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Christopher Nolan’s "Interstellar ," about astronauts traveling to the other end of the galaxy to find a new home to replace humanity’s despoiled home-world, is frantically busy and earsplittingly loud. It uses booming music to jack up the excitement level of scenes that might not otherwise excite. It features characters shoveling exposition at each other for almost three hours, and a few of those characters have no character to speak of: they’re mouthpieces for techno-babble and philosophical debate. And for all of the director’s activism on behalf of shooting on film, the tactile beauty of the movie’s 35mm and 65mm textures isn’t matched by a sense of composition. The camera rarely tells the story in Nolan’s movies. More often it illustrates the screenplay, and there are points in this one where I felt as if I was watching the most expensive NBC pilot ever made.

And yet "Interstellar" is still an impressive, at times astonishing movie that overwhelmed me to the point where my usual objections to Nolan's work melted away. I’ve packed the first paragraph of this review with those objections (they could apply to any Nolan picture post "Batman Begins"; he is who he is) so that people know that he’s still doing the things that Nolan always does. Whether you find those things endearing or irritating will depend on your affinity for Nolan's style.

In any case, t here’s something pure and powerful about this movie. I can’t recall a science fiction film hard-sold to a director’s fans as multiplex-“awesome” in which so many major characters wept openly in close-up, voices breaking, tears streaming down their cheeks. Matthew McConaughey ’s widowed astronaut Cooper and his colleague Amelia Brand ( Anne Hathaway ) pour on the waterworks in multiple scenes, with justification: like everyone on the crew of the Endurance , the starship sent to a black hole near Jupiter that will slingshot the heroes towards colonize-able worlds, they’re separated from everything that defines them: their loved ones, their personal histories, their culture, the planet itself. Other characters—including Amelia's father, an astrophysicist played by Michael Caine , and a space explorer (played by an un-billed guest actor) who’s holed up on a forbidding arctic world—express a vulnerability to loneliness and doubt that’s quite raw for this director. The film’s central family (headed by Cooper, grounded after the dismantling of NASA) lives on a corn farm, for goodness’ sake, like the gentle Iowans in " Field of Dreams " (a film whose daddy-issues-laden story syncs up nicely with the narrative of " Interstellar"). Granted, they're growing the crop to feed the human race, which is whiling away its twilight hours on a planet so ecologically devastated that at first you mistake it for the American Dust Bowl circa 1930 or so; but there's still something amusingly cheeky about the notion of corn as sustenance, especially in a survival story in which the future of humanity is at stake. ( Ellen Burstyn plays one of many witnesses in a documentary first glimpsed in the movie's opening scene—and which, in classic Nolan style, is a setup for at least two twists.)

The state-of-the-art sci-fi landscapes are deployed in service of Hallmark card homilies about how people should live, and what’s really important. ("We love people who have died—what's the social utility in that?" "Accident is the first step in evolution.") After a certain point it sinks in, or should sink in, that Nolan and his co-screenwriter, brother Jonathan Nolan , aren’t trying to one-up the spectacular rationalism of “2001." The movie's science fiction trappings are just a wrapping for a spiritual/emotional dream about basic human desires (for home, for family, for continuity of bloodline and culture), as well as for a horror film of sorts—one that treats the star voyagers’ and their earthbound loved ones’ separation as spectacular metaphors for what happens when the people we value are taken from us by death, illness, or unbridgeable distance. (“Pray you never learn just how good it can be to see another face,” another astronaut says, after years alone in an interstellar wilderness.)

While "Interstellar" never entirely commits to the idea of a non-rational, uncanny world, it nevertheless has a mystical strain, one that's unusually pronounced for a director whose storytelling has the right-brained sensibility of an engineer, logician, or accountant. There's a ghost in this film, writing out messages to the living in dust. Characters strain to interpret distant radio messages as if they were ancient texts written in a dead language, and stare through red-rimmed eyes at video messages sent years ago, by people on the other side of the cosmos. "Interstellar" features a family haunted by the memory of a dead mother and then an absent father; a woman haunted by the memory of a missing father, and another woman who's separated from her own dad (and mentor), and driven to reunite with a lover separated from her by so many millions of miles that he might as well be dead.

With the possible exception of the last act of " Memento" and the pit sequence in "The Dark Knight Rises"—a knife-twisting hour that was all about suffering and transcendence—I can’t think of a Nolan film that ladles on misery and valorizes gut feeling (faith) the way this one does; not from start to finish, anyway. T he most stirring sequences are less about driving the plot forward than contemplating what the characters' actions mean to them, and to us. The best of these is the lift-off sequence, which starts with a countdown heard over images of Cooper leaving his family. It continues in space, with Caine reading passages from Dylan Thomas's villanelle "Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night": "Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light." (If it wasn't already obvious, this sequence certifies Nolan as the most death-and-control obsessed major American filmmaker, along with Wes Anderson .)

