movie review interstellar

Interstellar

Christopher Nolan’s  “Interstellar ,” about astronauts traveling to the other end of the galaxy to find a new home to replace humanity’s despoiled home-world, is frantically busy and earsplittingly loud. It uses booming music to jack up the excitement level of scenes that might not otherwise excite. It features characters shoveling exposition at each other for almost three hours, and a few of those characters have no character to speak of: they’re mouthpieces for techno-babble and philosophical debate. And for all of the director’s activism on behalf of shooting on film, the tactile beauty of the movie’s 35mm and 65mm textures isn’t matched by a sense of composition. The camera rarely tells the story in Nolan’s movies. More often it illustrates the screenplay, and there are points in this one where I felt as if I was watching the most expensive NBC pilot ever made.

And yet “Interstellar” is still an impressive, at times astonishing movie that overwhelmed me to the point where my usual objections to Nolan’s work melted away. I’ve packed the first paragraph of this review with those objections (they could apply to any Nolan picture post “Batman Begins”; he is who he is) so that people know that he’s still doing the things that Nolan always does. Whether you find those things endearing or irritating will depend on your affinity for Nolan’s style. 

In any case, t here’s something pure and powerful about this movie. I can’t recall a science fiction film hard-sold to a director’s fans as multiplex-“awesome” in which so many major characters wept openly in close-up, voices breaking, tears streaming down  their  cheeks. Matthew McConaughey ’s widowed astronaut Cooper and his colleague Amelia Brand ( Anne Hathaway ) pour on the waterworks in multiple scenes, with justification: like everyone on the crew of the Endurance , the starship sent to a black hole near Jupiter that will slingshot the heroes towards colonize-able worlds, they’re separated from everything that defines them: their loved ones, their personal histories, their culture, the planet itself. Other characters—including Amelia’s father, an astrophysicist played by Michael Caine , and a space explorer (played by an  un-billed  guest actor) who’s holed up on a forbidding arctic world—express a vulnerability to loneliness and doubt that’s quite raw for this director. The film’s central family (headed by Cooper, grounded after the  dismantling  of NASA) lives on a  corn  farm, for goodness’ sake, like the gentle Iowans in “ Field of Dreams ” (a film whose daddy-issues-laden story syncs up nicely with the narrative of  “ Interstellar”). Granted, they’re growing the crop to feed the human race, which is whiling away its twilight hours on a planet so ecologically devastated that at first you mistake it for the American Dust Bowl circa 1930 or so; but there’s still something amusingly cheeky about the notion of corn as sustenance, especially in a survival story in which the future of humanity is at stake. ( Ellen Burstyn plays one of many witnesses in a documentary first glimpsed in the movie’s opening scene—and which, in classic Nolan style, is a setup for at least two twists.)

The state-of-the-art sci-fi landscapes are deployed in service of Hallmark card homilies about how people should live, and what’s really important. (“We love people who have died—what’s the social utility in that?” “Accident is the first step in evolution.”) After a certain point it sinks in, or should sink in, that Nolan and his co-screenwriter, brother Jonathan Nolan , aren’t trying to one-up the spectacular rationalism of “2001.” The movie’s science fiction trappings are just a wrapping for a spiritual/emotional dream about basic human desires (for home, for family, for continuity of bloodline and culture), as well as for a horror film of sorts—one that treats the star voyagers’ and their earthbound loved ones’ separation as spectacular metaphors for what happens when the people we value are taken from us by death, illness, or unbridgeable distance. (“Pray you never learn just how good it can be to see another face,” another astronaut says, after years alone in an interstellar wilderness.) 

While “Interstellar” never entirely commits to the idea of a non-rational, uncanny world, it nevertheless has a mystical strain, one that’s unusually pronounced for a director whose storytelling has the right-brained sensibility of an engineer, logician, or accountant. There’s a ghost in this film, writing out messages to the living in dust. Characters strain to interpret distant radio messages as if they were ancient texts written in a dead language, and stare through red-rimmed eyes at video messages sent years ago, by people on the other side of the cosmos. “Interstellar” features a family haunted by the memory of a dead mother and then an absent father; a woman haunted by the memory of a missing father, and another woman who’s separated from her own dad (and mentor), and driven to reunite with a lover separated from her by so many millions of miles that he might as well be dead. 

With the possible exception of the last act of “ Memento”  and the pit sequence in “The Dark Knight Rises”—a knife-twisting hour that was all about suffering and transcendence—I can’t think of a Nolan film that ladles on  misery and  valorizes  gut feeling (faith)  the way this one does; not from start to finish, anyway.  T he  most stirring sequences are less about driving the plot forward than contemplating what the characters’ actions mean to them, and to us. The  best of these is the lift-off sequence, which starts with a countdown heard over images of Cooper leaving his family. It continues in space, with Caine reading passages from Dylan Thomas’s villanelle “Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night”: “Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” (If it wasn’t already obvious, this sequence certifies Nolan as the most death-and-control obsessed major American filmmaker, along with Wes Anderson .)

The film’s widescreen panoramas feature harsh interplanetary landscapes, shot in cruel Earth locales; some of the largest and most detailed starship miniatures ever built, and space sequences presented in scientifically accurate silence, a la “2001.” But for all its high-tech glitz, “Interstellar” has a defiantly old-movie feeling. It’s not afraid to switch, even lurch, between modes. At times, the movie’s one-stop-shopping storytelling evokes the tough-tender spirit of a John Ford picture, or a Steven Spielberg film made in the spirit of a Ford picture: a movie that would rather try to be eight or nine things than just one. Bruising outer-space action sequences, with astronauts tumbling in zero gravity and striding across forbidding landscapes, give way to snappy comic patter (mostly between Cooper and the ship’s robot, TARS, designed in Minecraft-style, pixel-ish boxes, and voiced by Bill Irwin ). There are long explanatory sequences, done with and without dry erase boards, dazzling vistas that are less spaces than mind-spaces, and tearful separations and reconciliations that might as well be played silent, in tinted black-and-white, and scored with a saloon piano. (Spielberg originated “Interstellar” in 2006, but dropped out to direct other projects.)

McConaughey, a super-intense actor who wholeheartedly commits to every line and moment he’s given, is the right leading man for this kind of film. Cooper proudly identifies himself as an engineer as well as an astronaut and farmer, but he has the soul of a goofball poet; when he stares at intergalactic vistas, he grins like a kid at an amusement park waiting to ride a new roller coaster. Cooper’s farewell to his daughter Murph—who’s played by McKenzie Foy as a young girl—is shot very close-in, and lit in warm, cradling tones; it has some of the tenderness of the porch swing scene in “ To Kill a Mockingbird .” When Murph grows up into Jessica Chastain —a key member of Caine’s NASA crew, and a surrogate for the daughter that the elder Brand “lost’ to the Endurance ‘s mission—we keep thinking about that goodbye scene, and how its anguish drives everything that Murph and Cooper are trying to do, while also realizing that similar feelings drive the other characters—indeed, the rest of the species. (One suspects this is a deeply personal film for Nolan: it’s about a man who feels he has been “called” to a particular job, and whose work requires him to spend long periods away from his family.)

The movie’s storytelling masterstroke comes from adherence to principles of relativity: the astronauts perceive time differently depending on where Endurance is, which means that when they go down onto a prospective habitable world, a few minutes there equal weeks or months back on the ship. Meanwhile, on Earth, everyone is aging and losing hope. Under such circumstances, even tedious housekeeping-type exchanges become momentous: one has to think twice before arguing about what to do next, because while the argument is happening, people elsewhere are going grey, or suffering depression from being alone, or withering and dying. Here, more so than in any other Nolan film (and that’s saying a lot), time is everything. “I’m an old physicist,” Brand tells Cooper early in the film. “I’m afraid of time.” Time is something we all fear. There’s a ticking clock governing every aspect of existence, from the global to the familial. Every act by every character is an act of defiance, born of a wish to not go gently.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor-at-Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

• Mackenzie Foy as Young Murph
• William Devane as Old Tom
• Matthew McConaughey as Cooper
• Jessica Chastain as Murph
• Michael Caine as Dr. Brand
• Topher Grace as
• Anne Hathaway as Brand
• John Lithgow as Donald
• Casey Affleck as Tom
• Collette Wolfe as Ms. Kelly
• Ellen Burstyn as Old Murph
• Bill Irwin as TARS (voice)
• Wes Bentley as Doyle
• David Oyelowo as Principal
• Christopher Nolan
• Jonathan Nolan

Original Music Composer

• Hans Zimmer

Director of Photography

• Hoyte van Hoytema

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Film Review: ‘Interstellar’

Christopher Nolan hopscotches across space and time in a visionary sci-fi trip that stirs the head and the heart in equal measure.

By Scott Foundas

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We begin somewhere in the American farm belt, which Nolan evokes for its full mythic grandeur — blazing sunlight, towering corn stalks, whirring combines. But it soon becomes clear that this would-be field of dreams is something closer to a nightmare. The date is an unspecified point in the near future, close enough to look and feel like tomorrow, yet far enough for a number of radical changes to have taken hold in society. A decade on from a period of widespread famine, the world’s armies have been disbanded and the cutting-edge technocracies of the early 21st century have regressed into more utilitarian, farm-based economies.

“We’re a caretaker generation,” notes one such homesteader (John Lithgow) to his widower son-in-law, Cooper ( Matthew McConaughey ), a former NASA test pilot who hasn’t stopped dreaming of flight, for himself and for his children: 15-year-old son Tom (Timothee Chalamet) and 10-year-old daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy), the latter a precocious tot first seen getting suspended from school for daring to suggest that the Apollo space missions actually happened. “We used to look up in the sky and wonder about our place in the stars,” Cooper muses. “Now we just look down and wonder about our place in the dirt.”

But all hope is not lost. NASA (whose massive real-life budget cuts lend the movie added immediacy) still exists in this agrarian dystopia, but it’s gone off the grid, far from the microscope of public opinion. There, the brilliant physicist Professor Brand (Michael Caine, forever the face of avuncular wisdom in Nolan’s films) and his dedicated team have devised two scenarios for saving mankind. Both plans involve abandoning Earth and starting over on a new, life-sustaining planet, but only one includes taking Earth’s current 6-billion-plus population along for the ride. Doing the latter, it seems, depends on Brand’s ability to solve an epic math problem that would explain how such a large-capacity vessel could surmount Earth’s gravitational forces. (Never discussed in this egalitarian society: a scenario in which only the privileged few could escape, a la the decadent bourgeoisie of Neill Blomkamp’s “Elysium.”)

Many years earlier, Brand informs, a mysterious space-time rift (or wormhole) appeared in the vicinity of Saturn, seemingly placed there, like the monoliths of “2001,” by some higher intelligence. On the other side: another galaxy containing a dozen planets that might be fit for human habitation. In the wake of the food wars, a team of intrepid NASA scientists traveled there in search of solutions. Now, a decade later (in Earth years, that is), Brand has organized another mission to check up on the three planets that seem the most promising for human settlement. And to pilot the ship, he needs Cooper, an instinctive flight jockey in the Chuck Yeager mode, much as McConaughey’s laconic, effortlessly self-assured performance recalls Sam Shepard’s as Yeager in “The Right Stuff” (another obvious “Interstellar” touchstone).

Already by this point — and we have not yet left the Earth’s surface — “Interstellar” (which Nolan co-wrote with his brother and frequent collaborator, Jonathan) has hurled a fair amount of theoretical physics at the audience, including discussions of black holes, gravitational singularities and the possibility of extra-dimensional space. And, as with the twisty chronologies and unreliable narrators of his earlier films, Nolan trusts in the audience’s ability to get the gist and follow along, even if it doesn’t glean every last nuance on a first viewing. It’s hard to think of a mainstream Hollywood film that has so successfully translated complex mathematical and scientific ideas to a lay audience (though Shane Carruth’s ingenious 2004 Sundance winner “Primer” — another movie concerned with overcoming the problem of gravity — tried something similar on a micro-budget indie scale), or done so in more vivid, immediate human terms. (Some credit for this is doubtless owed to the veteran CalTech physicist Kip Thorne, who consulted with the Nolans on the script and receives an executive producer credit.)

It gives nothing away, however, to say that Nolan maps his infinite celestial landscape as majestically as he did the continent-hopping earthbound ones of “The Prestige” and “Batman Begins,” or the multi-tiered memory maze of “Inception.” The imagery, modeled by Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema on Imax documentaries like “Space Station” and “Hubble 3D,” suggests a boundless inky blackness punctuated by ravishing bursts of light, the tiny spaceship Endurance gleaming like a diamond against Saturn’s great, gaseous rings, then ricocheting like a pinball through the wormhole’s shimmering plasmic vortex.

With each stop the Endurance makes, Nolan envisions yet another new world: one planet a watery expanse with waves that make Waimea Bay look like a giant bathtub; another an ice climber’s playground of frozen tundra and sheer-faced descents. Moreover, outer space allows Nolan to bend and twist his favorite subject — time — into remarkable new permutations. Where most prior Nolan protagonists were forever grasping at an irretrievable past, the crew of the Endurance races against a ticking clock that happens to tick differently depending on your particular vantage. New worlds mean new gravitational forces, so that for every hour spent on a given planet’s surface, years or even entire decades may be passing back on Earth. (Time as a flat circle, indeed.)

This leads to an extraordinary mid-film emotional climax in which Cooper and Brand return from one such expedition to discover that 23 earth years have passed in the blink of an eye, represented by two decades’ worth of stockpiled video messages from loved ones, including the now-adult Tom (a bearded, brooding Casey Affleck) and Murphy (Jessica Chastain in dogged, persistent “Zero Dark Thirty” mode). It’s a scene Nolan stages mostly in closeup on McConaughey, and the actor plays it beautifully, his face a quicksilver mask of joy, regret and unbearable grief.

That moment signals a shift in “Interstellar” itself from the relatively euphoric, adventurous tone of the first half toward darker, more ambiguous terrain — the human shadow areas, if you will, that are as difficult to fully glimpse as the inside of a black hole. Nolan, who has always excelled at the slow reveal, catches even the attentive viewer off guard more than once here, but never in a way that feels cheap or compromises the complex motivations of the characters.

