Christopher Nolan's Interstellar is a lot of things. Like Inarritu's latest film Birdman, this is a movie that wants to combine many different genres at once- sentimental family drama, sci-fi adventure, space epic, a progressive vision of the future, a treatise on the value of love above all else...you get the idea, or you will when you see it. Also like Birdman, it's not entirely successful at everything it's trying to do, and some parts of it work much better than others- unfortunately, here it's a lot clearer which parts do and don't, and that's because Nolan is a much more straightforward, structured visionary (if you want to call him that) than Inarritu. The stuff that works, works very well, and the stuff that doesn't...well, it really doesn't.
But one of the things he was lucky enough to get very right here was the casting, and with Matthew McConaughey and Jessica Chastain as the lead characters in this film, I confess to feeling more attachment to them emotionally than I ever have to any of the characters in Nolan's other films, and that's an achievement. The people in his films are usually cold, distant archetypes, there to recite dialogue in ways that get across his ideas- his worlds are mostly cerebral and he's been criticized for being unemotional with his characters. The entire first act of this film seems designed to respond to those critiques, as he builds up McConaughey's all American good old boy Coop to be a widowed dad (of course) saddled with two kids and a farm with acres of cornfields, all part of a distant future where the earth has run out of food, leaving everyone who's survived to take up a useful profession, like farming.
But Coop is educated and trained as an engineer and pilot, so he longs to be able to use the skills he has acquired to go beyond this world, and maybe look for others instead. The building of emotional bonds between Coop and his kids, especially his precocious 10-year-old daughter Murph, and the set-up of their existence in this future may be more sentimental than Nolan fans are used to, but I think it works well in bonding the audience to these characters as people, and I appreciated that effort, because it causes us to care when the special effects extravaganza portion of the movie takes over. And it does indeed take over, lasting the vast majority of the film, which is undoubtedly what most will find to be the most entertaining part. But I was pretty okay with the world establishing, and it's more the space and planet hopping activities where my restlessness began to grow.