The film's widescreen panoramas feature harsh interplanetary landscapes, shot in cruel Earth locales; some of the largest and most detailed starship miniatures ever built, and space sequences presented in scientifically accurate silence, a la "2001." But for all its high-tech glitz, "Interstellar" has a defiantly old-movie feeling. It's not afraid to switch, even lurch, between modes. At times, the movie's one-stop-shopping storytelling evokes the tough-tender spirit of a John Ford picture, or a Steven Spielberg film made in the spirit of a Ford picture: a movie that would rather try to be eight or nine things than just one. Bruising outer-space action sequences, with astronauts tumbling in zero gravity and striding across forbidding landscapes, give way to snappy comic patter (mostly between Cooper and the ship's robot, TARS, designed in Minecraft-style, pixel-ish boxes, and voiced by Bill Irwin ). There are long explanatory sequences, done with and without dry erase boards, dazzling vistas that are less spaces than mind-spaces, and tearful separations and reconciliations that might as well be played silent, in tinted black-and-white, and scored with a saloon piano. (Spielberg originated "Interstellar" in 2006, but dropped out to direct other projects.)

McConaughey, a super-intense actor who wholeheartedly commits to every line and moment he's given, is the right leading man for this kind of film. Cooper proudly identifies himself as an engineer as well as an astronaut and farmer, but he has the soul of a goofball poet; when he stares at intergalactic vistas, he grins like a kid at an amusement park waiting to ride a new roller coaster. Cooper's farewell to his daughter Murph—who's played by McKenzie Foy as a young girl—is shot very close-in, and lit in warm, cradling tones; it has some of the tenderness of the porch swing scene in " To Kill a Mockingbird ." When Murph grows up into Jessica Chastain —a key member of Caine's NASA crew, and a surrogate for the daughter that the elder Brand "lost' to the Endurance 's mission—we keep thinking about that goodbye scene, and how its anguish drives everything that Murph and Cooper are trying to do, while also realizing that similar feelings drive the other characters—indeed, the rest of the species. (One suspects this is a deeply personal film for Nolan: it's about a man who feels he has been "called" to a particular job, and whose work requires him to spend long periods away from his family.)

The movie's storytelling masterstroke comes from adherence to principles of relativity: the astronauts perceive time differently depending on where Endurance is, which means that when they go down onto a prospective habitable world, a few minutes there equal weeks or months back on the ship. Meanwhile, on Earth, everyone is aging and losing hope. Under such circumstances, even tedious housekeeping-type exchanges become momentous: one has to think twice before arguing about what to do next, because while the argument is happening, people elsewhere are going grey, or suffering depression from being alone, or withering and dying. Here, more so than in any other Nolan film (and that's saying a lot), time is everything. "I'm an old physicist," Brand tells Cooper early in the film. "I'm afraid of time." Time is something we all fear. There's a ticking clock governing every aspect of existence, from the global to the familial. Every act by every character is an act of defiance, born of a wish to not go gently.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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Interstellar (2014)

Rated PG-13 for some intense perilous action and brief strong language

169 minutes

Matthew McConaughey as Cooper

Wes Bentley as Doyle

Anne Hathaway as Brand

Jessica Chastain as Murph

Michael Caine as Dr. Brand

John Lithgow as Donald

Topher Grace

Casey Affleck as Tom

Mackenzie Foy as Young Murph

Ellen Burstyn as Old Murph

Bill Irwin as TARS (voice)

Collette Wolfe as Ms. Kelly

David Oyelowo as Principal

William Devane as Old Tom

Christopher Nolan
Jonathan Nolan

Director of Photography

Hoyte van Hoytema

Original Music Composer

Hans Zimmer

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Interstellar, common sense media reviewers.

Ambitious intergalactic drama focuses on a father's promise.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Ultimately this is a story about the fierce love b

Cooper is an attentive, responsive father who talk

Several scenes of intense, impending peril -- part

Two adults kiss in celebration.

Strong language is infrequent but includes one or

Dell Latitude computer, several close-ups of a Ham

Positive Messages

Ultimately this is a story about the fierce love between a parent and his children. It explores the power of the intangible, unquantifiable feeling of love; the good of the man versus the good of mankind; and the certainty that there's more in the universe than we can possibly understand. The opening lines from Dylan Thomas' poem, "Do not go gentle into that good night," are repeated again and again as a reminder to not be complacent or accept death when there's a possible solution that could save your life. Cooper encourages his children to look hard for the answers to their questions.

Positive Role Models

Cooper is an attentive, responsive father who talks things through with his kids and always answers their questions. He sacrifices time with them in order to help the entire population of Earth, but he never forgets his promise to return to them. Amelia and her father believe in the virtue of sacrificing yourself for the good of the mission, but in the end, Amelia also understands that love needs to be taken into account, not just hard science. Murphy never stops looking for a way to explain her father's absence or to rescue the people of Earth.