Nolan stages one thrilling setpiece after another, including several hairsbreadth escapes and a dazzling space-docking sequence in which the entire theater seems to become one large centrifuge; the nearly three-hour running time passes unnoticed. Even more thrilling is the movie’s ultimate vision of a universe in which the face of extraterrestrial life bears a surprisingly familiar countenance. “Do not go gentle into that good night/Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” harks the good Professor Brand at the start of the Endurance’s journey, quoting the melancholic Welshman Dylan Thomas. And yet “Interstellar” is finally a film suffused with light and boundless possibilities — those of the universe itself, of the wonder in a child’s twinkling eyes, and of movies to translate all that into spectacular picture shows like this one.

It’s hardly surprising that “Interstellar” reps the very best big-budget Hollywood craftsmanship at every level, from veteran Nolan collaborators like production designer Nathan Crowley (who built the film’s lyrical vision of the big-sky American heartland on location in Alberta) and sound designer/editor Richard King, who makes wonderfully dissonant contrasts between the movie’s interior spaces and the airless silence of space itself. Vfx supervisor Paul Franklin (an Oscar winner for his work on “Inception”) again brings a vivid tactility to all of the film’s effects, especially the robotic TARS, who seamlessly inhabits the same physical spaces as the human actors. Hans Zimmer contributes one of his most richly imagined and inventive scores, which ranges from a gentle electronic keyboard melody to brassy, Strauss-ian crescendos. Shot and post-produced by Nolan entirely on celluloid (in a mix of 35mm and 70mm stocks), “Interstellar” begs to be seen on the large-format Imax screen, where its dense, inimitably filmic textures and multiple aspect ratios can be experienced to their fullest effect.

Reviewed at TCL Chinese Theatre, Hollywood, Oct. 23, 2014. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 165 MIN.

• Production: A Paramount (in North America)/Warner Bros. (international) release and presentation in association with Legendary Pictures of a Syncopy/Lynda Obst Prods. production. Produced by Emma Thomas, Christopher Nolan, Obst. Executive producers, Jordan Goldberg, Jake Myers, Kip Thorne, Thomas Tull.
• Crew: Directed by Christopher Nolan. Screenplay, Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan. Camera (Fotokem color and prints, partial widescreen, 35mm/70mm Imax), Hoyte Van Hoytema; editor, Lee Smith; music Hans Zimmer; production designer, Nathan Crowley; supervising art director, Dean Wolcott; art directors, Joshua Lusby, Eric David Sundahl; set decorator, Gary Fettis; set designers, Noelle King, Sally Thornton, Andrew Birdzell, Mark Hitchler, Martha Johnston, Paul Sonski, Robert Woodruff; costume designer, Mary Zophres; sound (Datasat/Dolby Digital), Mark Weingarten; sound designer/supervising sound editor, Richard King; re-recording mixers, Gary A. Rizzo, Gregg Landaker; visual effects supervisor, Paul Franklin; visual effects producer, Kevin Elam; visual effects, Double Negative, New Deal Studios; special effects supervisor, Scott Fisher; stunt coordinator, George Cottle; assistant director, Nilo Otero; casting, John Papsidera.
• With: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Ellen Burstyn, John Lithgow, Michael Caine, Casey Affleck, Wes Bentley, Bill Irwin, Mackenzie Foy, Topher Grace, David Gyasi, Timothee Chalamet, David Oyelowo, William Devane, Matt Damon.

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Interstellar.

• Common Sense Says
• Parents Say 46 Reviews
• Kids Say 189 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Ambitious intergalactic drama focuses on a father's promise.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Interstellar is a compelling sci-fi thriller/poignant family drama directed by Christopher Nolan ( The Dark Knight ) and starring Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway. As in Gravity , there are nail-bitingly intense (and life-threatening) sequences that take place in…

Why Age 12+?

Several scenes of intense, impending peril -- particularly the parts of the movi

Strong language is infrequent but includes one or two uses of "s--t,"

Dell Latitude computer, several close-ups of a Hamilton watch.

Two adults kiss in celebration.

Any Positive Content?

Ultimately this is a story about the fierce love between a parent and his childr

Cooper is an attentive, responsive father who talks things through with his kids

Violence & Scariness

Several scenes of intense, impending peril -- particularly the parts of the movie that take place in space. Several characters die -- mostly in space, but one on Earth as well. Characters are usually killed by a hostile environment, but one dies of natural causes. Two men get into a dangerous physical confrontation in space.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Strong language is infrequent but includes one or two uses of "s--t," "a--hole," "son of a bitch," "dumb ass," and "f--king."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Sex, romance & nudity.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Messages

Ultimately this is a story about the fierce love between a parent and his children. It explores the power of the intangible, unquantifiable feeling of love; the good of the man versus the good of mankind; and the certainty that there's more in the universe than we can possibly understand. The opening lines from Dylan Thomas' poem, "Do not go gentle into that good night," are repeated again and again as a reminder to not be complacent or accept death when there's a possible solution that could save your life. Cooper encourages his children to look hard for the answers to their questions.

Positive Role Models

Cooper is an attentive, responsive father who talks things through with his kids and always answers their questions. He sacrifices time with them in order to help the entire population of Earth, but he never forgets his promise to return to them. Amelia and her father believe in the virtue of sacrificing yourself for the good of the mission, but in the end, Amelia also understands that love needs to be taken into account, not just hard science. Murphy never stops looking for a way to explain her father's absence or to rescue the people of Earth.

Parents need to know that Interstellar is a compelling sci-fi thriller/poignant family drama directed by Christopher Nolan ( The Dark Knight ) and starring Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway . As in Gravity , there are nail-bitingly intense (and life-threatening) sequences that take place in space, but this is more than a survival tale: It's a relationship story about a father who has made a promise to his children to return to them, no matter what. The layered themes, intergalactic peril, and references to astrophysics may prove too dark and complicated for elementary school-aged tweens, but middle-schoolers and up will be drawn in by both the science and the parent-child bond that guides the central characters to keep searching for a way to reunite. Characters do die (both in space and on Earth), and there's some language ("s--t," one "f--king," etc.). To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Parent and Kid Reviews

• Parents say (46)
• Kids say (189)

Based on 46 parent reviews

Awesome movie. Kids will love it for different reasons as they grow up.

The best movie ever, what's the story.

Director Christopher Nolan 's INTERSTELLAR takes place in a future in which severe drought has killed most of the world's crops, and humans are dying of starvation and disease on a doomed, dust-covered Earth. Cooper ( Matthew McConaughey ) is a former pilot/engineer who, like the majority of Americans, has had to trade in his defunct career to work as a farmer. Coop's love of science is evident in his young daughter, Murphy ( Mackenzie Foy ), who swears there's a ghost in her bedroom leaving her messages in code. Coop is unbelieving at first but then helps Murph decipher one of the codes, leading them to a secret lab run by Professor Brand ( Michael Caine ), who heads what's left of NASA. Brand reveals that they sent a group of scientists through a wormhole leading to another galaxy -- and that now a small group of brave souls must embark on a mission to see whether any of those scientists found an inhabitable planet. Brand convinces Coop to be the life-and-death mission's pilot, with the understanding that his time spent in outer space could mean missing many years on Earth (one hour on one planet equals seven years on Earth) -- years that he'd be away from his children. As the team tries to survive unthinkable odds, back on Earth, Murph grows into a brilliant scientist ( Jessica Chastain ) obsessed with finding her lost-in-space father.

Is It Any Good?

Unless you're well-versed in the physics of wormholes, don't expect to understand the intricacies of Interstellar' s science. And there's a lot of science, most of which sounds unbelievable, but it gets the story where Nolan and his brother Jonathan (who co-wrote the film), need it to go -- from the dust-smothered and scorched Earth to the dangerous outer reaches of space. The visuals are gorgeous, and not just in space, where Coop and his fellow astronauts -- Amelia ( Anne Hathaway ), Doyle ( Wes Bentley ), Romilly (David Gyasi), and the wise-cracking militarized robot, TARS, voiced by Bill Irwin -- travel from planet to planet, but also back on Earth, where time is passing so quickly that Coop's now grown children have all but lost faith that they'll see him again.

Occasionally the time-bending storyline starts to feel like it's stretching time for viewers as well, but somehow the missions -- both the one to save mankind and Coop's personal one to see his kids -- are compelling enough to keep audiences interested. McConaughey balances the line between dead serious, sarcastic, and heartfelt, and he plays well off of his co-stars (particularly his space team). Both the young and adult versions of Murphy are perfectly cast, and Caine -- whose professor has a penchant for quoting Dylan Thomas' poem "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" -- provides elder-statesman gravitas as he did in Nolan's Batman films. As Hathaway's character explains, love is a force that transcends time and space, so if you feel invested in Coop's promise to Murphy (and, to a lesser degree, his son, who grows up to be played by Casey Affleck ), you'll forgive some of the confusing and convenient plot loops and concentrate on the possibility that at some point, this father will embrace his children again.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how Interstellar is similar to, and different from, other serious/thoughtful space movies -- like Gravity , Contact , and 2001: A Space Odyssey . How would you describe it to friends -- as a sci-fi movie, a thriller, a family drama, or what?

Does the violence in the movie seem less upsetting when it's man vs. nature instead of man vs. man? Why do you think Professor Brand keeps quoting Dylan Thomas' poem "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night"? What does the poem mean?

Director Christopher Nolan is known for movies with psychological themes that play with time, space, memory, etc. How is Interstellar like his previous films? How is it a departure?

How would you describe the parent/child relationships in this movie? Are they realistic? Relatable?

Movie Details

• In theaters : November 5, 2014
• On DVD or streaming : March 31, 2015
• Cast : Matthew McConaughey , Anne Hathaway , Jessica Chastain
• Director : Christopher Nolan
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Paramount Pictures
• Genre : Science Fiction
• Topics : Space and Aliens
• Run time : 169 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : some intense perilous action and brief strong language
• Awards : Academy Award - Other Category Winner , Academy Award - Other Category Nominee , BAFTA - BAFTA Winner , BAFTA - BAFTA Nominee , Golden Globe - Golden Globe Award Nominee
• Last updated : August 20, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Interstellar Reviews

Humbling and epic in scope, designed and conceptualised brilliantly, but a tad too stand-off-ish emotionally. While the father-daughter dynamic works in parts, the Cooper–Brand relationship is never given the right treatment and collapses.

Full Review | Oct 17, 2023

This is a film where complex concepts of quantum physics and powerful human emotions are inextricably intertwined and the ghost that haunts the farmhouse has both a scientific explanation and a sense of supernatural power.

Full Review | Sep 9, 2023

"Interstellar" pushes the limits for personal interpretation of both science and fiction. Both elements are wildly heightened to a bold scale to address the internal opposites between logic and spectacle, science and sentiment, and brains and emotion.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 4, 2023

…uses sci-fi to go beyond into the philosophical and spiritual beyond that few other epics can reach….

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 27, 2023

Nolan’s most openly emotional film, he fully lived up to his “Stanley Kubrick’s eye and Steven Spielberg’s heart” identity with this grand sci-fi epic about the sheer force of will that we have for those we love.

Full Review | Jul 20, 2023

Interstellar utilizes science in a way that strives for authenticity in a science-fiction thriller and it's why we're still discussing the Christopher Nolan film today.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jul 18, 2023

As Robert Bresson once said, “I’d rather people feel a film before understanding it.” Interstellar moved me, and I didn’t find myself fact checking the science so I could complain on Twitter.

Full Review | Jun 23, 2023

Staggeringly beautiful, bafflingly complex, this is proper event cinema.

Full Review | Apr 4, 2023

The film demands quite a bit of time from its viewers too, but its big ideas and wondrous sights are ample reward.

Full Review | Feb 27, 2023

When Mann appears to explain man, it collapses under the weight of a repeated thesis that doesn’t merit such explicit, redundant reiteration.

Full Review | Jan 24, 2023

It’s a contemplative adventure and an emotional exploration that captivated me from its opening moments.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 22, 2022

Rarely do epics of this scope and intelligence reach theaters anymore; such serious commercial filmmaking seems like a market almost exclusively maintained by Christopher Nolan.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 30, 2022

While not all-together perfect, the film represents a monumental cinematic achievement that deserves to be placed high within the caliber of Nolan’s filmography.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | May 27, 2022

The inherent message of the film brings hope, but it can definitely get waterlogged by intellectual speak and long-winded scenes.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 9, 2021

The film is indeed a sight to behold -- and one that demands to be seen on the biggest possible screen.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Aug 10, 2021

Nolan reaches for the stars with beautifully composed shots and some mind-bending special effects, but the dime store philosophy of the story never achieves lift off.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 2, 2021

Audiences are sure to lose their suspensions of disbelief over the nearly impenetrable climax.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Dec 4, 2020

...an often insanely ambitious science fiction epic that that remains mesmerizing for most of its (admittedly overlong) running time...

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 20, 2020

Scientists will debate, theologians will contemplate, philosophers will wonder, and cinema lovers will bask in the glory of another remarkable Christopher Nolan achievement.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4.0 | Sep 12, 2020

A big-budget reprise of ideas Nolan has been exploring since the beginning of his career. Not only is it a film about the passage of time, it's also a film about memory.

Full Review | Sep 3, 2020

Previous Story

• Entertainment
• Movie Review

'Interstellar' review

• By Josh Dzieza
• on October 27, 2014 12:07 pm
• @joshdzieza

From the opening scenes of sprawling cornfields accompanied by a revelrie-like brass note, it’s clear that Interstellar is working in the tradition of 2001: A Space Odyssey . It has the grand scope of Kubrick’s classic, promising to take us from humanity’s past to its distant future, and proceeds with the same stately pace that encourages you to ponder the themes it offers along the way. It throws out plenty to think about — the nature of time and space, the place of humanity in the universe — but somewhat unexpectedly for this type of film, and for Christopher Nolan, whose work tends toward the cerebral, it explores these ideas in human terms. Interstellar is as interested in how general relativity would affect your family life, for example, as it is in the theory itself.

Before you proceed: this review has a few spoilers, but nothing beyond what you’d glean from the preview and the first ten minutes or so of film. Turn back now if you care about that sort of thing.

