Interstellar

Interstellar (2014)

Dust storms blow across Cooper’s porch every morning. The truck needs a flat tire fixed. Corn is dying. Schools teach children that moon landings never happened. It feels like an old John Steinbeck novel with pickup trucks and broken combine harvesters.

NASA lives in a concrete basement. Cooper gets hired because he flew planes before society collapsed. They pack him into a tiny tin can with three scientists and a boxy military robot named TARS. The destination is a wormhole sitting out by Saturn. Once they jump through, relativity turns ugly. One hour down on an ocean world costs twenty-three years back home on Earth. You feel that lost time. Cooper sitting alone watching video tapes of his children growing into adults while he was away for an afternoon will break your heart.

The Noise in the Cinema

Hans Zimmer brought a church organ into the soundtrack. When the spaceship spins out of control, the pipe notes hit your chest. Then everything cuts out. Hard vacuum. Dead silence. Just a man breathing into his suit. Hoyte van Hoytema used real projectors outside the spaceship windows, so when light hits the actors’ faces, it looks dirty and real.

What Stumbles

The middle drags. Matt Damon turns up on an ice rock for an awkward fistfight that belongs in a cheap action film. Anne Hathaway gets stuck reading a sappy monologue about love. But once the ship drops past the event horizon into the tesseract, the film finds its feet again. It links black holes and time travel straight back to a father trying to say goodbye to his little girl through an old wristwatch.

If you like lonely space stories with strange clocks, check out Moon and Solaris.

Score: 8 / 10 Stars