Violence & Scariness

Several scenes of intense, impending peril -- particularly the parts of the movie that take place in space. Several characters die -- mostly in space, but one on Earth as well. Characters are usually killed by a hostile environment, but one dies of natural causes. Two men get into a dangerous physical confrontation in space.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Strong language is infrequent but includes one or two uses of "s--t," "a--hole," "son of a bitch," "dumb ass," and "f--king."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Dell Latitude computer, several close-ups of a Hamilton watch.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Interstellar is a compelling sci-fi thriller/poignant family drama directed by Christopher Nolan ( The Dark Knight ) and starring Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway . As in Gravity , there are nail-bitingly intense (and life-threatening) sequences that take place in space, but this is more than a survival tale: It's a relationship story about a father who has made a promise to his children to return to them, no matter what. The layered themes, intergalactic peril, and references to astrophysics may prove too dark and complicated for elementary school-aged tweens, but middle-schoolers and up will be drawn in by both the science and the parent-child bond that guides the central characters to keep searching for a way to reunite. Characters do die (both in space and on Earth), and there's some language ("s--t," one "f--king," etc.). To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

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Community Reviews

Parents say (43)
Kids say (183)

Based on 43 parent reviews

Awesome movie. Kids will love it for different reasons as they grow up.

The best movie ever, what's the story.

Director Christopher Nolan 's INTERSTELLAR takes place in a future in which severe drought has killed most of the world's crops, and humans are dying of starvation and disease on a doomed, dust-covered Earth. Cooper ( Matthew McConaughey ) is a former pilot/engineer who, like the majority of Americans, has had to trade in his defunct career to work as a farmer. Coop's love of science is evident in his young daughter, Murphy ( Mackenzie Foy ), who swears there's a ghost in her bedroom leaving her messages in code. Coop is unbelieving at first but then helps Murph decipher one of the codes, leading them to a secret lab run by Professor Brand ( Michael Caine ), who heads what's left of NASA. Brand reveals that they sent a group of scientists through a wormhole leading to another galaxy -- and that now a small group of brave souls must embark on a mission to see whether any of those scientists found an inhabitable planet. Brand convinces Coop to be the life-and-death mission's pilot, with the understanding that his time spent in outer space could mean missing many years on Earth (one hour on one planet equals seven years on Earth) -- years that he'd be away from his children. As the team tries to survive unthinkable odds, back on Earth, Murph grows into a brilliant scientist ( Jessica Chastain ) obsessed with finding her lost-in-space father.

Is It Any Good?

Unless you're well-versed in the physics of wormholes, don't expect to understand the intricacies of Interstellar' s science. And there's a lot of science, most of which sounds unbelievable, but it gets the story where Nolan and his brother Jonathan (who co-wrote the film), need it to go -- from the dust-smothered and scorched Earth to the dangerous outer reaches of space. The visuals are gorgeous, and not just in space, where Coop and his fellow astronauts -- Amelia ( Anne Hathaway ), Doyle ( Wes Bentley ), Romilly (David Gyasi), and the wise-cracking militarized robot, TARS, voiced by Bill Irwin -- travel from planet to planet, but also back on Earth, where time is passing so quickly that Coop's now grown children have all but lost faith that they'll see him again.

Occasionally the time-bending storyline starts to feel like it's stretching time for viewers as well, but somehow the missions -- both the one to save mankind and Coop's personal one to see his kids -- are compelling enough to keep audiences interested. McConaughey balances the line between dead serious, sarcastic, and heartfelt, and he plays well off of his co-stars (particularly his space team). Both the young and adult versions of Murphy are perfectly cast, and Caine -- whose professor has a penchant for quoting Dylan Thomas' poem "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" -- provides elder-statesman gravitas as he did in Nolan's Batman films. As Hathaway's character explains, love is a force that transcends time and space, so if you feel invested in Coop's promise to Murphy (and, to a lesser degree, his son, who grows up to be played by Casey Affleck ), you'll forgive some of the confusing and convenient plot loops and concentrate on the possibility that at some point, this father will embrace his children again.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how Interstellar is similar to, and different from, other serious/thoughtful space movies -- like Gravity , Contact , and 2001: A Space Odyssey . How would you describe it to friends -- as a sci-fi movie, a thriller, a family drama, or what?

Does the violence in the movie seem less upsetting when it's man vs. nature instead of man vs. man? Why do you think Professor Brand keeps quoting Dylan Thomas' poem "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night"? What does the poem mean?

Director Christopher Nolan is known for movies with psychological themes that play with time, space, memory, etc. How is Interstellar like his previous films? How is it a departure?

How would you describe the parent/child relationships in this movie? Are they realistic? Relatable?