Directed by Christopher Nolan ( Memento , Inception , the most recent Batman trilogy) and written with his brother and frequent collaborator Jonathan, Interstellar takes place in a near future that harkens back to the recent past — like the 1950s Midwest or maybe the Dust Bowl, but with laptops and drones. There’s very little exposition; through telling details and offhand comments, you get the sense that there’s been an environmental disaster followed by a famine, and that humanity has scaled back its ambitions to bare subsistence. People farm corn — the one crop left unravaged by blight — watch baseball games in half-empty stands, and flee towering haboob dust storms announced by air raid sirens.

Matthew McConaughey plays Cooper, a NASA pilot who has turned to farming — like everyone else at the time, an odd cut to faux-documentary footage informs us. He lives in a ramshackle house, complaining to his father (John Lithgow) about humanity’s diminished horizons and doting on his daughter Murph, played by Mackenzie Foy with a believably teenage mix of mischief and exasperation.

McConaughey eventually leaves Foy and Earth behind to scout out a new home for for the human race, but it’s their relationship that grounds the movie. As action-filled as Nolan’s films are, they can sometimes feel abstract, like symbolic sublimations of some offscreen mental trauma. So many of his characters get their motivation from some prior loss — the dead wives from Memento and Inception, the dead parents of Batman — that they then work through according to the game-like rules Nolan excels at, whether those rules are imposed by amnesia, consciousness, or a supervillain. But Foy is an actual character, not a cipher, and the relationship between her and McConaughey gives the film an emotional heft that Nolan’s other work sometimes lacks.

Interstellar features some of the most beautiful images of space I’ve seen on film. Space feels vast, with the spinning white vessel often relegated to a corner of the screen or lost against the rings of Saturn. The depiction of a wormhole accomplishes the seemingly impossible and makes, well, nothingness look dazzling, as light slides and warps around it like water off a bubble of oil. The black hole is even more amazing. Present throughout the movie, it’s in these lingering shots of a tiny spacecraft floating through the galaxy that the influence of Kubrick’s Space Odyssey is most clearly felt.

Some of the most beautiful images of space I've seen on film

Not that it’s all languorous drifting through the galaxy. Nolan has a genius for landscape-scale action sequences, and the planets, with their alien weather and gravity, give him ample opportunity to stage them. The camera races and plunges and, especially in IMAX, creates classic theme-park pit-of-your-stomach thrills. There are gigantic waves, frozen clouds, and other dangers that feel threatening despite looking totally surreal.

The biggest danger the shuttle crew faces, however, is time. Time isn't just running out — it's compressing and stretching as they travel through space. The Nolans use relativity to create some original and urgent crises as the shuttle crew figures out how to best spend their shifting time. Time is a resource, like food or water, Hathaway warns. The time differential between the crew and those they left behind also gives rise to the movie’s most melancholy scenes. In this respect it feels less like Space Odyssey and more like Homer’s Odyssey , with McConaughey getting detained and delayed as time passes and things go wrong back home.

As in 2001 , things get trippy toward the end. Without revealing too much, I can say that after a series of mostly comprehensible events, it swerves into either deeply theoretical physics or sentimental spirituality. Possibly both. The shift is jarring, but also visually interesting enough that I mostly went with it.

There’s always the question with Nolan of what it all means. His movies tempt you to demand a thesis, partly because his characters always seem to be grasping for one. They talk almost aphoristically about the human condition, ghosts, time, evil, love, and other heavy but abstract things, and they quote Dylan Thomas a few too many times. Fortunately, McConaughey brings some wry levity to the role, as does the robot TARS, a toppling metal block with adjustable honesty and humor settings, voiced by Bill Irwin. Ultimately I took the grander bits of dialogue as thematic signposts, telling you to keep your head at the level of death and humanity and time but not meaning much in themselves.

Which is fine. The movie is most powerful when it’s at its least abstract — when it’s working through the messy decisions and sacrifices that actual interstellar travel would entail, finding dramatic potential in the laws of physics. Interstellar is sometimes confusing, melodramatic, and self-serious, but Nolan managed to make a space epic on a human scale.

Interstellar opens November 5th.

• Cast & crew
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Interstellar

When Earth becomes uninhabitable in the future, a farmer and ex-NASA pilot, Joseph Cooper, is tasked to pilot a spacecraft, along with a team of researchers, to find a new planet for humans. When Earth becomes uninhabitable in the future, a farmer and ex-NASA pilot, Joseph Cooper, is tasked to pilot a spacecraft, along with a team of researchers, to find a new planet for humans. When Earth becomes uninhabitable in the future, a farmer and ex-NASA pilot, Joseph Cooper, is tasked to pilot a spacecraft, along with a team of researchers, to find a new planet for humans.

• Christopher Nolan
• Jonathan Nolan
• Matthew McConaughey
• Anne Hathaway
• Jessica Chastain
• 5.8K User reviews
• 490 Critic reviews
• 74 Metascore
• 44 wins & 148 nominations total

Top cast 45

• Murph (10 Yrs.)

• Murph (Older)

• Tom (15 Yrs.)

• School Principal

• (as Francis Xavier McCarthy)

• Professor Brand

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• Trivia To create the wormhole and black hole, Dr. Kip Thorne collaborated with Visual Effects Supervisor Paul J. Franklin and his team at Double Negative. Thorne provided pages of deeply sourced theoretical equations to the team, who then created new CGI software programs based on these equations to create accurate computer simulations of these phenomena. Some individual frames took up to one hundred hours to render, and ultimately the whole CGI program reached to eight hundred terabytes of data. The resulting visual effects provided Thorne with new insight into the effects of gravitational lensing and accretion disks surrounding black holes, and led to him writing two scientific papers: one for the astrophysics community, and one for the computer graphics community.
• Goofs Two characters sustain a fall from an ice plateau, on a steep ice ramp, onto a shadowy ice platform. A moment later, a panoramic shot shows them fighting on a very different place.

Cooper : We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down, and worry about our place in the dirt.

• Crazy credits The Warner Bros, Paramount, Syncopy and Legendary Pictures logos are brown and dusty, representing Earth's arid dry state in the film.
• Alternate versions The 70mm IMAX version is two minutes shorter than the regular 70mm, Digital IMAX, 35mm, and digital projection versions. This is because the end credits are played in an abbreviated slide-show form (rather than scrolling from bottom to top), due to the size capacity of the IMAX platters, which can hold a maximum of 167 minutes of film.
• Connections Featured in Trailer Failure: Interstellar (2013)
• Soundtracks Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night (uncredited) Written by Dylan Thomas

User reviews 5.8K

• e-jackson1985
• May 7, 2022
• How long is Interstellar? Powered by Alexa
• Why did Earth change its history books to claim that the Apollo missions to the Moon were faked?
• How did Cooper figure out NASA's location?
• What were Plan A and Plan B?
• November 7, 2014 (United States)
• United States
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• Paramount Pictures
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• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $165,000,000 (estimated)
• $188,020,017
• $47,510,360
• Nov 9, 2014
• $705,191,242

Technical specs

• Runtime 2 hours 49 minutes
• Dolby Digital
• IMAX 6-Track
• Dolby Surround 7.1

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Interstellar Review

07 Nov 2014

166 minutes

Interstellar

Warning: this review contains mild spoilers

Christopher Nolan is a director whose name has, quite literally, become synonymous with realism. The Nolanisation of cinema, which made the gloomy streets of Gotham a bridge between the fantastical and the commonplace, now grounds countless fancies within the mud of our reality. With Interstellar, arguably his first ‘true’ science-fiction project, Nolan inverts expectation once again, with a film rooted in the mundanity of maths homework but spliced with the fantastic.

Born a year after the Apollo landing, Nolan grew up in the aftermath of the space race, when young eyes still turned upwards in wonder. Decades later, with the Space Shuttle decommissioned and children staring blearily down at the glow of their smartphones, it’s his disappointment at NASA’s broken promise that forms the driving force behind Interstellar.

Opening, tellingly, on a dusty model of the shuttle Atlantis, the film’s near-future setting sees humanity starving, squalid and devoid of hope. Eking out an existence in a post-millennial Dust Bowl, Matthew McConaughey ’s Cooper and his two children — ten year-old daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy) and her older brother Tom (Timothée Chalamet) — lead a life of agrarian survivalism (while, hearteningly, still reading a great many books). But in Cooper we find a new man cut from old cloth: an all-American hero pulled straight from Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff. Played with a drawling, Texan swagger underpinned by startling emotional depth, he is Nolan’s most traditional lead to date, embodying the wide-eyed wonder of the director’s youth; a man for whom we are “explorers and pioneers, not caretakers”, who casts his lot among the stars as the human race’s last, best hope.

With the ailing Blue Planet left behind, Interstellar shifts smoothly into second gear. The black abyss rolls out like Magellan’s Pacific; an unknowable frontier, final in a way that Roddenberry’s never was. According to über-boffin co-producer Kip Thorne, the spherical wormhole (it’s three-dimensional, obviously) and the spinning event horizon of the film’s black hole (named Gargantua) are mathematically modelled and true to life. Sitting before a 100-foot screen, though, you won’t give a toss about equations because Nolan’s starscape is the most mesmerising visual of the year. Gargantua is as captivating as it is terrible: an undulating maelstrom of darkness and light. Like the Hubble telescope on an all-night bender, this is space imagined with a dizzying immensity that would make Georges Méliès lose his shit.

The planets themselves are no less spectacular. Let The Right One In cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema (replacing Nolan regular Wally Pfister) captures the bleak expanse of southern Iceland as both a watery hell with thousand-foot waves and an icy expanse where even the clouds freeze solid. With more than an hour of footage shot in 70mm IMAX, you’ll want to park your arse in front of the biggest screen available to fully appreciate the spectacle.

In contrast to the grandeur of space, the ship itself is a scrapyard mutt. Modular and boxy, the Endurance looks like an A-Level CDT workshop, with no hint of aesthetic flourish or extraneous design. Ever the practical filmmaker, Nolan has constructed a functional, utilitarian vessel. Its robotic crew-members, TARS and CASE, are ’60s-inspired slabs of chrome; AI encased in LEGO bricks that twist and rearrange (manually operated by Bill Irwin — there’s no CG trickery here) to perform complex tasks with minimalist efficiency.

Beneath Interstellar’s flawless skin, the meat is bloodier and harder to chew. The science comes hard and fast, though Nolans Christopher and Jonah shore up the quantum mechanics with generous expository hand-holding. Astrophysics is the vehicle not the destination, however, and Interstellar’s gravitational centre is far more down to Earth. Embodied by Dylan Thomas’ Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night (quoted in the film at several points), this is a defiant paean to the human spirit that first took man to the stars. But far more than Thomas’ villanelle, Interstellar scales the heights and plumbs the depths of humanity, pitting the selfish against the selfless, higher morality against survival instinct. As Cooper, scientist Brand (Anne Hathaway) and crew draw closer to their destination, complications require tough decisions; the sanctity of the mission wars with the hope of a return trip. That the undertaking isn’t quite as advertised doesn’t come as a shock, but the cruelty of the deception lands like a body blow. Nature isn’t evil, muses Brand (played with soulful nuance by Hathaway). The only evil in space is what we bring with us.

When Interstellar began life back in 2006, Steven Spielberg, not Nolan, was the man in the cockpit; a presence still felt in the relationship between Cooper and Murph. The betrayal of a child abandoned is potent from the outset but the guilt is magnified tenfold when the Endurance’s first stop, within the influence of the black hole, means that a few hours stranded planet-side result in two decades passing back on Earth. Cooper’s tortured face as he watches his family unspool through 20 years of unanswered video missives is agony, raw and unadorned. Beneath everything else, this is a story about a father and his daughter, the ten-year-old giving way to Jessica Chastain ’s adult in the blink of a tear-filled eye.

With the endless pints of physics chased by shots of moral philosophy, Interstellar can at times feel like a three-year undergraduate course crammed into a three-hour movie. Or, to put it another way, what dinner and a movie with Professor Brian Cox might feel like. The final act compounds the issue, descending into a morass of tesseracts, five-dimensional space and gravitational telephony. It’s a dizzying leap from the grounded to the brain-bending that will baffle as many viewers as it inspires. More than the monolithic robot and his sarcastic, HAL-nodding asides (“I’ll blow you out of the airlock!”), it’s the psychedelic, transcendental climax that feels most indebted to Kubrick’s 2001; something that will undoubtedly prompt some to accuse Nolan of disappearing up his own black hole.

Inception posed questions without clear answers. Interstellar provides all the answers — you just might not understand the question. This is Nolan at his highest-functioning but also his least accessible; a film that eschews conflict for exploration, action for meditation and reflection. This isn’t the outer to Inception’s inner space (his dreams-within-dreams are airy popcorn-fodder by comparison), but it does wear its smarts just as proudly. Yet for the first time, here Nolan opens his heart as well as his mind. Never a comfortably emotional filmmaker, here he demonstrates a depth of feeling not present in his earlier work. It’s no coincidence that the film’s shooting pseudonym was Flora’s Letter, after Nolan’s own daughter. Interstellar is a missive from father to child; a wish to re-instil the wonder of the heavens in a generation for whom the only space is cyber. Anchored in the bottomless depths of paternal love, it’s a story about feeling as much as thinking. And if the emotional core is clumsily articulated at times (Brand’s “love transcends space and time” monologue being the worst offender), it’s no less powerful for it.

As a light-year-spanning quest to save the human race, this is the director’s broadest canvas by far, but also his most intimate. And against the alien backdrop of black holes, wormholes and strange new worlds, Interstellar stands as Nolan’s most human film to date.

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Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar Is Big, Long, Ridiculous — and Lots of Fun

In his florid sci-fi opera Interstellar, Christopher Nolan aims for the stars, and the upshot is an infinite hoot — its dumbness o’erleaps dimensional space. It’s hugely entertaining, though. Matthew McConaughey is the pilot turned farmer turned hero-astronaut named (wait for it) Coop, whose bond with his nervy redheaded daughter, Murph (Mackenzie Foy as a girl, Jessica Chastain all growed up), is tighter than the insides of an atom, perhaps even the key to transcending the law of relativity. It must be transcended because Earth (in an unspecified near future) is parched, dust-smothered, dying (no reason given — but why ask why these days?), and mankind needs to find another hospitable planet, stat. The mix of wonky physics, mysticism, and genetically modified corn is so clunky it’s … fabulous.

