Name- Anamika Shrivastav

Roll no- 543

Div- B

INTERSTELLAR FILM APPRECIATION

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, there’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.)