Movie Details

In theaters : November 5, 2014
On DVD or streaming : March 31, 2015
Cast : Matthew McConaughey , Anne Hathaway , Jessica Chastain
Director : Christopher Nolan
Inclusion Information : Female actors
Studio : Paramount Pictures
Genre : Science Fiction
Topics : Space and Aliens
Run time : 169 minutes
MPAA rating : PG-13
MPAA explanation : some intense perilous action and brief strong language
Last updated : May 25, 2023

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Interstellar Reviews

Humbling and epic in scope, designed and conceptualised brilliantly, but a tad too stand-off-ish emotionally. While the father-daughter dynamic works in parts, the Cooper–Brand relationship is never given the right treatment and collapses.

Full Review | Oct 17, 2023

This is a film where complex concepts of quantum physics and powerful human emotions are inextricably intertwined and the ghost that haunts the farmhouse has both a scientific explanation and a sense of supernatural power.

Full Review | Sep 9, 2023

"Interstellar" pushes the limits for personal interpretation of both science and fiction. Both elements are wildly heightened to a bold scale to address the internal opposites between logic and spectacle, science and sentiment, and brains and emotion.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 4, 2023

…uses sci-fi to go beyond into the philosophical and spiritual beyond that few other epics can reach….

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 27, 2023

Nolan’s most openly emotional film, he fully lived up to his “Stanley Kubrick’s eye and Steven Spielberg’s heart” identity with this grand sci-fi epic about the sheer force of will that we have for those we love.

Full Review | Jul 20, 2023

Interstellar utilizes science in a way that strives for authenticity in a science-fiction thriller and it's why we're still discussing the Christopher Nolan film today.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jul 18, 2023

As Robert Bresson once said, “I’d rather people feel a film before understanding it.” Interstellar moved me, and I didn’t find myself fact checking the science so I could complain on Twitter.

Full Review | Jun 23, 2023

Staggeringly beautiful, bafflingly complex, this is proper event cinema.

Full Review | Apr 4, 2023

The film demands quite a bit of time from its viewers too, but its big ideas and wondrous sights are ample reward.

Full Review | Feb 27, 2023

When Mann appears to explain man, it collapses under the weight of a repeated thesis that doesn’t merit such explicit, redundant reiteration.

Full Review | Jan 24, 2023

It’s a contemplative adventure and an emotional exploration that captivated me from its opening moments.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 22, 2022

Rarely do epics of this scope and intelligence reach theaters anymore; such serious commercial filmmaking seems like a market almost exclusively maintained by Christopher Nolan.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 30, 2022

While not all-together perfect, the film represents a monumental cinematic achievement that deserves to be placed high within the caliber of Nolan’s filmography.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | May 27, 2022

The inherent message of the film brings hope, but it can definitely get waterlogged by intellectual speak and long-winded scenes.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 9, 2021

The film is indeed a sight to behold -- and one that demands to be seen on the biggest possible screen.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Aug 10, 2021

Nolan reaches for the stars with beautifully composed shots and some mind-bending special effects, but the dime store philosophy of the story never achieves lift off.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 2, 2021

Audiences are sure to lose their suspensions of disbelief over the nearly impenetrable climax.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Dec 4, 2020

...an often insanely ambitious science fiction epic that that remains mesmerizing for most of its (admittedly overlong) running time...

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 20, 2020

Scientists will debate, theologians will contemplate, philosophers will wonder, and cinema lovers will bask in the glory of another remarkable Christopher Nolan achievement.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4.0 | Sep 12, 2020

A big-budget reprise of ideas Nolan has been exploring since the beginning of his career. Not only is it a film about the passage of time, it's also a film about memory.

Full Review | Sep 3, 2020

Entertainment
Review: <i>Interstellar</i> Shows the Wonder of Worlds Beyond

Review: Interstellar Shows the Wonder of Worlds Beyond

“We’ve forgotten who we are,” says Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper. “Explorers, pioneers — not caretakers.” That could be Christopher Nolan speaking about movies in this timid age of old genres endlessly recycled and coarsened. He’s the rare filmmaker with the ambition to make great statements on a grand scale, and the vision and guts to realize them.

Nolan is also a consummate conjuror. Memento, his amnesiac movie, ran its scenes in reverse order. In The Prestige, magicians devised killer tricks for each other and the audience. Inception played its mind games inside a sleeper’s head, and the Dark Knight trilogy raised comic-book fantasy to Mensa level. But those were the merest études for Nolan’s biggest, boldest project. Interstellar contemplates nothing less than our planet’s place and fate in the vast cosmos. Trying to reconcile the infinite and the intimate, it channels matters of theoretical physics — the universe’s ever-expanding story as science fact or fiction — through a daddy-daughter love story. Double-domed and defiantly serious, Interstellar is a must-take ride with a few narrative bumps.

In the near future, a crop disease called “the blight” has pushed the Earth from the 21st century back to the agrarian 1930s: the world’s a dust bowl, and we’re all Okies. In this wayback culture, schools teach that the Apollo moon landings were frauds, as if America must erase its old achievements in order to keep people from dreaming of new ones.

