Critics reviews

INTERSTELLAR believes in love and family as real forces in the physical world, and I don't have the heart to tell it otherwise. (It also literalizes string theory as a multicolored pane of time-bending strings behind your bedroom wall. Think about that for a moment!) The ambition of INTERSTELLAR is inseparable from its clean-shaven nuttiness and its discreet romanticism.

Interstellar is Nolan's best and most brazenly ambitious film to date... The film is a feast of extraordinary ideas, each one depicted by Nolan's cinematographer, Hoyte van Hoytema, and his visual effects team with heart-swelling grandeur.

[The part where Coop communicates with his daughter from another dimension] loses some viewers, but it leaves me a wreck every time. Interstellar has never really been about science; any science in it has always been at the service of Nolan's more poetic ambitions. And here, the film abandons any pretense to physics and enters a strange, wonderful netherworld between dreamy metaphor and literal-minded fantasy.

...These are actual, astrophysical equations, but as seen on screen, line after line, covering the entire blackboard, they actually look like an exotic script, an alien language hardly anyone can read. This is what math is to 99.99 percent of moviegoers: mysterious and never to be understood.

Through scale and speed, Interstellar‘s first half builds enough beyond-human momentum to sustain a not inconsiderable amount of entertainment value — but when Mann appears to explain man, it collapses under the weight of a repeated thesis that doesn't merit such explicit, redundant reiteration.

The first half sometimes drags, admittedly. The second half – the mission itself – is better, the vastness of space coming up against human frailty. Spaceships and wormholes are fine for science nerds – but when people lie, or deceive their loved ones, or succumb to all-too-human weaknesses, that's real drama.

Christopher Nolan's new film Interstellar, which addresses both science and poetry in implicit and explicit ways, offers us a possible "theory of everything"—one in which the simple beauties of art are conjoined with the complex mathematics of science in a middle space between the two, with that middle space corresponding to the pathway from our collective reality so many of us have been seeking for so long.

Once this movie got to where it was going, I had an involuntary spasm of laughter. What else could I do? Partly, I laughed at the cleverness of the revelation. The sequence delivers. And partly, I laughed because Nolan believes cleverness is the same thing as audacity. He thinks that the click of realization is profound, that it's the key — when, really, it's just the gears of a giant machine locking into place. All of this effort, all of these questions, all of this movie, and for what?

A film of wide-open spaces and lofty ambition—and fields of corn literally as high as an elephant's eye if you're watching it in IMAX—Interstellar is Nolan's most enjoyable film since 2006's The Prestige and in many ways his least enervating movie ever, drained as it is of the acidic pessimism that infected so many of its predecessors.

Nolan's effects are clever and, above all, elaborate—they resound with the amount of work that he and his team devoted to them—but they're devoid of astonishment; they're not up to the cosmic vision that they're supposed to suggest (just as Zimmer's banal music isn't up to such a vision, either—compare it with Kubrick's use of music by Ligeti). Nolan's images seem to be at arm's length, like illustrations of what space travel might be like—they're not in themselves an experience of that travel.

[Nolan's method] is, on paper at least, to the good. So it is without great relish that I must report that Interstellar, like Inceptionbefore it, is a movie that feels like being tangled up in a pile of infinitely-unfolding some-assembly-required instructions in the watching, full of dialogue that's like the recital of a How To manual.

Viewers have to infer the particulars of his futuristic scenario gradually, as evidence presents itself, and he trusts that we're smart enough to do so. It's a bold decision, but it has a strategic purpose, because Interstellar ultimately turns into the sort of hard sci-fi in which characters are constantly and necessarily spewing exposition. By providing no information at the outset, Nolan creates a context in which later onslaughts of practical verbiage feel like a gift rather than like a slog.