenomenon called time dilation, which occurs when the astronauts are close to the black hole and what feels like two years to them is actually something like twenty years on Earth. So while Coop, Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway), Doyle (Wes Bentley), and Romily (David Gyasi) barely age during their travels, decades pass by on Earth.



The film nicely cuts between what happens on the Endurance and what is happening on Earth at the same time. The differences in the passage of time due to the time dilation make for some pretty stark and shocking moments. At one point, everyone but Romily goes to investigate the surface of a planet full of water. One hour on the planet's surface would equate to seven years in Earth time. When the crew returns to the docking station in orbit, two decades of time have passed due to an unfortunate mishap. Time becomes, in essence, an enemy the astronauts struggle to combat just as much as the foreboding cold and darkness of space. Romily tells of the absurdity in designing spacecraft for humans to operate; A thin piece of aluminum is all that separates them from certain death in oblivion. What isn't particularly addressed is the fact that these people and the people who embarked on the missions before them are true pioneers who are exploring the final frontier. They have risked and sacrificed their most treasured commodity -- seeing their loved ones grow up -- to ensure that humanity gets a much-needed future.


On Earth, Murph (played as an adult by Jessica Chastain), her family, and Professor Brand have to cope without their loved ones. Murph's story is particularly poignant, as she has deep abandonment issues that keep her ostracized from her family and largely alone at work. She initially hates that her father left her to save humanity, which is a very understandable mentality. He promised that he would come back to her, but the years pass by without much hope that he can keep that promise. This is the primary relationship that drives the third act. Tom (now Casey Affleck) is the less crucial character because he was largely accepting of Coop's departure.




Their relationship isn't as broken as the one with Murph. She wanted him to stay with her, a selfish sentiment that informs on Coop's actions in this section of the film. It is here that the true intentions of many characters are revealed. The mission changes from something largely hopeful into a sinister lie that has been agreed upon and accepted by those in the know. This includes the lead scientist who led the earlier Lazarus missions in front of the Endurance.



As the story moves along here, the chances of success become more and more remote. The danger of extinction is a terrifyingly real possibility. The discussions of "love triumphing all things" are a little hard to swallow (especially coming from Amelia), but do add to what drives Coop here. McConaughey embodies the humanity and purpose that serves as a solid anchor for the story to build around. One's impressions of the film should be based on his performance and how he so natirally attenuates Coop's emotional states.



Ultimately, the mission and its larger purpose do not matter. The story boils down to whether Coop can get back to his daughter before she perishes along with the rest of the human race. The ending can be seen as either a cheat (some are not going to buy the "love transcends time and space and is the fifth dimension" conceit that is crucial to the narrative; I was initially dubious, but ultimately accepting) or a telling message of the tenacity and resiliency within all humans. Interstellar is an intriguing glimpse into a plausible potential future that is at times devastatingly frightening to contemplate, yet still full of optimism and hope.