Farmer Coop, once an astronaut, needs to slip this straitjacket and do something. So does his daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy); she’s getting “poltergeist” signals from her bookshelves. A strange force leads them to a nearby hideout for NASA, whose boss, Dr. Brand (Michael Caine), drafts Coop to pilot a mission to deep space. With Brand’s daughter Amelia (Anne Hathaway) and two others as his crew, Coop is to find a wormhole near Saturn that may provide an escape route for humanity. “We’re not meant to save the world,” Brand says. “We’re meant to leave it.”

Coop, a widower, wasn’t meant to leave his children. Son Tom (Timothée Chalamet) can manage; but the precocious Murph sees abandonment and betrayal in Dad’s journey to save billions of humans. Coop, who thinks a parent’s main role is to be “the ghosts of our children’s future,” shares Murph’s ache. He needs her. He goes out so he can come back.

What’s out there? New worlds of terror and beauty. Transported by the celestial Ferris wheel of their shuttle, Coop and the crew find the wormhole: a snow globe, glowing blue. One planet it spins them towards has a giant wall of water that turns their spacecraft into an imperiled surfboard. Another planet, where treachery looms, is icy and as caked with snow granules as Earth was with dust. Interstellar may never equal the blast of scientific speculation and cinematic revelation that was Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, but its un-Earthly vistas are spectral and spectacular.

Someone on the icy planet says, “Our world is cold, stark but undeniably beautiful.” Shuttling between the grad-school blackboard and the family hearth, this undeniably beautiful film blows cold and hot, stark and sentimental by turns. Taking the visual wow factor as a given, you may feel two kinds of wonder: a child’s astonishment at the effects and a bafflement that asks, “I wonder why that’s happening.”

It’s not just that the rules of advanced physics, as tossed out every 15 minutes or so, are beyond the ken of most movie-goers. It’s also that some scenes border on the risible — a wrestling match in space suits — and some characters, like Amelia, are short on charm and plausibility. In story terms, her connection with Coop is stronger than that of the two astronauts in Gravity. But Sandra Bullock and George Clooney gave their roles emotional heft, in a film more approachable and affecting than this one.

If the heart of Interstellar is Coop’s bond with Murph, its soul is McConaughey’s performance as a strong, tender hero; in the film’s simplest, most potent scene, he sheds tears of love and despair while watching remote video messages from his kids. He is the conduit to the feelings that Nolan wants viewers to bathe in: empathy for a space and time traveler who is, above all, a father.

With Interstellar, Nolan’s reach occasionally exceeds his grasp. That’s fine: These days, few other filmmakers dare reach so high to stretch our minds so wide. And our senses, all of them. At times, dispensing with Hans Zimmer’s pounding organ score, Nolan shows a panorama of the spacecraft in the heavens — to the music of utter silence. At these moments, viewers can hear their hearts beating to the sound of awe.

Go Behind the Scenes of Interstellar

Read next: Watch an Exclusive Interstellar Clip With Matthew McConaughey

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Interstellar Review

Time is a circular circle..

Interstellar is an imperfect film, but like its central characters, aims about as high as one can. The ambition, execution, and craftsmanship are all to be admired. As the filmmaker intended, this is an experience that one can only truly have in the theatre itself and it is one worth having. Though, as mentioned, Interstellar also has the potential to become a highly divisive film. Ultimately, the viewers takeaway will likely come down to their emotional response. [poilib element="accentDivider"] Roth Cornet is an Entertainment Editor for IGN. You can chat with her on Twitter: @RothCornet , or follow Roth-IGN on IGN.

More Reviews by Roth Cornet

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Entertainment
Movie Review

'Interstellar' review

By Josh Dzieza
on October 27, 2014 12:07 pm
@joshdzieza

From the opening scenes of sprawling cornfields accompanied by a revelrie-like brass note, it’s clear that Interstellar is working in the tradition of 2001: A Space Odyssey . It has the grand scope of Kubrick’s classic, promising to take us from humanity’s past to its distant future, and proceeds with the same stately pace that encourages you to ponder the themes it offers along the way. It throws out plenty to think about — the nature of time and space, the place of humanity in the universe — but somewhat unexpectedly for this type of film, and for Christopher Nolan, whose work tends toward the cerebral, it explores these ideas in human terms. Interstellar is as interested in how general relativity would affect your family life, for example, as it is in the theory itself.

Before you proceed: this review has a few spoilers, but nothing beyond what you’d glean from the preview and the first ten minutes or so of film. Turn back now if you care about that sort of thing.

Directed by Christopher Nolan ( Memento , Inception , the most recent Batman trilogy) and written with his brother and frequent collaborator Jonathan, Interstellar takes place in a near future that harkens back to the recent past — like the 1950s Midwest or maybe the Dust Bowl, but with laptops and drones. There’s very little exposition; through telling details and offhand comments, you get the sense that there’s been an environmental disaster followed by a famine, and that humanity has scaled back its ambitions to bare subsistence. People farm corn — the one crop left unravaged by blight — watch baseball games in half-empty stands, and flee towering haboob dust storms announced by air raid sirens.

