Film Review - Interstellar (2014)

Interstellar is the new film by Christopher Nolan who gave the Dark Knight Trilogy and the story here takes place on a future Earth that's running out of food so Cooper (Matthew McCounaghey) is tasked to lead an Interstellar mission to seek out a new world and boldly go where no man has gone before.

I was so SO excited for this film going into it, I'm a big fan of the Dark Knight that Nolan made and a new Sci-Fi film has me automatically racing to see it as fast as Quicksilver from X-Men, could this new voyage soar for the stars or just come crashing down to Earth.

Hmmmm.

It pains me to say this, it pains me to say it to the point where I want to cry but this movie is a major disappointment for me, almost on the same level as Jack Ryan was back at the beginning of the year.

But before I delve into those I will talk about what I did like and that is Nolan's technical achievements, the cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema who also did Her and the Visual Effects work are extraordinary and they demand to be seen on the biggest screen one could find (unless a Christmas Pageant sees you booted into the smallest which happened with me) as they are marvellous to look at and study.

However this film's storyline is all over the place and Nolan is just not that same kind of filmmaker that Steven Spielberg and James Cameron are or even Peter Jackson to a certain extent as while his spectacle is truly special this film lacks a beating human heart and emotional resonance to go with it and those three men are far more capable of pulling this sort of film off (the project originally started with Spielberg in mind) and after coming out of the film I started to miss the Chris Nolan that gave us the Dark Knight which was a very cold and dark film that took no prisoners and went balls to the wall.

And that sort of dark edged filmmaking is what Nolan excels at whereas this sort of sugary sweet and melodramatic style of filmmaking is a very specialist skill which Spielberg, Jackson and Cameron can pull off but Nolan isn't capable of it and I hope that with his next film he will go back to the Dark Knight tone.

But finally in terms of the performances McCounaghey and John Lithgow are the best performers here whilst Anne Hathaway is stuck with a 2 dimensional and poorly thought out role and Jessica Chastain is just wasted in her role and someone of her calibre and beauty (I swoon when I see her on screen) just doesn't deserve it.

And so to wrap it up, Interstellar is a sad sad sad disappointment for me despite its amazing visual effects, I cannot recommend it and it saddens me to even say it as I wanted this to be good I really did but it was not and I just cannot take any pleasure in saying this, 2 out of 5.