Nolan (who wrote the script with his brother, Jonathan) clearly wants Interstellar to be a great American epic —  The Grapes of Wrath II: The New Vintage. His dust-covered cars and farmhouses evoke the dust bowl of the ’30s, but the odd personal computer reminds us that people have the technology to do more than huddle like Steinbeck’s Okies. The problem is that mankind has lost faith in science, to the point where Murph’s schoolbooks say the Apollo missions of the 20th century were hoaxes to force the Soviets into a bankrupting space race. Coop chafes at the contraction of mankind’s horizons (“We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt!”), but his view of science is limited by what’s measurable, quantifiable. It’s young Murph who’s convinced there are forces that can’t yet be explained — among them a “ghost” in her book-lined bedroom she’s sure is sending coded messages.

I doubt Stephen Hawking could make sense of all the loop-de-loops to come, but at least Interstellar has a clear emotional through-line. Eventually, a professor played by Michael Caine enlists Coop to pilot a spaceship to another galaxy through a wormhole next to Saturn that was put there (he thinks) by benevolent five-dimensional beings. (“This world was never enough for you, Coop.”) But the prospect of humanity perishing seems abstract beside the reality of leaving the distraught Murph for decades — or forever. How can he shake her faith in the one thing she knows to be real — a father’s love? But how can he not go? “Mankind was born on Earth,” Caine intones, as Hans Zimmer’s music rises. “It was never meant to die here.”

Interstellar is packed with Go For It lines like that. There are about 37 recitations (I lost count) of Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night … Rage, rage against the dying of the light!” As Coop’s fellow astronaut, Anne Hathaway delivers a wet-eyed speech (while the camera slowly dollies in) on the interstellar power of love. Can it be that the heart knows more than the scientific mind? That’s certainly how the film is shaped. Dramatically speaking, every decision Coop makes about mankind’s future home is dwarfed by his — and our — fear of letting Murph down. What gives the movie its urgency is that she’s aging more rapidly than he is, especially when he lands on a planet where every passing hour equals seven years on Earth.

By the end of the three-hour Interstellar, you might wonder if 21 years has passed in the outside world too. But the first half at least goes by quickly. Nolan’s frames are unusually clean (even with all the dust), and the special effects are as convincing as in any NASA documentary. In space, the ringed mother ship — a great, segmented wheel — spins so lyrically that you don’t even need the “Blue Danube” waltz. Though the wisecracking robot, TARS, seems a throwback to kiddie sci-fi shows, the design is elegant, like two mini 2001 monoliths attached in the middle and striding around like Gumby. McConaughey is a good sci-fi hero, his stoner-­cowboy drawl making even his overexplanatory lines sound flaky, and though Hathaway still has the look of a drama-camp kid eager to prove herself, there’s something dear about her. She has gumption. Foy and Chastain are an excellent tag-team Murph (though Chastain basically recycles her Zero Dark Thirty performance), and Matt Damon pops up on an ice planet to look shifty and bite his lip to keep from breaking into his peerless McConaughey impression.

The second half is where the sputtering begins, the Nolans being firmly wedded to spatial flips, temporal permutations, and intricacy for intricacy’s sake. There’s a flurry of crosscutting between Coop in space and Murph on Earth that’s first bewildering and then riotously inane. My hunch is that, given their clout, no one is permitted to examine the Nolans’ scripts for what a scientist might term “massive narrative anomalies.” But the incoherence might be — paradoxically — a key to their prized status in certain quadrants of the internet galaxy, where billions of words will be devoted to filling in the gaps and figuring out, say, how to reconcile the characters’ rates of aging. I wonder if the Nolanoids will even care that what should be the triumphant climactic scientific achievement happens offscreen, and that the ending is so goopy it makes you grateful that back in the day Stanley Kubrick opted for arty obscurity. But the movie is still gobs of fun if you’re in the right frame of mind. The Nolans, ever ambitious, even throw in baseball as a symbol for mankind’s hopeful past. Interstellar is the new woo-woo touchstone: Starfield of Dreams.

*This article appears in the November 3, 2014 issue of New York Magazine .

Postscript: Christopher Nolan’s movies are defended so angrily (and with such high levels of abusive) on the internet that I find myself grateful for divergent viewpoints, such as this outrageous Esquire U.K. putdown of some of our most beloved cinematic works. I must say that I disagree about the first Matrix movie — I think it comes closer to the spirit of Philip K. Dick than many Dick adaptations. But it’s always fun to throw a bit of snark the Nolanoids’ way.

• interstellar
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• DVD & Streaming

Interstellar

• Action/Adventure , Drama , Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Content Caution

In Theaters

• November 5, 2014
• Matthew McConaughey as Cooper; Anne Hathaway as Amelia; Wes Bentley as Doyle; David Gyasi as Romilly; Jessica Chastain as Murph; Matt Damon as Dr. Mann; Mackenzie Foy as Young Murph; Michael Caine as Professor Brand; Casey Affleck as Tom

Home Release Date

• March 31, 2015
• Christopher Nolan

Distributor

• Paramount Pictures

Movie Review

Everything has its time, we’re told in Ecclesiastes. And for planet Earth, it’s time for death.

Not that you’d know it from a cursory glance. In fact, most folks hope the old girl is on the road to recovery decades after an environmental cataclysm wiped out most of the globe’s food supply. Now, severely depopulated and humbled, we’re getting back to the basics: growing food, maintaining shelter, spending time with family. A few of us might even take in a ball game on a lazy afternoon.

But a nitrogen-eating blight is again cutting down crops, one by one. Wheat, rice, okra … nothing survives the disease these days except corn, and that may not last much longer. Massive dust storms sweep across the land, choking out light and life alike. And even as people push through day by day, it seems society has lost something critical: it’s desire to explore, to search for something better.

“We used to look up in the sky and wonder at our place in the stars,” former astronaut Cooper says. “Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.”

And that place in the dirt for Coop means scraping together a living as a farmer instead of continuing his career as an astronaut. It means having to deal with his high-tech combines taking off in their directions instead of doing what he’s programmed them to do. And listening to his 10-year-old daughter, Murphy, saying there’s a ghost in her room. Then, when a dust storm blows through Murph’s open window, it seems the grime has made strange patterns on the floor … as if it—the dirt itself—was trying to tell them something.

It is, actually. And Coop discovers the dusty lines are binary code that, when translated, become coordinates on a map. When he and Murph go there, they find a massive, secret science facility—perhaps humanity’s last real hope. The scientists and engineers who work there, led by Coop’s old NASA associate Dr. Brand, have found a mysterious wormhole near Saturn that leads to a new galaxy. They’ve already sent a dozen intrepid scientists through the hole and to some promising planets beyond, but they need another ship to now shoot through, retrieve data from the 12 and return home with it.

And, Brand tells Coop, they could sure use a good pilot to fly the thing. If all goes well and the theory of relatively works as it ought, he could get back home in, oh, a few decades or so—looking no worse for wear and ready to save whatever’s left of humanity.

If not … well, Coop should give Murph an extra-long hug goodbye.

Positive Elements

Coop and the mission scientists, Amelia Brand (daughter of the good doctor), Romilly and Doyle, accept this bold mission through the wormhole in a selfless effort to save humanity. They do so without any guarantees of success or safety. They know the odds are long, but they’re determined to give it a shot.

But to undertake this worthwhile mission means Coop will leave behind his kids, whom he clearly loves more than anything. Throughout the movie we see just how much he cares for them, even from afar, and how much it hurts him to leave them. And even though Murph’s angry with her dad for leaving, the love the two share proves to be a pivotal element in the tale’s resolution. Indeed, Interstellar posits that love , not wormholes or black holes, is the mightiest force in the universe.

Spiritual Elements

One whole wall of Murph’s room is devoted to a bookshelf, and there are times when the thing seems to be a little haunted. Books tumble to the floor, seemingly on their own. A lunar lander model is knocked over. Murph tells her father that it’s a ghost. Coop says that ghosts aren’t real—but clearly something’s going on. So he asks Murph to document what she sees and treat it like a scientific problem.

[ Spoiler Warning ] Murph’s ghost does have a sorta-science-like explanation, as do all the other oddities we see here. For all its talk of love and its sometimes spiritual-feeling vibe, Interstellar appears to embrace a primarily humanist worldview. We hear references to evolution. And though scientists talk about a mysterious “they” helping us from a distant galaxy, neither god nor alien make an explicit appearance. Our saviors, the story suggests, are us.

Still, the initial flights through the wormhole to save humanity are called the Lazarus Projects, named after the man Jesus raised from the dead.

Sexual & romantic Content

Cooper is a widower. His father-in-law suggests he should woo a local teacher and do his part to repopulate the Earth. “Start pulling your weight,” he jokes.

Violent Content

Astronauts fight, one pushing another off a cliff, and the two wrestle in their space suits. One cracks the visor of the other’s helmet, hoping to murder him. Other folks expire in explosions. One is killed after being thrashed around by a giant wave of water. Humans and human-sounding robots sacrifice their lives/existences for what they see as a greater good.

We hear something of the disaster that befell Earth and know it must’ve resulted in catastrophic death. And we hear about/know about other, closer-to-home deaths as well, some of them natural, others not so much. Coop and his kids nearly drive into a lake while racing after a drone. Someone sets fire to a field of corn as a diversionary tactic. Someone else brandishes a tire iron.

Crude or Profane Language

One f-word, six s-words and a dribble of other profanities, including “a–,” “b–ch,” “d–n” and “h—.” God’s name is paired once with “d–n,” and Jesus’ name is abused twice.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Coop and his father-in-law share a beer.

Other noteworthy Elements

A scientist deceptively continues to tell folks for years that there’s hope for them, long after he’s given up on that dream and moved on to a colder, more heartless plan. Other characters also mislead, often for reasons they think are good. And even the computers have their “honesty” parameters set at 90% because (as one computer tells us) being completely honest with emotinal humans is often a mistake.

Whatever its faults, Interstellar does not lack ambition.

This epic story is director Christopher Nolan’s biggest movie to date, however you want to define the word “big.” (And that’s saying something, since this is the man responsible for The Dark Knight trilogy as well as Inception and Memento .) Interstellar is nearly three hours long. It’s visually massive. And it’s devoted to huge cosmological themes predicated on mind-bending physics. (Kip Thorn, one of the world’s foremost experts on the theory of relativity, was an executive producer.)

And it’s also about love conquering all.

It’s a fascinating film, even if it tries to do a little too much. And it will inspire lots of different reactions from moviegoers. Some will see the majesty of the universe and the mighty hand of God at work behind it all. Others may take it as a humanist-minded scientific screed, one that goes out of its way to say we’re on our own out here in interstellar space.

It seems pretty obvious that the movie wants its explanations to reside in the naturalistic, humanistic realm: There are no moments of divine transcendence here, not even the subtle nods we see in Gravity to the eternal soul and prayer. And yet, even for its lack of interest in theology, there’s still something deeply spiritual undergirding this work.

The adventure that Coop and his fellow scientists go on contains the barest of hints of biblical narrative: They, like Noah, are trying to save a remnant of creation. They, like Moses, are looking for a “promised land,” one seemingly pointed to via an incredibly providential wormhole. One, as a mirror of Jesus, sacrifices himself to save the world and is even figuratively resurrected long after he should be dead. In Interstellar , we see humanity’s “best” fail. And we see what we know to be God’s best for us, bound up in love and family, transcend every law of physics imaginable.

Love is a mystical but very real force in Interstellar . To see God behind it requires only one small step for moviegoers.

Interstellar has its problems, of course. Though it’s not designed to expand the PG-13 universe, the language can be sometimes a bit harsh, and flurries of violence are disquieting, especially given their unnatural-feeling contexts. And if that small step toward God I mentioned isn’t taken, the movie’s worldview becomes problematic as it sits undefined and unredeemed. So Interstellar is a film that practically demands discussion.

“Mankind was born on Earth,” Coop says, “but it was never meant to die here.” And the grandly scientific, often confusing concepts in Interstellar can’t be allowed to uncritically blink out of existence the minute we stand up during the credits either.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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Interstellar Review

Director Christopher Nolan’s long-awaited sci-fi epic Interstellar arrives. Read our review!

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“Haunting” is the word that keeps lingering as I reflect on Christopher Nolan’s new movie, Interstellar , over and over again in my mind. There is a somber tone to the film, an elegiac mood that is one of its most powerful assets. We feel the shroud of despair and apathy surrounding the people of Earth as it becomes clear that the planet is essentially turning against us, and we also experience the intense loneliness and isolation of the small crew of astronauts who travel an unimaginable distance on a last-chance mission to save the human race from extinction.

When Interstellar is at its best — which is frequent, but not constant — that mood has an emotional pull to it that bolsters the other plot elements which are designed to tug at your heart. It also suffuses the film’s often brilliant visuals, which effectively capture the grandeur of traveling across the universe while simultaneously detailing just how unimaginably small and alone we are against that vast and seemingly endless darkness. Nolan throws a lot of ideas — and a lot of movie — at us for Interstellar ’s nearly three-hour running time.

Matthew McConaughey stars as Cooper, a former NASA test pilot and widower who now runs a farm where he lives with his children Murph (Mackenzie Foy) and Tom (Timothee Chalamet), as well as his father-in-law Donald (John Lithgow). It’s the near future and an agricultural blight has descended upon the planet, destroying every crop but corn. There are hints that traditional institutions of society have been or are being dismantled as survival becomes the prime objective, but it’s undeniable that even that goal may elude humankind’s grasp.

The key to keeping the human race alive comes in the shape of a reconfigured remnant of NASA, to which Cooper and Murph are led to by a series of what must be described for now as inexplicable events. There they find a small team led by Professor Brand (Michael Caine) and his daughter Amelia (Anne Hathaway) who have detected the appearance of a wormhole near Saturn. Its origin is unknown, yet it was apparently meant to be found: it tunnels through time and space to a distant galaxy where planets exist that could support human life.

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Previous probes through the wormhole by solo explorers have returned ambiguous messages and data at best. Cooper is reluctantly persuaded by the Brands to pilot a new and perhaps final four-person mission, knowing that the titanic distances they travel will bend time in a way that decades may pass on Earth and Cooper may very well never see his children again. But the death of humanity is almost assured if a habitable planet — and a way to somehow transport our species there — is not found soon.