Matthew McConaughey plays Cooper, a NASA pilot who has turned to farming — like everyone else at the time, an odd cut to faux-documentary footage informs us. He lives in a ramshackle house, complaining to his father (John Lithgow) about humanity’s diminished horizons and doting on his daughter Murph, played by Mackenzie Foy with a believably teenage mix of mischief and exasperation.

McConaughey eventually leaves Foy and Earth behind to scout out a new home for for the human race, but it’s their relationship that grounds the movie. As action-filled as Nolan’s films are, they can sometimes feel abstract, like symbolic sublimations of some offscreen mental trauma. So many of his characters get their motivation from some prior loss — the dead wives from Memento and Inception, the dead parents of Batman — that they then work through according to the game-like rules Nolan excels at, whether those rules are imposed by amnesia, consciousness, or a supervillain. But Foy is an actual character, not a cipher, and the relationship between her and McConaughey gives the film an emotional heft that Nolan’s other work sometimes lacks.

Interstellar features some of the most beautiful images of space I’ve seen on film. Space feels vast, with the spinning white vessel often relegated to a corner of the screen or lost against the rings of Saturn. The depiction of a wormhole accomplishes the seemingly impossible and makes, well, nothingness look dazzling, as light slides and warps around it like water off a bubble of oil. The black hole is even more amazing. Present throughout the movie, it’s in these lingering shots of a tiny spacecraft floating through the galaxy that the influence of Kubrick’s Space Odyssey is most clearly felt.

Some of the most beautiful images of space I've seen on film

Not that it’s all languorous drifting through the galaxy. Nolan has a genius for landscape-scale action sequences, and the planets, with their alien weather and gravity, give him ample opportunity to stage them. The camera races and plunges and, especially in IMAX, creates classic theme-park pit-of-your-stomach thrills. There are gigantic waves, frozen clouds, and other dangers that feel threatening despite looking totally surreal.

The biggest danger the shuttle crew faces, however, is time. Time isn't just running out — it's compressing and stretching as they travel through space. The Nolans use relativity to create some original and urgent crises as the shuttle crew figures out how to best spend their shifting time. Time is a resource, like food or water, Hathaway warns. The time differential between the crew and those they left behind also gives rise to the movie’s most melancholy scenes. In this respect it feels less like Space Odyssey and more like Homer’s Odyssey , with McConaughey getting detained and delayed as time passes and things go wrong back home.

As in 2001 , things get trippy toward the end. Without revealing too much, I can say that after a series of mostly comprehensible events, it swerves into either deeply theoretical physics or sentimental spirituality. Possibly both. The shift is jarring, but also visually interesting enough that I mostly went with it.

There’s always the question with Nolan of what it all means. His movies tempt you to demand a thesis, partly because his characters always seem to be grasping for one. They talk almost aphoristically about the human condition, ghosts, time, evil, love, and other heavy but abstract things, and they quote Dylan Thomas a few too many times. Fortunately, McConaughey brings some wry levity to the role, as does the robot TARS, a toppling metal block with adjustable honesty and humor settings, voiced by Bill Irwin. Ultimately I took the grander bits of dialogue as thematic signposts, telling you to keep your head at the level of death and humanity and time but not meaning much in themselves.

Which is fine. The movie is most powerful when it’s at its least abstract — when it’s working through the messy decisions and sacrifices that actual interstellar travel would entail, finding dramatic potential in the laws of physics. Interstellar is sometimes confusing, melodramatic, and self-serious, but Nolan managed to make a space epic on a human scale.

Interstellar opens November 5th.

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‘interstellar’: what the critics are saying.

Christopher Nolan's space-set epic stars Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Ellen Burstyn, John Lithgow, Michael Caine and Casey Affleck

By Ashley Lee

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Interstellar , out Wednesday in Imax and Friday nationwide, is the space-set epic that searches for a suitable home for humans in another dimension, yet is grounded in a story about love and family . Directed by Christopher Nolan , the super-secret drama stars Matthew McConaughey , Anne Hathaway , Jessica Chastain , Ellen Burstyn , John Lithgow , Michael Caine , Casey Affleck , Wes Bentley and Mackenzie Foy .

Read more THR Cover: Interstellar’s’ Christopher Nolan, Stars Gather to Reveal Secrets of the Year’s Most Mysterious Film

See what top critics are saying about Interstellar :

The Hollywood Reporter’s Todd McCarthy warns, “ Interstellar so bulges with ideas, ambitions, theories, melodrama, technical wizardry, wondrous imagery and core emotions that it was almost inevitable that some of it would stick while other stuff would fall to the floor. … This grandly conceived and executed epic tries to give equal weight to intimate human emotions and speculation about the cosmos, with mixed results, but is never less than engrossing, and sometimes more than that. … For all its adventurous and far-seeing aspects, Interstellar remains rather too rooted in earthly emotions and scientific reality to truly soar and venture into the unknown, the truly dangerous.” Hans Zimmer ‘s compositions add up to an “often soaring, sometimes domineering and unconventionally orchestrated wall-of-sound score.”

