Christopher Nolan is the go to man if you’re looking for sharply-written, brilliantly-articulated sci-fi films with as much substance as they have visual style.
It’s the reason why his latest masterpiece Interstellar – no, I haven’t seen it but after movies like the masterful Inception and the moody but insightful Dark Knight trilogy and enigmatic Memento, I am prepared to go out on that much of a critical limb – has been so eagerly awaited and why every teaser trailer and poster has been watched, examined and dissected to within an inch of its extra-galactic life.
And now we finally have a richly-detailed trailer (along with a slew of TV trailers) that lays out much more of the plot of this hitherto obliquely-revealed movie, a film that has been largely promoted via trailers steeped in suggestion and visual poetry than hard-and-fast facts, and a beautifully-presented website so cryptic you almost needed a degree in Hidden Meanings in Art to divine any actual information from it.
A tale of a daring journey through a newly-discovered wormhole to a far distant solar system wherein may lie a habitable planet that humanity can flee to after Earth suffers a cataclysmic drop in food production, Interstellar is at its heart a story of one man’s (Cooper played by Oscar winner Matthew McConaughey) quest (along with a carew that includes Anne Hathaway) to give his children, and particularly his daughter Murphy (Jessica Chastain, Ellen Burstyn and Mackenzie Foy all play her at various ages) some kind of viable future given that she is likely to be, as predicted by Michael Caine’s character who is behind the launch of the mission, part of “the last [generation] to survive on Earth.”
Think of it as a very grown up, thoughtful and well-considered, emotionally resonant Lost in Space, without Dr Smith, the robot or that awful chimpanzee-like creature Penny loved so much, which for all its cheesiness (which I mostly love by the way) examined much the same idea – what happens when Earth, our ancestral home can no longer support us?
Where do we go from there and if we do manage to journey into the stars, what will be find and will we find it in time?
What is so impressive about Nolan’s vision for Interstellar is that it has the bearing and look of an epic blockbuster but with the intimate soul of an indie film, a harkening back to movies of yore than understood that with style must go substance or all you have is very pretty but ultimately vacuous cinematic shell.
And it is thematically right on the money with the world, well most of it anyway, worried about the accelerating threat of climate change will leave us and how much longer we can cheat the evolutionary odds on a planet that we are so clearly changing into our own image with often deleterious results.
Interstellar is the very definition of an event movie and I daresay I won’t be the only one chomping at the bit when the movie is finally released on 6 November in Australia (and 7 November in USA and UK), eager to see if Matthew McConaughey can indeed “get out there and save the world.”