To delve much deeper into the plot (the script was co-written by Nolan and his brother and frequent collaborator Jonathan) would demand the revelation of spoilers that I’m not prepared to give away. But what happens throughout the rest of the film is a balancing act between the personal, emotional, and intimate story of Cooper and his family, and the larger canvas of what is easily the most complex “hard sci-fi” film in a long time. Cooper and his crew — Amelia plus scientists Romilly (David Gyasi) and Doyle (Wes Bentley) — venture to other worlds, grapple with the effects of relativity and even tangle with a black hole, while back home characters age, some die, and others strive to find their own answers to the same questions the crew of the Endurance are trying to solve untold light years from home.

Like many of Nolan’s films before this one — including The Dark Knight , Inception, and The Dark Knight Rises — the filmmaker’s desire to tell us as much story as he possibly can occasionally gets tripped up by both his own heavy-handedness, as well as leaps in logic or story structure that can test one’s suspension of disbelief. The Nolans’ script is big and ragged and feels bloated in some ways: there are scenes — most of them on Earth — that could be compressed or dismissed altogether with a cleverly thought-out image or perhaps a bit of exposition, although this is already an exposition-heavy movie. The director’s propensity for stacking up climaxes or set-pieces and then cross-cutting between them actually works to his detriment here (unlike, say, in Inception ), because it lessens the impact of what is happening in his main story, with Cooper and the crew (I hate to imagine a scenario where an actress like Jessica Chastain could have her role diminished considerably in a film, but that’s kind of the case here).

And yet despite those issues and a penchant for repetition when it comes to his key themes (by the fourth time we hear the main verse from Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” I found myself thinking, “Okay, we get it.”) I can’t help but be dazzled, occasionally moved by, and haunted (that word again) by Nolan’s galactic adventure. I ultimately have the same relationship with this movie that I have with most of his previous ones, especially the Batman blockbusters and Inception : their sheer ambition, production value, scope, and earnestness outweigh their flaws in the end.

Nolan to me is really a darker, more serious-minded and adult-oriented version of Steven Spielberg when he’s working in genre, only with two or three endings in his films instead of one contrived happy one that is grafted onto the story like a reverse appendectomy. He shares the same desire to go as big as possible and show the audience sights they’ve never seen before, and he believes in the story he’s telling and the theme he’s trying to get across, even if he lacks some of the skills necessary to transmit them as effectively as possible. And yet he is also still capable of a quietly devastating moment like the one in which the crew of the Endurance find out just how much of an effect the theory of relativity and the distortion of time has on one short trip to a planet’s surface (it all comes down to just two words of dialogue and nothing else).

There are some big ideas in the movie, and their visual components are handled brilliantly from start to finish. On a pure filmmaking level,  Interstellar is jaw-dropping and almost demands to be seen in IMAX. The film is so immersive that you will feel like you’re flying through that wormhole or plunging into that black hole. Cinematographer Hotye van Hoytema ( Her ) and production designer Nathan Crowley ( The Dark Knight Rises ) do a splendid job in creating and filming our blighted future Earth, the mysterious expanses of space and the surfaces of the planets that the Endurance visits. Nolan’s trademark requirement that everything be grounded and functional has led to a hybrid of miniatures, fully constructed sets, and CG that is pretty much seamless.

Once again, he has also surrounded himself with a strong cast who make the most out of roles that are, to some degree, more archetypal in nature. McConaughey shines as Cooper, playing a character who seems closer to the actor himself that some of his other recent work, and centering the film with his innate decency and everyman worldview. Hathaway is striking as Amelia Brand, whose icy, guarded exterior hides a vulnerable core. The scene-stealer of the lot is actor-comedian Bill Irwin, who controls the movement of the crew’s two robot companions, TARS and CASE, and voices TARS with a delightful blend of dry humor and matter-of-fact observational wit (CASE, who is the more reserved personality, is voiced by Josh Stewart).

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Credit also to composer Hans Zimmer, who likewise goes very big in his scores — especially for Nolan — and whose trademark style on the  Dark Knight   films has been aped and parodied for the past few years. The score here is just as grandiose, but he employs as his main instrument the organ, which provides the perfect musical equivalent for the film’s tone and can embody both the finality of death and the infinite mysteries of the heavens at the same time. I loved his work here — I’m a huge fan of the organ — even if the music and some of the sound effects frankly drowned out large swaths of dialogue at the screening I attended (although I understand that this was most likely an issue with the theater itself — the TCL Chinese in Hollywood — than the film).

Interstellar is a huge film and strives to do what science fiction does at its best: show us some truth about the human condition through the filter of scientific discovery or theory. It doesn’t succeed as well as it could; its worst moments are clunky and disjointed, but its finest moments are extraordinary. This is top-notch filmmaking by a director who wants to make the most ambitious film he can in whatever genre he’s working in. Interstellar may not be as mind-blowing as many of us hoped, and may be too manipulative for others, but Christopher Nolan reaches for the stars with this one, and his journey is just rich enough to keep us along for the ride.

Interstellar opens on IMAX screens on Wednesday, November 5 and in theaters everywhere on Friday, Nov. 7th.

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Don Kaye | @donkaye

Don Kaye is an entertainment journalist by trade and geek by natural design. Born in New York City, currently ensconced in Los Angeles, his earliest childhood memory is…

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‘Interstellar’: The Cinema of Physicists

By Dennis Overbye

• Nov. 17, 2014

The Earth is a dying dust bowl where a blight is destroying all the crops and oxygen. Schoolchildren are being taught that the moon landings were faked to bankrupt the Russians, and NASA is a secret agency consisting of a dozen scientists huddling underground. The Yankees are a barnstorming troupe who play games in cornfields and let ground balls go through their legs.

This is the world of “Interstellar,” the space thriller directed by Christopher Nolan, of “Inception” and “The Dark Knight” fame, and written by him and his brother Jonathan, that hit theaters in a tsunami of publicity this month.

I’ve been looking forward to “ Interstellar ” ever since I first heard back in 2006 that physicists led by the celebrated gravitational theorist and Caltech professor Kip Thorne had held a workshop to brainstorm a science-fiction movie. This would be the movie that finally got things right.

The movie stars Matthew McConaughey as an astronaut named Cooper, who leads an expedition to another galaxy in search of a new home for humanity, and, stars among others, Mackenzie Foy, who grows up into Jessica Chastain, as his daughter, Murph (named after the law), who is mad that he left. On one level, it is a heroically realistic tale of space exploration. On another level, it’s a story about father-daughter relationships, as well as a meditation on the human spirit and what happens when humans take their eyes off the stars. But it’s also about quantum gravity and the mysteries of the fifth dimension, and even an astronaut who was at a screening with me confessed that he was confused.

The first time I saw it, I too was confused, and disappointed. Aside from a wonderful view of Cooper’s spacecraft dwarfed by lonely blackness down at the corner of the Imax screen as it passed by a magnificently glowing Saturn, and tense docking sequences similar to certain scenes in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” it was short on the magic and the delicious storytelling twists I expect from the Nolan brothers.

The second time I saw the movie, clued in by Dr. Thorne’s new book, “The Science of Interstellar,” I enjoyed it more, and I could appreciate that a lot of hard-core 20th- and 21st-century physics, especially string theory, was buried in the story — and that there was a decipherable, if abstruse, logic to the ending. But I wonder if a movie that requires a 324-page book to explicate it can be considered a totally successful work of art. The movie’s pedigree goes back to Carl Sagan, a Cornell astronomer and author.

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Tom cruise's aerial fight in top gun: maverick ending underwhelms real fight pilot, first beetlejuice beetlejuice reviews are in — is tim burton's sequel worth the 36-year wait, interstellar is an imaginative movie, but a heavy-handed mix of personal sacrifice and theoretical physics doesn't leave much room for subtle storytelling..

In the not-too-distant future of Interstellar , Earth has been ravaged by an environmental disaster known as the Blight - forcing humanity to abandon technology and the dreams of discovery, in order to focus on basic survival. To that end, former NASA pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a widowed father of two, is now a farmer tasked with growing one of the planet's last remaining sustainable crops: corn. In a time when humankind has been asked to put aside personal desire in the interest of a greater good, Cooper has attempted to make peace with farm life, providing for his teenage children, Tom (Timothée Chalamet) and Murph (Mackenzie Foy), as well as his aging father-in-law (John Lithgow). Yet, even as conditions become increasingly dire on Earth, Cooper's thirst for scientific discovery remains.

However, when Cooper is reunited with an old colleague, Professor Brand (Michael Caine), he is offered a new chance to fulfill an old ambition. Informed that the situation on Earth is much more serious than he previously knew, Cooper is asked to leave his family behind (in an increasingly dangerous world) and set out on an uncertain journey into space - to find humankind a new planet.

Director Christopher Nolan has built a career on cerebral storytelling - starting with his feature debut, Following , in 1998. Since that time, the filmmaker has delivered one thought-provoking drama after another ( Insomnia , Memento , The Prestige , and Inception ) - while also setting a new bar for comic book adaptations with a contemplative three-film exploration of Batman (and his iconic villains). As a result, it should come as no surprise that Nolan's Interstellar offers another brainy (and visually arresting) moviegoing experience - one that will, very likely, appeal to his base (those who spent hours pouring over minute details in the director's prior works); however, it may not deliver the same casual appeal that made Inception and The Dark Knight cross-demographic hits.

Interstellar is an imaginative movie, but a heavy-handed mix of personal sacrifice and theoretical physics doesn't leave much room for subtle storytelling (or particularly memorable action). For a film that is rooted in the love between a father and his daughter, Interstellar offers surprisingly cold (and often stiff) drama - albeit drama that is buoyed by high-minded science fiction scenarios and arresting visuals. Nolan relies heavily on lengthy scenes of surface-level exposition, where characters debate or outright explain complicated physics and philosophical ideas, to educate the audience and ruminate on humanity (both good and bad) in the face of death and destruction.

It's a smart foundation to juxtapose personal desire and our place in the larger universe - as well as evolved levels of understanding we have yet to achieve - but unlike Nolan's earlier works, the filmmaker's passion is most apparent in his science (based on the theories of physicist Kip Thorne) - rather than his characters. This isn't to say that Interstellar doesn't provide worthwhile drama, but there's a stark contrast between the lofty spacetime theories and the often melodramatic characters that populate the story.

Viewers who reveled in McConaughey's philosophical musings on True Detective will find the actor treading similar territory as Cooper. McConaughey ensures his lead character is likable as well as relatable, and manages to keep exposition-heavy scenes engaging. Still, despite a 169 minute runtime, Interstellar never really develops its central heroes beyond anything but static outlines - and Cooper is no exception. Viewers will root for him, and come to understand what he cherishes and believes about humanity, but any major revelations come from what happens to him - not necessarily what he brings to the table or how he evolves through his experiences.

The same can be said with regard to the supporting cast. Everyone involved provides a quality turn in their respective roles, but they're shackled by straightforward arcs - limited exposition machines that add to the film's thematic commentary and/or advance the plot, but aren't particularly well-realized or as impactful as Nolan intends. To that end, in a cast that includes Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Casey Affleck, and Matt Damon, two of the most memorable characters are actually non-humans - quadrilateral-shaped robots, TARS and CASE, that aid the crew on their adventure (and inject much-needed humor into the proceedings).

Interstellar is also playing in IMAX theaters and the added charge is definitely recommended. Much of the film was shot with actual IMAX cameras and the filmmaker makes worthwhile use out of the increased screen space and immersive sound - especially when the crew visits alien worlds. IMAX won't be a must for all viewers, but given that the film's visuals (many of which relied on practical sets and effects) are one of Interstellar 's biggest selling points, moviegoers who are excited about Nolan's latest project shouldn't hesitate in purchasing a premium ticket.

Casual filmgoers who were wowed by the director's recent filmography may find that Interstellar isn't as accessible as Nolan's prior blockbuster movies - and dedicates too much time unpacking dense scientific theories. Nevertheless, while the movie might not deliver as much action and humor as a typical Hollywood space adventure, the filmmaker succeeds in once again producing a thought-provoking piece of science fiction. For fans who genuinely enjoy cerebral films that require some interpretation, Interstellar should offer a satisfying next installment in Nolan's well-respected career.

That said, for viewers who are simply looking to get lost in a thrilling adventure with memorable characters (from the director of Inception and The Dark Knight ), Interstellar may not provide enough traditional entertainment value to balance out its brainy scientific theorizing. On many levels, it's a very good film, but Interstellar could leave certain moviegoers underwhelmed - and feeling as though they are three-dimensional beings grasping for straws in a five-dimensional movie experience.

_____________________________________________________________

Interstellar runs 169 minutes and is Rated PG-13 for some intense perilous action and brief strong language. Now playing in IMAX theaters with a full release Friday, November 7th.

Confused about Interstellar 's ending? Read our Interstellar Ending & Space Travel Explained article.

Let us know what you thought of the film in the comment section below. If you’ve seen the movie and want to discuss details about the film without worrying about spoiling it for those who haven’t seen it, please head over to our Interstellar Spoilers Discussion . For an in-depth discussion of the film by the Screen Rant editors check out our Interstellar episode of the Screen Rant Underground Podcast .

Agree or disagree with the review? Follow me on Twitter @ benkendrick to let me know what you thought of Interstellar .

Interstellar

From Christopher Nolan, Interstellar imagines a future where the Earth is plagued by a life-threatening famine, and a small team of astronauts is sent out to find a new prospective home among the stars. Despite putting the mission first, Coop (Matthew McConaughey) races against time to return home to his family even as they work to save mankind back on Earth.

• Movie Reviews
• 3.5 star movies

Interstellar

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

It’s damn near three hours long. There’s that. Also, Interstellar is a space odyssey with no UFOs, no blue-skinned creatures from another planet, no alien bursting from the chest of star Matthew McConaughey . It reveals a hopeful side of filmmaker Christopher Nolan that will piss off Dark Knight doomsayers. And, hey, didn’t Alfonso Cuarón just win an Oscar for directing Gravity ? How long are audiences expected to get high on rocket fumes?

Blah, blah, blah. Bitch, bitch, bitch. What the neg-heads are missing about Interstellar is how enthralling it is, how gracefully it blends the cosmic and the intimate, how deftly it explores the infinite in the smallest human details.