The theme of the parent-child bond “is overstressed in a narrow manner. Murph’s [Chastain] persistent anger at her father is essentially her only character trait and becomes tiresome; she’s a closed-off character. Her brother [Affleck] remains too thinly developed to offer a substantial contrast to her attitude.” Additionally, “what goes on among the astronauts is not especially interesting and Amelia [Hathaway], in particular, remains an annoyingly vague and unpersuasive character in contrast to McConaughey’s exuberant, if regret-laden, mission leader, a role the actor invests with vigor and palpable feeling.”

See more ‘Interstellar’ Premiere: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Christopher Nolan Hit Hollywood

The New Yorker ‘s David Denby says the film “is ardently, even fervently incomprehensible, a movie designed to separate the civilians from the geeks, with the geeks apparently the target audience. … There’s a problem, however. Delivered in rushed colloquial style, much of this fabulous arcana, central to the plot, is hard to understand, and some of it is hard to hear. The composer Zimmer produces monstrous swells of organ music that occasionally smother the words like lava. The actors seem overmatched by the production.” Visually, the film’s “basic color scheme of the space-travel segments is white and silver-gray on black, and much of it is stirringly beautiful. There’s no doubting Nolan’s craft. … But, over all, Interstellar , a spectacular, redundant puzzle, a hundred and sixty-seven minutes long, makes you feel virtuous for having sat through it rather than happy that you saw it.”

USA Today ‘s Claudia Puig gives the film three out of four stars. Among impressive special effects are “minimalist exchanges between McConaughey and Hathaway, whose chemistry as space-exploring partners is lacking. Hathaway’s character is not given much dimension. Other members of the space team are even less well-drawn, so it’s hard to care what befalls them.” Also, “what is meant as a climactic humanistic ending seems to tie things up far too neatly for a film about the complex messiness that comes with a world that has taken dramatic wrong turns.”

See more ‘Interstellar’: Inside THR’s Roundtable With Christopher Nolan and Matthew McConaughey

Time ‘s Richard Corliss calls it “a must-take ride with a few narrative bumps. … Interstellar may never equal the blast of scientific speculation and cinematic revelation that was Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey , but its un-Earthly vistas are spectral and spectacular.” In comparison to Gravity , “ Sandra Bullock and George Clooney gave their roles emotional heft, in a film more approachable and affecting than this one.” Still, “McConaughey’s performance as a strong, tender hero is notable.”

The Guardian ‘s Henry Barnes writes, “ Interstellar only really gets going once it’s up in the air. … It saves its beauty for the cosmos and its humanity for the machines. The actors — even those of the calibre of McConaughey and Hathaway — are script-delivering modules, there to output exposition and process emotional data. The best lines, those that seem truly spontaneous and responsive, go to TARS, the crew’s AI assistant.”

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Interstellar

When Earth becomes uninhabitable in the future, a farmer and ex-NASA pilot, Joseph Cooper, is tasked to pilot a spacecraft, along with a team of researchers, to find a new planet for humans. When Earth becomes uninhabitable in the future, a farmer and ex-NASA pilot, Joseph Cooper, is tasked to pilot a spacecraft, along with a team of researchers, to find a new planet for humans. When Earth becomes uninhabitable in the future, a farmer and ex-NASA pilot, Joseph Cooper, is tasked to pilot a spacecraft, along with a team of researchers, to find a new planet for humans.

Christopher Nolan
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Matthew McConaughey
Anne Hathaway
Jessica Chastain
5.7K User reviews
488 Critic reviews
74 Metascore
44 wins & 148 nominations total

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Murph (Older)

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Trivia To create the wormhole and black hole, Dr. Kip Thorne collaborated with Visual Effects Supervisor Paul J. Franklin and his team at Double Negative. Thorne provided pages of deeply sourced theoretical equations to the team, who then created new CGI software programs based on these equations to create accurate computer simulations of these phenomena. Some individual frames took up to one hundred hours to render, and ultimately the whole CGI program reached to eight hundred terabytes of data. The resulting visual effects provided Thorne with new insight into the effects of gravitational lensing and accretion disks surrounding black holes, and led to him writing two scientific papers: one for the astrophysics community, and one for the computer graphics community.
Goofs Two characters sustain a fall from an ice plateau, on a steep ice ramp, onto a shadowy ice platform. A moment later, a panoramic shot shows them fighting on a very different place.

Cooper : We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down, and worry about our place in the dirt.

