Film Carew: Interstellar

INTERSTELLAR

When critics use the word 'loud' to describe a film-going experience, it's normally a pejorative. Loud is what you call some obnoxious explosion-movie; the adjective as much about vision as sound; about a big, stupid, cacophonous, clamourous film whose frenetic edits and endless bombast are something to suffer through. But when Christopher Nolan's Interstellar is loud, it’s loud in the most literal way: rocket engines roaring, Hans Zimmer's Goblin-on-the-Grand-Pipe-Organ score thundering, the whole earth seemingly trembling. It is 'loud' in the best way imaginable, the cinematic equivalent of My Bloody Valentine's 'holocaust' section: an overdriven din that assaults the audience, makes them feel their organs rattle. Nolan likes to talk big — to dream big — on the state of the cinematic experience, and here he delivers: all his boy's-own devotion to balls-out, 70mm-IMAX excess amounting to a profound sensorial experience.

The canvas couldn't be any grander for Interstellar. In a career long on wild ambition, Nolan's ninth feature may be his most ambitious yet. In a near-future whose population has been thinned by mass-famine and food-wars, a 'caretaker' generation tries to hold the fort, keeping failing crops alive in the face of drought, blight, and rising nitrogen levels. Ideally, they're responsible stewards who'll help humanity weather the (dust) storm, surviving to a time of more-fertile climes. More likely, they're sentinels tending to their own tombs. It's post-apocalyptic Earth as dustbowl Middle America: all taciturn corn-farmers in trucker caps, weather-beaten pickup trucks, and Field Of Dreams baseball diamonds. In this semi-ironic vision of the rural idyll, kids crib from official textbooks that teach 'em that the US faked the Moon Landing so as to bankrupt the USSR: the race to the lunar surface a glittering symbol of the excess and wastefulness of the 20th century.

In the face of such sensible social management and admitted-defeat, one man still dares to dream. Whilst society stares down at the dirt, Movie Star Matthew McConaughey gazes at the stars. And, after an unimpressive ghosts-or-maybe-aliens-are-communicating-with-us opening-reel that gave me terrified Signs flashbacks, soon Matty Mac stumbles onto an Area 51-ish underground NASA, presided over by Michael Caine (in his eternal Alfred role) and daughter Anne Hathaway. A brisk sequence of walk-and-talk, what-we-do-is-secret exposition later, and McConaughey, Hathaway, Wes Bentley, and David Gyasi are (loudly!) blasting their way into space, fired headlong towards a wormhole that'll reroute them to new frontiers, explorers charting once-unreachable galaxies. They're in pursuit of a handful of scientists who've undertaken never-to-return solo missions to possibly-habitable planets: a cross-cosmos Hail Mary on which the survival of the species may hang.

Along the way, the film takes a deep-dive plunge into the jargonist nerdery of the space-time continuum; the Nolan brothers — Christopher working, again, with brother Jonathan, on the script — showing an artful hand at illustrative imagery, finding the figurative ways (the pearl in the oyster!) to communicate the wilder notions of wormholes, horizon lines, light bending, black holes, particle physics, 5-dimensional space-beings(!) et al. "That's relativity, folks," Gyasi cracks, at one point; and the Nolans manage to deliver egghead science with both froth and panache, whilst never dumbing down the ideas. The film’s very existence was inspired by the work of theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, who also served as consultant; meaning Neil deGrasse Tyson is unlikely to be sent into conniption-Twitter-fits about the science of Interstellar.

Gravity is an obvious comparison point, especially when Hathaway and McConaughey are lady and gentleman floating in space, a celestial Eve/Adam pirouetting in gravity-free glory. In form, these two towering totems of popcorn entertainment are the best comparison: Nolan's picture an operatic three-hour chin-scratcher that bends time and space to its narrative wont; Alfonso Cuaron's movie a taut-and-thrillin' 80-minute theme-park ride that played out as cinematic chain-reaction. But the comparison persists, and the head-to-head favours Interstellar. Even though Gravity became some critical rallying point, and cavorted its way to Oscar glory, for everyone who winced at its moments of cursory characterisation and just-plain-awful writing — at George Clooney's "sunlight over the Ganges" banter or Sandra Bullock's midday-telemovie dead daughter — the thoughtfulness of the Nolans' screenplay (instead of listening to some awful country music in the eerie silence of space, McConaughey's iPod is loaded with field-recordings of crickets and rain), and the depth and seriousness of the drama, are pleasing.

In Interstellar's most profound sequence, McConaughey and Hathaway return from a failed rescue-mission on a planet of water and waves. Though they've been gone mere hours, the planet's proximity to a black-hole has meant that, by Earth's time, their in-and-out incursion (with Zimmer's score going all Inception metronomic-ticking-clock) has lasted 23 years. So McConaughey does what anyone who's just got back home from a spell away does: he checks his messages! With tears streaming down his Best Actor face, Wooderson watches, traumatised that time's kept on slippin' in his absence; Nolan making the daring decision to hold frame on his star, to embrace the emotion of the reaction. Eventually Nolan turns camera back to the video, in time to see that the kids our hero left behind have grown up to become irascible-farmer Casey Affleck and visionary-scientist Jessica Chastain; each, in their own way, chips off the old (man) block.

Nolan then hands the narrative over to Chastain, and, thereafter, back-and-forth; and the emotional pull between Earth and space, between this planet and imagined others, feels powerful, gravitational. Things get a little ridiculous, sure, when Hathaway — and, the Nolans themselves — alight on love as a quasi-mystical force that can transcend the limits of space/time, but by then Interstellar — with its space-physics, relativity hijinks, foreign planets, droll robots, and Matt Damon reveals; its showstopping, all-IMAX sequences of spinning space-station docking and McConaughey hurtling through the empty blackness of space, rattling inside his space-suit — feels like it's already beaten you into submission.

It's big, loud, overdriven, and over-the-top, but in the best sense of those words, all of 'em. Interstellar is a towering feat, a valentine to the human capacity for wild dreams, inspired ingenuity, and against-all-odds ambition, authored by an auteur who knows those impulses all too well.