Christopher Nolan has never been one for small vision or limited ambition. 2010’s Inception is a perfect example of how big his ideas are and how daring his execution can be.
Interstellar, his latest film, outdoes everything he’s made so far, and blasts far ahead of recent offerings from other filmmaking teams. It is truly a great film, a historic film, perhaps one of the greatest achievements in recent human history.
Why? Because it’s not afraid to ask a most difficult and important question, a big question, the very question of existence itself: “where did we come from?”
What’s truly stunning about this film is how long it’s been in the works. The concept for Interstellar goes all the way back to the early 1990’s. Since then he and his team have labored to develop the technology necessary to pull off this amazing feat.
While budget cuts got in the way of other, similar projects, Interstellar was finally launched in 2004 for the 10 year journey through space it would take to reach the world’s movie screens.
Always one to eschew CGI and substitute practical effects, Interstellar goes the distance, the filmmakers actually building Rosetta, a space-faring probe designed to fly to and closely observe a comet, a comet which may contain important clues to our primordial past.
During that 10 years, the orbiter Nolan and his team created traveled through space for nearly seven billion miles before reaching its target, the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. It’s breathtaking to think that a film could find much less make contact with a target this small in the vastness of space. After all, the comet’s major lobe is only 4 kilometers in diameter. Not only did Nolan and his team manage to navigate to this tiny needle in an unimaginably vast haystack, they were able to establish a stable orbit around it and send back haunting, beautiful images which are giving the world some of the few close-up views of a comet ever obtained.
The idea here is simple. Nolan isn’t content merely to provide pretty pictures. And the tremendous cinematography of Hoyte Van Hoytema aside, he’s right. This is a movie about a lot more than just imagery, it’s about those universal questions. Where did we come from? Where do we go next? Since those answers may lie in the chemical composition of the comet itself, the only answer is to land on it, take samples and beam the results back to Earth.
The sheer audacity of this, both from an imagination perspective as well as the physical cost of getting such events on screen, is what really give weight to Interstellar. Nolan hasn’t worked on this large a canvas in a while and it’s good to see him back to huge, bold ideas.
The Philea probe, brilliantly played by a driven, haunted Matthew McConaughey, faces incredible odds as it separates from the Rosetta and makes a nail-biting seven hour descent. (Yes, running time is one of the problems of the film, but is forgiven when you realize the issues at stake here.)
Despite the few, requisite obstacles, the landing is a success and McConaughey’s Philea completes its mission, taking the first ever samples of a comet’s surface, analyzing them, and sending he results back to a waiting Earth.
Philea does what he was designed to do, provides the world with important information, and dies. What could be more poignant than that?
It is that emotional core, a man willing to give everything for the betterment of his species, that pushed Interstellar far above anything we’ve seen in cinemas recently. Not since Tom Cruise played the Curiosity Rover in Spielberg’s Mars themed War of the Worlds has a film of such ambition been made about the search for life in other parts of our solar system.
One complaint, since the Rosetta never actually went to another star (the technical definition of interstellar travel) I’m not sure why Nolan and his team felt the title appropriate, but that small slip must be allowed to pass given the magnitude of what they’ve accomplished.