INTERSTELLAR MOVIE REVIEW

Nolan's films are not just stories that are made into films. It is his idea that's told through a medium called cinema. 

 

If Memento was ambiguous, if The Prestige was smart, if Inception was deceiving, if The Batman Trilogy was a revelation, then Interstellar is hope-giving, inspiring, levitating, flabbergasting and more... It's a roller-coaster ride of transcendental thought process. Time as a relative theory, astrology as a whole, time-travel and lot other high level thinking is mandatory to go about the narration of this movie when our very little brain cells have a tough time differentiating between just a movie being watched in a cinema hall or being part of a galactic expedition.

 

Interstellar is a science-fiction movie about a group of space travelers on a picaresque journey across the wormhole to find a habitable planet other than earth. Sounds familiar? We've had Blade Runner, A Space Odyssey, Contact or the recent Gravity along with numerous other ambitious takes on such top level prophecies, but what makes Interstellar a suffocating, impactful film?

The amount of study that has gone into the making of the film is equivalent to a new find. Be it the concept of dimensions, futuristic world, or the unexplainable topics to the laymen, this story from the Nolan brothers is rather simple than all their previous outings. Interstellar in simple words, is a film about a father-daughter relationship. 

 

Taking the ‘Dust bowl’ as a primary setting for the story to have a beginning, Mr. Cooper is a farmer by choice but a trained pilot and engineer by profession. He is a single father who still believes the plight of their blight filled earth can be taken over by inhabiting another planet. His bright daughter Murphy doesn't want him to go on a NASA powered voyage fearing his return. Let’s stop it there on making a futile attempt of describing the story.

 

Interstellar has propelled itself to the pinnacle by an undeniably superior story, astute screenplay and stellar performances from the uncanny yet stubborn Mathew McConaughey as Cooper the pilot, Anne Hathaway as Amelia a committed scientist, Micheal Caine as Dr. Brand the chief and Jessica Chaistan as Murphy the abandoned daughter. Double Negative has taken up the herculean task of doing the visual effects for a Nolan film and has re-created unseen visuals of the wormhole, the outer space, inhabited planets of the other galaxy and of course the beautiful earth. The graphics and other digitally composited elements in the film are pretty much the life-line for the film, making the unseen portions of outer space look so convincing to us and not a compromised, make-believe platform. How will the engines of a space shuttle sound, how is sound transmitted in a planet that has only 80% gravity, how does a button sound when it is pressed by a finger that has astronaut’s gloves on it?

 

Hans Zimmer can never get tired of writing top-class music scores. Be it the nail-biting sequence of the shuttle docking into the mother-ship or the take-off into the space or the scene where Cooper gets to watch a video sent from his family, the musical support in the film is a parachute like life-saver for such a hard-hitting story. He elevates the film and positions it to an unreachable height of excellence and creativity. Interstellar has been filmed with anamorphic 35mm and IMAX 70 mm to give a different visage for the story. Hoyte Van Hoytema’s (what word could you think of to describe his skill) cinematography will become a standard procedure on how science-fictions are to be shot. 

 

Made on a whopping budget of 165 million dollars, Nolan almost returned 10 million after filming from the original allocated budget. Private corn fields were bought and cultivated to be used as a major backdrop. Special IMAX cameras were made to shoot the interiors of the cockpit. Exclusively Robots were made for the film. 100 hours for rendering a single CG powered frame and what not first-timer for a film. Interstellar has started a race of its own for generation of film-makers to follow. 

 

Einstein’s general relativity, Morse code, rotating black-hole and lot other complexities are dealt in Interstellar, but it is an emotional tale about the cosmos of survival. This piece of writing has no spoilers and talks nothing about, how great the film is. It is just an immediate response…