Interstellar

'Interstellar' was the next film to take my fancy. After reading about this movie online a couple of months ago, and after the amazingness that was 'Gravity', I was very much looking forward to getting lost in space once again. Did it live up to my expectations? 

 

'Interstellar' is an American science fiction film starring Matthew McConaughey, Michael Caine and Anne Hathaway. Blight has occurred on planet Earth causing many of our crops to die out. The only crop currently surviving is corn which seems to be on its way out shortly. Widowed Cooper, a former NASA pilot, now runs a family farm presumably in the south of the United States with his father-in-law, son, and 10-year-old daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy - Breaking Dawn Part 2). Cooper's daughter Murphy believes her room is being haunted by a ghost seemingly trying to communicate to her via Morse code. After a particularly dusty storm, Murphy discovered a pattern in the dust on her bedroom floor. Cooper realises that gravity has part to play and works out that this code is actually a set of coordinates. These coordinates lead Cooper, and his stowaway daughter, to a secret NASA headquarters run by Professor Brand (Caine). It turns out that a wormhole has been created by 'Them' situated just off the rings of Saturn. The wormhole can be used to travel through the universe to a very distant galaxy with multiple Earth-like planets that are possibly capable of sustaining human life. Cooper must make the decision to leave his family behind in search of a new home to solve the ever growing problem on Earth and save mankind. Much to his daughters despair, Cooper sets off on this mission with no idea of if/when he will return. Along with Professor Brand's daughter Amelia (Hathaway), he must travel through the wormhole and find a new home before it's too late.

 

So I went into the movie theatre rather naively looking for a film to best my favourite film of all time 'Gravity'. Instead what I found was 3 hours of mostly weirdness held together by a plot more similar to the 1997 film 'Contact'. The movie is very much one of two halves. The first being the depressing and lifeless world our planet has become due to the dusty blight. Humans are barely surviving with a rather bleak future. As for the second half, it focuses more on the weirdness of this film. The weirdness being the wormhole and how it got there, massive waves on a planet covered in water and a hard to grasp fifth dimension theory. For all of its efforts this film never quite reaches the emotion or epic scenes like those in 'Gravity'. Also this films score is all over the place where with 'Gravity' it could not be faulted. Anyway I'll stop comparing the two now as I feel my need for another believable, realistic, emotion-packed space adventure is clouding my judgment a touch! 'Interstellar' kept up the pace and didn't drag as much as it could have with its lengthy duration. The acting ability in this film was also one of two halves. I didn't feel like Matthew McConaughey was at his best, not like how we saw him earlier in the year in the amazing 'Dallas Buyers Club'. To go with that Anne Hathaway could have been replaced by a number of better actors. However, hats off to Mackenzie Foy and Jessica Chastain who shine bright as a star in the role of the younger and older incarnation of Murphy. This character and the actors playing her provide pretty much all of the much needed emotion in this film. The production of the film was great with some epic shots of outer space and some equally amazing shots of the other worlds within the alternative galaxy. The bad points are the mish-mash, ill-fitting score and the zero gravity shots. I just felt that they weren't as fluid as in other space films I have seen.

 

So it's a 7.5/10 for 'Interstellar' placing it at number 25 of 63 so far on the league table. Not bad but not quite 'Gravity'!