Of course, Nolan has never been the cold technician of his reputation. Watch  Memento again, or The Prestige , or the undervalued Insomnia . The sticking point here is that Interstellar finds Nolan wearing his heart on his sleeve. Nothing like emotion to hold a cool dude up to ridicule. But even when Nolan strains to verbalize feelings, and the script he wrote with his brother Jonathan turns clunky, it’s hard not to root for a visionary who’s reaching for the stars.

Which brings us to a plot full of deepening surprises I’m not going to spoil. The poster for Interstellar presents McConaughey surveying a wasteland. It’s meant to be Saturn, but it could just as well be Earth, where environmental recklessness has morphed the planet into a Dirt Bowl starving and choking its citizens.

Nolan spends the first third of the film in the American farm belt of the near future, introducing us to widower Cooper (McConaughey), a former test pilot, who depends on his father-in-law (John Lithgow) to help him raise 15-year-old son Tom (Timothée Chalamet) and 10-year-old daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy, superb). Like her dad, Murph is a rebel who refuses to buy into her school’s official dictum that the Apollo space program was a lie.

It’s when dad and daughter find the remnants of NASA, headed up by Cooper’s old boss Professor Brand (Michael Caine), that the story gains momentum. Cooper heads into space to find a new world to colonize, leaving behind two kids who may never forgive him.

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The physics lessons (Cal-tech’s Kip Thorne consulted) kick in when Coop captains the Endurance mother ship with a science team made up of Amelia ( Anne Hathaway ), Brand’s daughter; Romilly (David Gyasi); and Doyle (Wes Bentley). And don’t forget R2-D2 and C-3PO. Not really. The ex-military robots of Interstellar are called CASE and TARS. The great Bill Irwin voices TARS, a chatty monolith that looks like something out of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and sounds like that film’s HAL. (Note to viewers: Kubrick’s 1968 landmark and George Lucas’ Star Wars franchise are part of Nolan’s DNA. React accordingly.)

Next comes the wow factor that makes Interstellar nirvana for movie lovers. A high-tension docking maneuver. A surprise visitor. A battle on the frozen tundra. A tidal wave the size of a mountain. Cheers to Nolan and his team, led by cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema and VFX supervisor Paul J. Franklin ( Inception ). See Interstellar in IMAX, with the thrilling images oomphed by Hans Zimmer’s score, and you’ll get the meaning of “rock the house.”

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And yet it’s the final, quieter hour of Interstellar that gives the film resonance and lasting value. All the talk of black holes, wormholes and the space-time continuum take root in Coop when he realizes his two years in space have occupied 23 years on Earth. His children, the now-adult Tom (Casey Affleck) and Murphy ( Jessica Chastain ), spill out decades of joys and resentments in video messages that Coop watches in stunned silence. McConaughey nails every nuance without underlining a single one of them. He’s a virtuoso, his face a road map to the life he’s missed as his children bombard him with a Rorschach test of emotions.

In case you haven’t noticed, McConaughey is on a roll. And he partners beautifully with the sublime Chastain, who infuses Murph with amazing grit and grace. Familial love is the topic here, not the romantic or sexual kind. How does that figure into space exploration? Nolan gives Hathaway a monologue about it. But dialogue is no match for the flinty eloquence shining from the eyes of McConaughey and Chastain. They are the bruised heart of Interstellar, a film that trips up only when it tries to make love a science with rules to be applied. In 2001, Kubrick saw a future that was out of our hands. For Nolan, our reliance on one another is all we’ve got. That’s more the stuff of provocation than a Hallmark e-card. Nolan believes it’s better to think through a movie than to just sit through it. If that makes him a white knight, Godspeed.

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Interstellar (United States/United Kingdom, 2014)

Christopher Nolan has never shied away from a challenge and the one he has taken on with Interstellar may be his most prodigious thus far - bigger than delivering an end-to-start chronology in Memento , more impressive than the mind-bending contortions of Inception , and more daunting than re-imagining Batman into the most unique superhero franchise of the 21st century. Interstellar is simultaneously a big-budget science fiction endeavor and a very simple tale of love and sacrifice. It is by turns edgy, breathtaking, hopeful, and heartbreaking. It's an amazing achievement that deserves to be seen on the biggest screen with the best sound system possible. Nolan has crafted Interstellar as a movie theater experience. Watching it at home, no matter how good the sound system is, won't match. This is one time when the IMAX surcharge is worth it.

Interstellar is science fiction . It's not space opera. It's not futuristic fantasy. It's what the term "science fiction" was coined to represent. It presents a viable future in which space travel, while possible, is dangerous and uncertain. Starships aren't zipping from planet to planet. Space craft aren't firing lasers, phasers, or photon torpedoes. Travel across long distances uses the dangerous and unpredictable method of entering a wormhole, not engaging Warp One or making the jump to hyperspace. Time dilation comes into effect in the presence of a black hole and there's even a little bit about the relationship between quantum mechanics and relativity. This isn't Star Wars , Star Trek , or Guardians of the Galaxy , and anyone who approaches it with such expectations will be disappointed. It's more along the lines of recent movies like Contact (which also starred Matthew McConaughey) and Gravity in that it acknowledges science rather than ignoring the rules of reality as we understand them.

It will be difficult to find a review of Interstellar that doesn't reference 2001: A Space Odyssey and there's a valid reason for that. Nolan at times uses Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece as a template, especially during moments of grandeur. Hans Zimmer's score is no less crucial to Interstellar than "Also Sprach Zarathustra" was to 2001 . Yet, this is no mere copy of Kubrick's film; in fact, it goes far afield. There's heroism, a la The Right Stuff . It's also a warmer, more emotional experience - less stately and abstruse. In fact, found at the core of this big budget adventure is the most relatable thing imaginable: the feelings of love and trust that bind father and daughter. It's almost a fusion of Kubrick and Spielberg.

Interstellar opens at an unspecified future date in America's farm belt. Although the film is careful not to identify a year, it's probably around 2050. The world has fallen victim to famine caused by overpopulation and a blight that is killing crops and creating massive dust storms. With nitrogen on the rise in the atmosphere, total asphyxiation is the inevitable endgame. Earth as a bastion of humanity is doomed. Former NASA engineer and test pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) owns acres of corn that he farms along with his family: son Tom, daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy), and father-in-law Donald (John Lithgow). Drawn by almost supernatural means to a chain-link fence around a super-secret location, Cooper finds himself face-to-face with what remains of his former employer: an underground think-tank dedicated to saving the human race. Led by Professor Brand (Michael Caine), NASA has developed two plans. The first involves creating a massive space vehicle to transport as many humans as possible into outer space. The second involves using frozen embryos to colonize a distant world. There are problems with Plan A - namely, overcoming gravity to launch the massive space ship - but Brand is convinced he can solve the necessary equations that will make this possible.

Cooper learns that a wormhole has appeared in space near Saturn, presumably placed there by (alien) entities of great intelligence intent upon giving humanity a path of survival. Ten years ago, astronauts were sent through to scout the dozen potentially habitable planets on the other side. Now another craft must make the journey to determine humankind's final destination. Mindful that his children's future is at stake, Cooper agrees to pilot the craft. He is accompanied by a small crew of four: Brand's daughter, Amelia (Anne Hathaway); scientists Doyle (Wes Bentley) and Romilly (David Gyasi); and the sardonic robot TARS (Bill Irwin), who recalls HAL 9000. Murph is resentful of her father for abandoning her - an anger she nurses into adulthood, when (now played by Jessica Chastain), she becomes Brand's second-in-charge working for the same entity that took her father away from her.

Like Contact , Interstellar displays an uncanny knack for making complex physics accessible to laymen (partial credit to Executive Producer and CalTech physicist Kip Thorne). Yes, there are times when the dialogue is dense but it never becomes impenetrable (although there are some odd passages, such as one in which Cooper and Amelia discuss the meaning of "love"). Does the movie occasionally fudge? Of course, but it sticks closer to Einstein's laws than most space-faring movies and when it speculates, it does so in a believable manner.

The movie remains Earthbound for its first 45 minutes, establishing a dire scenario for the planet and depicting the day-to-day struggles of those who survive in this blasted, inhospitable future. Most importantly, however, this part of the film establishes the closeness of the relationship between Cooper and Murph and introduces the mystery of "them" - the mysterious "ghosts" who will play a part on the periphery for the rest of the movie. In the end, Cooper must embrace the philosophy that "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." He promises to Murph that he will return, knowing he may not be able to keep that promise.

Once in space, the white knuckle moments begin. Limiting the use of CGI, Nolan relies on practical effects to craft a movie that feels more like a real journey than a video game. There are some tremendous action set pieces and the narrative is wonderfully unpredictable. The movie takes some chances with its endgame, which resolves a lot of plot points but at times seems rushed. Interstellar is at its most complex during its final 20 minutes and even those who pay rapt attention may leave the theater with some unanswered questions.

The film is nearly three hours but there's enough story here for something a lot longer. In condensing it, Nolan has made something 169 minutes in length that breezes by faster than many productions half its length. He accomplishes this by establishing a blistering pace during Interstellar 's meatier sections, including expert cross-cutting between Earth and space during a powerful "fire and ice" sequence.

Visually, Interstellar looks great. Nolan understands all the facets of special effects technology (except, perhaps, old age makeup) and uses them to their best. Hans Zimmer delivers an operatic score that, although occasionally drowning out dialogue (more a mixing issue than a scoring one), adds to the overall experience. Sound is important to Interstellar - when the rocket lifts off around the 45-minute mark, the bass shakes the entire theater.

It has been a tremendous year for McConaughey. From Dallas Buyers Club to True Detective to Interstellar , he has won a Golden Globe and an Oscar and been nominated for an Emmy. Interstellar will give him another opportunity for Academy recognition: he's the glue that holds everything together. He's the human factor in a vast universe. His love for his daughter and his pain when he acknowledges her despair invests this movie with a warmth and feeling that no previous Nolan movie can boast. The supporting cast, which includes Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, and Michael Caine, is strong, but McConaughey represents the heart and soul of Interstellar .

For those who appreciate the Mobius strip approach Nolan is known for, Interstellar offers a little of that. There are some twists and non-chronological jumps, although not so many that the story becomes confusing or unintelligible. Time dilation (the slowing down of time for those in close proximity to a dense gravitational source) isn't just a convenient plot device; it's an integral element of the narrative. Like nearly everything else in Interstellar , it is used effectively.

For anyone with a hunger for real science fiction rather than the crowd-pleasing, watered-down version Hollywood typically offers (and that I often enjoy immensely), Interstellar is a satisfying entrée. I'd rank this alongside Memento and The Dark Knight as the best Nolan has done, and it's an immediate contender for one of 2014's best. The film deserves the label of an "experience" and the bigger the venue, the more immersive it will be. As event movies go, this is one of the most unique and mesmerizing.

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• Star Wars: A New Hope (1977)
• Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
• Aliens (1986)
• Howard the Duck (1986)
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• Good Man in Africa, A (1994)
• Orange County (2002)
• Cider House Rules, The (1999)
• Sleuth (1969)
• Mona Lisa (1969)
• Bewitched (2005)
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Love and Physics

“Interstellar,” an outer-space survivalist epic created by the director Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan, with whom he co-wrote the screenplay, is ardently, even fervently incomprehensible, a movie designed to separate the civilians from the geeks, with the geeks apparently the target audience. Nolan’s 2010 movie, “Inception,” offered layers of dreaming consciousness, each outfitted with its own style of action. The film was stunning but meaningless—a postmodern machine, with many moving parts, dedicated to its own workings and little else. In “Interstellar,” however, Nolan goes for a master narrative. Like so many recent big movies, “Interstellar” begins when the earth has had it. The amount of nitrogen in the air is increasing, the oxygen is decreasing, and, after a worldwide crop failure, dust storms coat the Midwest, drying out the corn, the only grain that is still growing. But all is not lost. God or Fortune or a Higher Intelligence (take your pick) has entered the game, and has placed near Saturn a traversable wormhole, a tunnel in space-time, providing an expressway out of the galaxy and on to the countless stars and planets beyond.

The commander of an underground nasa outpost, Professor Brand (Michael Caine), sends a favored pilot, Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), on a mission: Cooper and his crew, including Brand’s daughter, Amelia (Anne Hathaway), are to retrace the flights of three astronauts who a decade earlier were sent to planets thought to be capable of sustaining human life. Are the explorers alive? What did they find? Can the earth’s billions be moved through the wormhole? As the crew members enter the distant passage, with its altered space-time continuum, they testily debate one another, referring, in passing, to theories advanced by Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, and Kip Thorne. (Thorne, a theoretical physicist and a longtime friend of Hawking’s, served as an adviser and an executive producer on the film.) Black holes, relativity, singularity, the fifth dimension! The talk is grand. There’s a problem, however. Delivered in rushed colloquial style, much of this fabulous arcana, central to the plot, is hard to understand, and some of it is hard to hear. The composer Hans Zimmer produces monstrous swells of organ music that occasionally smother the words like lava. The actors seem overmatched by the production.

Nolan, who made the recent trilogy of night-city Batman movies, must love the dark. In “Interstellar,” he and the designer, Nathan Crowley, and the cinematographer, Hoyte van Hoytema, send Cooper’s ship, the Endurance, hurtling through the star-dotted atmosphere, or whirling past seething and shimmering clouds of intergalactic stuff. The basic color scheme of the space-travel segments is white and silver-gray on black, and much of it is stirringly beautiful. There’s no doubting Nolan’s craft. Throughout “Interstellar,” the camera remains active, pursuing a truck across a cornfield or barrelling through sections of the Endurance. All this buffeting—in particular, the crew’s rough-ride stress—is exciting from moment to moment, but, over all, “Interstellar,” a spectacular, redundant puzzle, a hundred and sixty-seven minutes long, makes you feel virtuous for having sat through it rather than happy that you saw it. The Nolans provide a pair of querulous robots, the more amusing of which is voiced by Bill Irwin, but George Lucas’s boffo jokiness and Stanley Kubrick’s impish metaphysical wit live in a galaxy far, far away. ****

Cooper has two children back on Earth and, like Leonardo DiCaprio’s Cobb, in “Inception,” he longs to return to his family. That leads to fights with Amelia, who wants to journey on to the planet where her lover, one of the astronauts on the earlier mission, was sent, in the hope of reuniting with him. McConaughey does his stylized, hyper-relaxed drawl, and Hathaway, with short Ph.D. hair, is crisp but also angry and passionate, and the two stars clash with professional skill. Cooper’s side of the argument sets up the movie’s finest scene. After paying a quick visit to a planet in another galaxy, the crew returns to the ship and discovers that on Earth more than twenty years has passed. Cooper watches video messages from his family, including his daughter, Murph, who was a young girl when he left but has grown up to be Jessica Chastain. Through her tears, she lashes out at him, as only Jessica Chastain can lash out, for leaving her. The Nolans take us into the farthest mysteries of space-time, where, they assure us, love joins gravity as a force that operates across interstellar distances. The Earth may die, but love will triumph. For all his dark scenarios, Christopher Nolan turns out to be a softie.

