This is probably the push Interstellar needed to get it firmly into the Best Picture race, which AO Scott and Kenneth Turan have just done. It was teetering for a while, with mixed reviews but the two coasts have pretty much sealed the deal.
AO Scott says:
Of course, the film is more than that. It is in the nature of science fiction to aspire to more, to ascend fearlessly toward the sublime. You could think of “Interstellar,” which has a lot to say about gravity, as the anti-“Gravity.” That movie, which would fit inside this one twice, stripped away the usual sci-fi metaphysics, presenting space travel as an occasion for quiet wonder and noisy crisis management. Mr. Nolan takes the universe and eternity itself as his subject and his canvas, brilliantly exploiting cinema’s ability to shift backward and sideways in time (through flashbacks and cross cuts), even as it moves relentlessly forward.
But “Gravity” and “Interstellar” are both ultimately about the longing for home, about voyages into the unknown that become odysseys of return. And “Interstellar” may take its place in the pantheon of space movies because it answers an acute earthly need, a desire not only for adventure and novelty but also, in the end, for comfort.
And Kenneth Turan:
If the science can get ethereal, it is one of the characteristics of a Nolan film that as much as possible of what you see was shot in the camera and created physically, not in a computer. In fact, two of the film’s space ships, weighing in at more than 10,000 pounds each, were reassembled on a remote glacier in Iceland that doubles as one of those far-away planets.
But “Interstellar’s” greatest accomplishment is that all those logistics didn’t stand in the way of the personal dimension, of a story that understands that the qualities that make us human is the most special effect of all.
My own first pass of the film is a lot more like Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir’s take:
“Interstellar” is M. Night Shyamalan’s finest film. It blends the aching, yearning, Hallmark-flavored sentimentality, the melodramatic plot twists and the pseudo-profound philosophical reversals with some surprising nuggets of cutting-edge hard science and a view of the human future grounded in both realism and hope. It hits all the notes a Shyamalan fan could hope for: It’s about an all-American farm family in the Corn Belt struggling through hard times, it’s about a grand intergalactic adventure whose real subject is family and love, and it’s got numerous scenes of major movie stars trying to hold back the tears but not succeeding. Anne Hathaway sobs, Jessica Chastain sobs and Matthew McConaughey sobs. Hell, Matt Damon sobs buckets – and the fact that he’s even in this movie was a well-protected secret until the reviews started to hit. Those people do their crying at different and irreconcilable points on the space-time continuum; now we know how water got from place to place in the univers
My own take on the film is a little closer to Andrew O’Hehir’s but I do hope to see it again at some point to see if it settles better:
Nolan has said that he hopes the movie will encourage renewed public interest in space travel, which is now seen in most Western countries as an expensive and unnecessary luxury. I entirely support that goal; I think it’s a great historic mistake to hold science hostage to neoliberal economics, or to abandon it to autocratic regimes like Russia and China. But for all the philosophical nostrums and pop physics in “Interstellar,” Nolan waffles so much on the horrifying and ludicrous notion that we should abandon our planet and go find another one to rape that I honestly can’t tell you where he comes down, or even exactly how the movie ends. (I would also argue that the Nolans have grossly and irritatingly misread Dylan Thomas’ famous villanelle “Do not go gentle into that good night,” which is about the unquenchable, unavoidable tragedy of the death of one individual, and not at all about the human species. But that’s become a pop-culture staple, and it’s pointless to complain.)
Then again, maybe the problem is that the Spielberg-Shyamalan mask of sentimental populism doesn’t entirely fit, and that Nolan can’t help playing a game of bait-and-switch with his audience. “Interstellar” is thrilling to watch across its moments but ultimately unmemorable; I feel it slipping away from me even now. It’s an almost convincing simulation of a great mainstream movie made by an entity from another dimension, who sees our flaws with a mixture of amusement and dim, theoretical sympathy, but who finally doesn’t care whether we save our planet or not, whether we live in reality or delusion, whether we rage against the dying of the light or suck the tailpipe of our self-constructed engine of doom and die.