The belief that love, as much as gravity, holds galaxies together, may have held some interest for Stephen Hawking, but in a more attainable setting than on a planet beyond the Milky Way. “The Theory of Everything” tells the story of Hawking and his first wife, Jane Wilde Hawking. The film begins in 1963, when Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) is a graduate student in cosmology at Cambridge University. At a party, he meets Jane (Felicity Jones), who is studying “arts,” as she says, and they begin a charmingly awkward courtship in which she jollies him along as he confesses his modest desire to create “one single unified equation that explains everything in the universe.” But an earlier scene, in which he races a friend around a field, shows something odd about his gait. It is the first sign of motor-neuron disease. As the illness progresses, Hawking takes a bad fall in front of his residence hall, after which he retreats to his room, listening over and over to Wagner’s “Die Walküre,” an opera in which goddesses ride stallions through the air. He is expected to live no more than two years, but Jane, tougher than a British Army officer, marries him and keeps him going.

The couple went on to have three children. In one scene, a male friend at Cambridge carries Hawking up some stone steps and asks him, “Does your disease affect, you know, everything?” Hawking, who is still able to speak a little, says, “Different system.” The film, at its best, doesn’t mince words or scenes about Hawking’s disability. It’s also a revelatory portrait of his strength, including his surprising gaiety, the jokes and the ironies that he drew from God knows what reserves of energy. In this movie, his illness and his productivity are intimately linked.

The film is based on Jane Wilde Hawking’s 2007 memoir, “Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen,” which the screenwriter, Anthony McCarten, and the director, James Marsh, have made into a physically detailed and touching but, all in all, rather conventional against-all-odds bio-pic. Some of the scenes are predictable: The hero commits prodigious feats of casual English genius, such as solving a difficult mathematical problem on the back of a railway timetable. He is wheeled before Cambridge dons and distinguished scientists, many of whom are amazed that the shrunken man at the front of the room, barely able to speak, has a remarkable talent for theoretical speculation. (It isn’t made clear, though, how Hawking does his calculations—his work can’t be all speculation.)

Eddie Redmayne’s performance is astonishing, as eloquent, though in a different way, as Daniel Day-Lewis’s work in “My Left Foot.” Day-Lewis, playing the Irish artist Christy Brown, a man whose mobility is reduced to a single limb, deployed his left foot, a bushy black beard, and minimal, mangled speech to create a ferociously willful and sexually miserable man. Redmayne is a gentler actor; he was the noble youth in “Les Misérables” who sang, in a fine light tenor, the tear-stained but upbeat “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables.” Tall and slender, with freckles and a flattened upper lip, he wears his brown hair in a heavy mop that in this film falls across his forehead to meet enormous black-framed glasses. With his narrow shoulders, he initially looks like an abashed scarecrow. Redmayne uses his eyebrows, his mouth, a few facial muscles, and the fingers of one hand to suggest not only Hawking’s intellect and his humor but also the calculating vanity of a great man entirely conscious of his effect on the world.

Hawking doesn’t discover a unified equation, but he settles for black holes and a comprehensive and remarkably lucrative obsession with time. (“A Brief History of Time” has sold more than ten million copies worldwide.) The movie is a love story and a success story, ending with Hawking’s refusal of a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth, for reasons that aren’t explained. His relationships with women in general here are baffling. We’re puzzled by the black hole in his character that causes him, after twenty-five years of loving marriage, to leave the devoted, accomplished, and beautiful Jane for a young nurse (Maxine Peake) who treats him like a baby, and dominates him. After one brief outburst, Jane doesn’t protest but happily escapes into the arms of a strapping but gentle choirmaster (Charlie Cox). So we have to do a little speculating ourselves: Did Jane want to get out of the marriage? Or did she suppress an entirely understandable rage in order to keep the portrait of the marriage as pleasant (and salable) as possible? “The Theory of Everything” makes a pass at the complexities of love, but what’s onscreen requires a bit more investigation. ♦

Is There Going To Be an 'Interstellar 2'?

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The Big Picture

• An Interstellar sequel is unnecessary as the film's open-ended conclusion works to its benefit.
• Nolan intentionally left Interstellar 's ending ambiguous for audience interpretation.
• Production hurdles make an Interstellar sequel unlikely due to Nolan's deal with Universal Pictures.

Today, when you hear the name Christopher Nolan , your mind probably goes to Oppenheimer , the filmmaker's bold, star-studded biopic that earned him and his cast several Oscars. But the Cillian Murphy -led film was certainly not the first time Nolan told an expansive drama with intricate character dynamics. The Dark Knight trilogy did this particularly well, as did the space drama Interstellar , one of his more popular films. It seems the conversations surrounding the 2014 film starring Matthew McConaughey , Anne Hathaway , and Jessica Chastain never cease to end, which begs the question: Are we going to get an Interstellar sequel?

Christopher Nolan's 'Interstellar' Doesn’t Need a Sequel

Interstellar is, in many ways, the single most ambitious project of Nolan’s career thus far. Although he attempted to ask existential questions about the nature of mankind’s origins that drew comparisons with Stanley Kubrick and his incredible work on 2001: A Space Odyssey , Nolan also included a very emotional parental storyline in Interstellar that felt like a tribute to Steven Spielberg classics like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra Terrestrial . Interstellar is already a perfect movie that doesn’t need a continuation to be satisfying.

Nolan has stated that Interstellar has a purposefully ambiguous conclusion , so any potential sequel would erase the open-ended nature that the film perfected. While the viewer gets to have the satisfaction of seeing that Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is able to reunite with his daughter Murph ( Ellen Burstyn ) when he finally returns to fulfill his promise, it is unclear if he will be successful in reaching Dr. Amelia Brand ( Anne Hathaway ), who he was forced to abandon earlier on in the mission. Co-screenwriter Jonathan Nolan had initially proposed a more straightforward ending in which Cooper was jettisoned into a black hole, but the brothers decided that leaving the audience to interpret the conclusion for themselves would be in the film’s best interest. Nolan stated in a subsequent interview with Entertainment Weekly that "the drama comes from audience identification."

Christopher Nolan Demanded a Ridiculous Amount of Corn for ‘Interstellar'

With a little help from his friend, Zack Snyder.

A sequel to Interstellar is not necessary because the primary conflict in the film is already resolved. Interstellar is certainly curious about the nature of existence and the way that time repeats itself, but at its heart, it's a very personal story about the relationship between a father and his daughter. Even for those who find themselves confused by the quantum mechanics and elaborate plot twists that Nolan includes in his epic science fiction journey , it's hard not to be moved by the undeniably human moments. Nolan developed similarly ambiguous endings with Inception , The Prestige , Memento , and Tenet , and hasn't made a sequel to any of them, either.

'Interstellar 2' Is Likely Not Possible With Christopher Nolan's Production Deal

Interstellar was originally produced under a co-production deal between Paramount Pictures and Warner Brothers, the latter of which had worked with Nolan for over a decade. However, Nolan chose to sever his relationship with Warner Brothers after the studio opted to send all of its theatrical releases slated for 2021 to a “day-and-day” simultaneous release on the streaming service HBO Max. Nolan subsequently signed a deal with Universal Pictures to make Oppenheimer ; considering that the historical biopic grossed nearly $1 billion and earned rave reviews, it's unlikely that Universal would ever consider dropping Nolan as a client.

Interstellar is set to return to theaters this fall to celebrate its 10th anniversary in IMAX, and, the decision to re-release Interstellar may be more to do with the newfound popularity of the IMAX format than to generate hype for a sequel, as Tenet was re-released earlier this year for similar reasons. While there may be fans that are disappointed that they will never be able to return to the world of Interstellar for a new adventure, they can rest assured that Nolan has many new original projects on his slate in the near future.

Interstellar

When Earth becomes uninhabitable in the future, a farmer and ex-NASA pilot, Joseph Cooper, is tasked to pilot a spacecraft, along with a team of researchers, to find a new planet for humans.

Interstellar is available to watch on Prime Video in the U.S.

Watch on Prime Video

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Slingshot Review: Casey Affleck & Laurence Fishburne Lead a Small-Scale Sci-Fi Mindbender

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Christopher Nolan's acclaimed sci-fi epic Interstellar has perhaps been overshadowed by some of his other works over the years, but it's interesting to look back on it now as it celebrates its 10th anniversary . Meanwhile, one of its many stars, Oscar-winner Casey Affleck, is leading another mind-bending sci-fi feature that's hitting the masses this week. Slingshot is a much smaller-scale effort but also features some big names alongside Affleck, such as the legendary Laurence Fishburne and The Boys standout Tomer Capone (aka "Frenchie").

Compared to Fishburne's juicier roles over the years, such as Morpheus from The Matrix or the Bowery King in the John Wick films, Slingshot is a bit of a walk in the park for the 63-year-old. But he reliably brings a certain intensity to his questionable character here and, opposite the fully committed Casey Affleck, helps carry Slingshot despite its occasionally derivative nature. It also helps that director Mikael Håfström ( Escape Plan, 1408 ) helms this psychological thriller set in space, so soak in the visionary delights here.

A Disjointed Journey to Titan

A psychological thriller starring Casey Affleck and Laurence Fishburne, Slingshot follows an elite trio of astronauts aboard a years-long, possibly compromised mission to Saturn’s moon Titan. As the team gears up for a highly dangerous slingshot maneuver that will either catapult them to Titan or into deep space, it becomes increasingly difficult for one astronaut to maintain his grip on reality. 

• A fine cast build tension in a well-directed, small-scale sci-fi thriller.
• Affleck really commits here, and Tomer Capone is a surprising delight.
• Slingshot feels derivative of better sci-fi mind-benders, and has a final shot that may piss you off.

Let's send another crew to the moon, shall we? And if our own moon sounds overdone, what about a different planet's? Saturn, perhaps? That's the premise of the Slingshot script by R. Scott Adams and Nathan Parker, with the three-man crew headed toward Titan to collect natural resources to supplement Earth's dwindling supplies. The quaint title references a 'gravity assist,' a certain maneuver the crew may need to finagle with their embattled shuttle, utilizing the gravitational field of a planet to alter course without depleting the shuttle's own resources.

Through an artfully disjointed narrative, we slowly gather that ambitious astronaut John (Affleck) has decided to leave his lover Zoe (the excellent Emily Beecham) behind to join the shuttle overseen by Captain Franks (Fishburne), with their commander Napier (David Morrissey) keeping somewhat of a close eye on them back home. One of the kickers is that the mission will last years; not quite the length of McConaughey's Interstellar journey, but it's clear John will be facing a new life if he ever returns to the third rock from the sun.

Slingshot Director Mikael Håfström Dishes on His Sci-Fi Thriller & His Stephen King Classic

Håfström discusses working with Casey Affleck and Laurence Fishburne on Slingshot and his old horror hit, 1408.

Paranoia in Space

As danger aboard the shuttle presents itself in multiple unsettling ways, things start to turn eerily psychological — just as director Håfström's acclaimed Stephen King adaptation 1408 did back in 2007. It doesn't help that John and co-pilot Nash (a very entertaining Capone) are occasionally pumped full of hibernation drugs to stay sedated during long stretches of interstellar travel.

When they regain consciousness, Captain Franks — who starts walking around with a handgun, despite their protests — feeds them "facts" and updates which they don't exactly believe or see eye-to-eye with. Nash is a genius with Ph.D.'s under his belt and doesn't favor where the mission is headed for various reasons, but the pompous yes-man Franks tries to reassure them that all is well. But of course it isn't, and the film draws on many older classics in creating tension toward its climax.

28 Best Sci-Fi Movies on Netflix to Watch Right Now

If you're looking for great science fiction, you can watch any of these great sci-fi movies on Netflix, from alien invasions to time travel.

A Divisive Ending to a Fun but Derivative Film

Astronauts potentially losing their marbles in space is well-trodden territory, from Sam Rockwell's underrated indie thriller Moon (2009) to the Andrei Tarkovsky masterpiece, Solaris (and Steven Soderbergh's excellent remake). Those are obviously better films that Slingshot seems to crib from, but sci-fi die-hards will still likely find this to be satisfying fan service that can tide them over until the next addition. It's more of a thematic aperitif until something better, but it's a very interesting one thanks to Håfström's interesting structuring and visuals.

If nothing else, the committed and emotionally charged performances by Affleck, Beecham, and Capone maintain a certain fiery momentum as their livelihoods are threatened. And having a captain played by Fishburne, channeling his gravitast as he struts the spaceship with a certain sinister presence, never fails to stir the pot. The film's final image may cause you to heave your popcorn at the screen depending on your sensibilities, or will at least instigate chatter among your cinephile pals. But sometimes, that's enough to satisfy a Friday night craving for genre cinema.

From Bleecker Street, Slingshot will be released in theaters on Aug. 30, 2024.

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10 Bold Sci-Fi Movies to Stream on Prime Video Right Now

From close encounters to iconic superheroes, Prime Video delivers the sci-fi goods.

Christopher Reeve's performance as the Man of Steel still stands tall.

The streaming world is rife with wonderful sci-fi entries, and when it comes to fun movies to add to your watch list, Prime Video 's library is stacked. Science fiction is a genre that can take viewers anywhere they want to go. Whether it's a highly conceptual drama or a nutty joyride into the apocalypse, sci-fi entertainment consistently explores relevant themes while providing the escapism audiences seek. 

Do you want stories about UFOs, an iconic Man of Steel and time-traveling astronauts ? You've beamed down to the right place. From Stephen King to Steven Spielberg, the sci-fi list below is worth your time. But don't take our word for it. Scroll on and find out for yourself.

Read more: 17 Epic Sci-Fi TV Shows You Need to Watch on Netflix Right Now

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

This sci-fi classic, directed by Steven Spielberg, follows an average man named Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) who, after experiencing an alien encounter, becomes obsessed with the existence of UFOs. Close Encounters shines a light (or two) on humanity's enduring curiosity about what exists beyond our world. Deeper still, it's a poignant exploration of mental health.

The Tomorrow War

It's hard to leave The Tomorrow War off this list, because it's Prime Video's big sci-fi actioner starring Chris Pratt. It follows a schoolteacher who's drafted into a war with aliens, in the future. An easily digestible flick that you can watch while looking at your phone.

Interstellar

Christopher Nolan's Interstellar takes the filmmaker's cerebral narrative talents to outer space. Matthew McConaughey is Cooper, a NASA astronaut tasked with finding a planet that can sustain life, in order to ensure humanity's future. Loss, trauma and grief play big parts in the storytelling here. Nolan's got a knack for stitching together an engaging yarn, which he does in this flick. In short, Interstellar doesn't disappoint.

Superman: The Movie

Superman: The Movie is an example of a comic book movie done right. Richard Donner's superhero epic set the standard for how modern day films of this ilk can operate. Gene Hackman's Lex Luthor is a legendary portrayal of the DC Comics villain. Through an effortless balance of heroism, physical power, humor and heart, Christopher Reeve's portrayal of Kal-El remains as iconic as ever. 

After carving his niche in the horror genre with the first two Evil Dead movies, Sam Raimi marked his big budget feature debut with Darkman -- a disruptive superhero film that's tough to pin down. Is it sci-fi? Yes. But the movie, which stars Liam Neeson and Frances McDormand, mishmashes horror, action, comedy and romance together into a fun and entertaining cult classic.

The Dead Zone

Stephen King delved into sci-fi territory with The Dead Zone, a story that follows a teacher named Johnny Smith (played by Christopher Walken) who, after waking up from a coma, discovers he has psychic abilities. Being able to see the future leads Johnny on a mission to try and save it -- putting him face-to-face with Greg Stillson (Martin Sheen), a presidential candidate who, according to his visions, will start a nuclear war if he gets elected.

Rian Johnson's sci-fi thriller explores a future where time travel exists. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Joe, a hitman who waits in the past for the mob to send him targets to eliminate. Things get complicated when his future self, played by Bruce Willis, is sent back in time for him to kill. Twisty smart writing, solid performances and savvy filmmaking make this movie a thoroughly entertaining ride.

Asteroid City

Wes Anderson takes on the sci-fi genre with Asteroid City and, as you'd suspect, he flips the script on things and delivers a movie that is quintessentially him. Whimsy, nostalgia and drama mix effortlessly as this UFO-themed story takes audiences back to a fictional version of 1950s America. The ensemble is a who's who of Anderson faves, featuring wonderful performances from Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Maya Hawke, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston and more.

Face/Off follows a rather simple, and silly, premise: FBI agent Sean Archer (Nicolas Cage) goes under the knife for a controversial face transplant procedure in order to discover the location of a bomb planted by comatose terrorist Castor Troy (John Travolta). Things get crazy when Troy wakes up and undergoes the same surgery. It all sounds ridiculous and it very much is, but thanks to the all-in performances by the two leads, and the guidance of legendary director John Woo, the whole thing works. And delightfully so.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension

This movie doesn't really make sense, but it sure is fun to watch. Packed with noteworthy talent, including Peter Weller, Jeff Goldblum, Clancy Brown, Ellen Barkin, John Lithgow and Christopher Lloyd, the '80s cult classic follows Dr. Buckaroo Banzai (Weller) as he fights a group of alien enemies in order to save the world. It's thematically reminiscent of Doctor Who and features a delightfully unhinged performance by Lithgow.

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Prime Video top 10 movies — here’s the 3 worth watching now

These are the Prime Video movies you need to watch right now

• Best of Prime Video top 10
• Full Prime Video top 10

The Prime Video top 10 has been a little static in recent weeks with the likes of “Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning” and “The Beekeeper” refusing to budge from high-ranking positions. These popcorn action flicks are definitely worth watching, but they’re not the only gems in the streaming service’s list of the most-watched movies.

However, be warned, the Prime Video top 10 also contains a few stinkers that really don’t deserve as much attention from subscribers. Yes, we’re looking at you “Jackpot!” and “Night Swim”; these movies have a 31% and 20% rating on Rotten Tomatoes , respectively. 

So, to ensure you pick out the highlights and don’t waste your precious movie-watching time on a dud, I’m selecting the very best of the Prime Video top 10 down below. One final note, this article is based on the Prime Video top 10 as of 11 a.m. ET on Wednesday, August 28. 

Best movies in the Prime Video top 10

‘21 jump street’ (2012).

In the early 2010s, it seemed like Hollywood was obsessed with rebooting just about any faded franchise it could get its hands on, so when a new movie adaption of the ‘80s cop show “21 Jump Street” was announced, it’s fair to say my enthusiasm was low. However, what we got in the end was one of the funniest and freshest comedies of the past 15 years. Plus, it’s got a delightful meta-streak poking fun at its own status as a pretty questionable reboot. 

Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum prove to be a fantastic comedic double act as a pair of low-level beat cops that are sent undercover in the local high school to track down the supplier of a new synthetic drug. Once back in class, they revert to their younger selves but quickly discover that the rules of school have changed and what was cool in their day isn’t so hip anymore. Also featuring Brie Larson, Dave Franco, Ice Cube, Ellie Kemper, Jake Johnson and Nick Offerman, “21 Jump Street” is a constantly funny comedy with real underdog spirit. 

Watch "21 Jump Street" on Prime Video now

‘Interstellar’ (2014)

“Interstellar” is one of those rare movies that I never seem to tire of no matter how many times I’ve watched it. Heck, even just writing about it now has me itching to go rewatch some of my favorite moments (and you better believe I'll be blasting the iconic score the rest of the day). It’s arguably Christopher Nolan's most ambitious work and it’s practically guaranteed to send a shiver down your spine during its most visually stunning and emotionally-charged moments. 

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Set on a future Earth decimated by a global crop blight caused by a huge dust storm, scientists are forced to accept that the planet is on course to become uninhabitable and the damage is irreversible. To prevent humanity's total extinction, a NASA mission to find a new home is launched. Reluctant pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) leads up the team selected to complete this vital task, and their epic journey takes them through a wormhole and across the vast galaxy in search of a place for mankind to call home. 

Watch "Interstellar" on Prime Video now

‘The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring’ (2001)

The entire “Lord of the Rings” trilogy (and its companion “The Hobbit” trilogy) has been added to Prime Video this month, and that has started a passionate debate in the Tom’s Guide office as to which of these legendary fantasy movies is the best. For me, there’s only one answer, the first installment is the clear pick. “The Lords of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” sets the stage for the entire trilogy and introduces viewers to a compelling cast of characters and a fantasy world that is completely engrossing.

Based on the masterworks of author J. R. R. Tolkien, “The Lord of the Rings” really needs no introduction. It’s about as iconic a movie franchise as you can get, but if you’ve been living in a Hobbit hole for the past 20 years, “The Fellowship of the Rings” opens with a young Frodo Baggins (Elijah Wood) who finds himself in possession of a ring of immense power and is tasked by the wizard Gandalf the Grey (Ian McKellen) to destroy it in the fires of Mount Doom. This kickstarts a truly epic quest that sees Frodo and his allies face the forces of evil desperate to stop them.

Watch "The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring" on Prime Video now

Prime Video top 10 movies right now

• "Jackpot!" (2024)
• "Passengers" (2016)
• "Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning" (2023)
• "The Beekeeper" (2024) 
• "21 Jump Street" (2012)
• "22 Jump Street" (2014)
• "Night Swim" (2024)
• "Interstellar" (2014)
• "Drive-Away Dolls" (2024)
• "The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring" (2001)

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• 7 best new movies to stream on Netflix, Max, Peacock and more
• This sci-fi horror show just crashed the Prime Video top 10
• Prime Video is about to lose one of the best thriller movies ever  

Rory is an Entertainment Editor at Tom’s Guide based in the UK. He covers a wide range of topics but with a particular focus on gaming and streaming. When he’s not reviewing the latest games, searching for hidden gems on Netflix, or writing hot takes on new gaming hardware, TV shows and movies, he can be found attending music festivals and getting far too emotionally invested in his favorite football team. 

Prime Video is about to lose one of the best thriller movies ever — stream it before it leaves this week

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‘slingshot’ review: casey affleck stars as an astronaut whose mind plays tricks on him in serviceable space thriller.

Laurence Fishburne and Emily Beecham co-star in director Mikael Håfström’s story of three spacemen on a dangerous mission to the far side of the solar system.

By Jordan Mintzer

Jordan Mintzer

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“In space, no one can hear you scream… your girlfriend’s name,” would be a good tagline for Slingshot , a psychological sci-fi thriller about an astronaut suffering major romantic withdrawal during a voyage to Saturn’s largest moon, Titan.

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Affleck stars as John, who’s part of a three-man mission on the Odyssey 1 (shoutout to Kubrick), a long-haul shuttle traveling to Titan to determine whether the moon’s ample supply of methane gas could help combat the climate crisis. If this doesn’t seem logical or even feasible, just know that Slingshot is less concerned with the reality of interstellar travel, or with what could actually be done with all that methane, than with John’s diminishing psychological state as he journeys further into the solar system.

The astronaut seems to have a major case of the deep space blues, haunted by the memories of his girlfriend, Zoe (Emily Beecham), whom he met at NASA (though it’s not called NASA here). She pops up in his dreams every time he goes into hibernation, which is basically every other scene. Affleck has never been a lively actor, and the fact that his character is a state of semi-narcolepsy for most of the movie suits his style well.

It’s fairly boilerplate material, and Håfström frankly seems more interested in exploring John’s memories, nightmares, visions and wavering psyche. Like in his Stephen King adaptation, 1408 , about a man who goes crazy in a hotel room, the director has a knack for placing unreliable narrators in tight spaces that ultimately spell their doom. If you put aside all the space stuff, Slingshot is basically a one-set, one-character thriller that constantly tests the viewer’s belief in what’s happening.

Is John heartbroken because he left Zoe back on Earth for a multiyear trek to the far side of Saturn, or is he too emotionally withdrawn to care? Is Nash trying to sabotage the mission because he’s also completely unstable, or is he fighting to save their lives? And why is Franks suddenly brandishing a pistol to try and restore order on the ship? Even better question: Who brings a pistol onto a space shuttle?

At the start of the film, a generic female voice — that of the machine — warns John that the drugs which induce hibernation can have some side effects. From then on, the name of the game seems to be questioning if we’re actually witnessing those side effects or reality itself. By the time Slingshot moves into its third act, which throws a major and un-spoilable twist at us, we’re wondering if anything we’re seeing is really happening.

Fishburne and Capone (a solid actor who should be in more movies) are also strong, even if their characters aren’t given ample room to exist outside John’s interior conflicts. Indeed, there’s something altogether claustrophobic about Slingshot , including a shuttle (designed by Barry Chusid, San Andreas ) whose interior seems to be a scaled-down version of the one from 2001: A Space Odyssey . What’s missing, finally, is the sense of vastness and fascination such a voyage usually entails. For all the millions of miles he supposedly travels, John never gets out of his own head, and neither do we.

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'Slingshot' captures astronauts' inner turmoil in outer space

Casey affleck plays a man hallucinating his way to saturn on a damaged spacecraft..

As an astronaut (Casey Affleck, left) starts losing his mind on a mission, his commander (Laurence Fishburne) keeps calm in “Slingshot.”

Bleecker Street

As we’ve learned from “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “The Planet of the Apes” (both 1968 releases), the “Alien” franchise, “Interstellar” (2014) and “Passengers” (2016) and all the way back to a 1964 episode of “The Twilight Zone” titled “The Long Morrow,” whenever space travelers are placed in cryostasis, aka suspended animation aka cryo-sleep pods, so they can hibernate for extended periods of time, well, things rarely go according to plan, to put it mildly.

So it goes with Casey Affleck’s John in the tense and trippy outer space thriller “Slingshot.” John is part of a three-man crew, along with a fellow astronaut named Nash (Tomer Capone) and the commanding officer Capt. Franks (Laurence Fishburne) aboard the Odyssey-1 spacecraft, which has embarked on a mission to Saturn’s moon, Titan, in the hopes of finding a rich and plentiful new source of renewable energy that will save the dying planet Earth. (Isn’t that always the way?)

In order to reach their destination, they’ll have to pull of a “slingshot” maneuver utilizing Jupiter’s gravitational pull — and along the way, they’ll periodically enter hyper-sleep pods for three months at a time, in order to conserve resources.

Each time John wakes up, the obligatory Automated Female Voice says, “Hello John, you are emerging from deep hibernation. ... Please be careful. The drugs used to induce hibernation can produce mild side effects, including confusion, nausea, dizziness and disorientation.”

At first, all seems well aboard the Odyssey-1, but after an unknown object strikes the spacecraft and causes potentially catastrophic damage, everything goes sideways. Nash spirals out of control, demanding that the ship return home, while John begins to hear voices and experience hallucinations. Capt. Franks is the only one who seems to have it together, as he insists they continue on the mission and exudes an air of calm that seems almost sinister as he sips homemade moonshine and sings along with the Animals’ “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.”

The Swedish director Mikael Håfström, whose best-known American film is the chilling 2007 Stephen King adaptation “1408,” employs jump scares and quick cuts to capture the looming sense of danger (or is it paranoia?) aboard the ship, while the screenplay by R. Scott Adams and Nathan Parker takes the story back and forth between the present-day unraveling on Odyssey-1 and flashbacks on Earth.

We learn that John was the perfect candidate for this mission because he’s alone in the world by design and won’t regret leaving anyone back home — but matters are complicated when John meets and begins to fall for Zoe (Emily Beecham), who is on the design team for the spacecraft. Affleck and Beecham have a quiet and lovely chemistry together in the courtship scenes, which couldn’t be in starker contrast to the chaos aboard the ship, where it becomes increasingly difficult for John (and thus the viewer) to determine what’s real and what’s in John’s mind. We’re kept guessing all the way until the final scene, when John —

Come on. You knew I wasn’t going to give it away. That ending is now yours to experience, should you choose to accept this mission.