Crazy credits The Warner Bros, Paramount, Syncopy and Legendary Pictures logos are brown and dusty, representing Earth's arid dry state in the film.
Alternate versions The 70mm IMAX version is two minutes shorter than the regular 70mm, Digital IMAX, 35mm, and digital projection versions. This is because the end credits are played in an abbreviated slide-show form (rather than scrolling from bottom to top), due to the size capacity of the IMAX platters, which can hold a maximum of 167 minutes of film.
Connections Featured in Trailer Failure: Interstellar (2013)
Soundtracks Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night (uncredited) Written by Dylan Thomas

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November 7, 2014 (United States)
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Nov 9, 2014
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Interstellar

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

It’s damn near three hours long. There’s that. Also, Interstellar is a space odyssey with no UFOs, no blue-skinned creatures from another planet, no alien bursting from the chest of star Matthew McConaughey . It reveals a hopeful side of filmmaker Christopher Nolan that will piss off Dark Knight doomsayers. And, hey, didn’t Alfonso Cuarón just win an Oscar for directing Gravity ? How long are audiences expected to get high on rocket fumes?

Blah, blah, blah. Bitch, bitch, bitch. What the neg-heads are missing about Interstellar is how enthralling it is, how gracefully it blends the cosmic and the intimate, how deftly it explores the infinite in the smallest human details.

Of course, Nolan has never been the cold technician of his reputation. Watch Memento again, or The Prestige , or the undervalued Insomnia . The sticking point here is that Interstellar finds Nolan wearing his heart on his sleeve. Nothing like emotion to hold a cool dude up to ridicule. But even when Nolan strains to verbalize feelings, and the script he wrote with his brother Jonathan turns clunky, it’s hard not to root for a visionary who’s reaching for the stars.

Which brings us to a plot full of deepening surprises I’m not going to spoil. The poster for Interstellar presents McConaughey surveying a wasteland. It’s meant to be Saturn, but it could just as well be Earth, where environmental recklessness has morphed the planet into a Dirt Bowl starving and choking its citizens.

Nolan spends the first third of the film in the American farm belt of the near future, introducing us to widower Cooper (McConaughey), a former test pilot, who depends on his father-in-law (John Lithgow) to help him raise 15-year-old son Tom (Timothée Chalamet) and 10-year-old daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy, superb). Like her dad, Murph is a rebel who refuses to buy into her school’s official dictum that the Apollo space program was a lie.

It’s when dad and daughter find the remnants of NASA, headed up by Cooper’s old boss Professor Brand (Michael Caine), that the story gains momentum. Cooper heads into space to find a new world to colonize, leaving behind two kids who may never forgive him.

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The physics lessons (Cal-tech’s Kip Thorne consulted) kick in when Coop captains the Endurance mother ship with a science team made up of Amelia ( Anne Hathaway ), Brand’s daughter; Romilly (David Gyasi); and Doyle (Wes Bentley). And don’t forget R2-D2 and C-3PO. Not really. The ex-military robots of Interstellar are called CASE and TARS. The great Bill Irwin voices TARS, a chatty monolith that looks like something out of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and sounds like that film’s HAL. (Note to viewers: Kubrick’s 1968 landmark and George Lucas’ Star Wars franchise are part of Nolan’s DNA. React accordingly.)

Next comes the wow factor that makes Interstellar nirvana for movie lovers. A high-tension docking maneuver. A surprise visitor. A battle on the frozen tundra. A tidal wave the size of a mountain. Cheers to Nolan and his team, led by cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema and VFX supervisor Paul J. Franklin ( Inception ). See Interstellar in IMAX, with the thrilling images oomphed by Hans Zimmer’s score, and you’ll get the meaning of “rock the house.”

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And yet it’s the final, quieter hour of Interstellar that gives the film resonance and lasting value. All the talk of black holes, wormholes and the space-time continuum take root in Coop when he realizes his two years in space have occupied 23 years on Earth. His children, the now-adult Tom (Casey Affleck) and Murphy ( Jessica Chastain ), spill out decades of joys and resentments in video messages that Coop watches in stunned silence. McConaughey nails every nuance without underlining a single one of them. He’s a virtuoso, his face a road map to the life he’s missed as his children bombard him with a Rorschach test of emotions.

In case you haven’t noticed, McConaughey is on a roll. And he partners beautifully with the sublime Chastain, who infuses Murph with amazing grit and grace. Familial love is the topic here, not the romantic or sexual kind. How does that figure into space exploration? Nolan gives Hathaway a monologue about it. But dialogue is no match for the flinty eloquence shining from the eyes of McConaughey and Chastain. They are the bruised heart of Interstellar, a film that trips up only when it tries to make love a science with rules to be applied. In 2001, Kubrick saw a future that was out of our hands. For Nolan, our reliance on one another is all we’ve got. That’s more the stuff of provocation than a Hallmark e-card. Nolan believes it’s better to think through a movie than to just sit through it. If that makes him a white knight, Godspeed.

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Interstellar Review

07 Nov 2014

166 minutes

Interstellar

Warning: this review contains mild spoilers

Christopher Nolan is a director whose name has, quite literally, become synonymous with realism. The Nolanisation of cinema, which made the gloomy streets of Gotham a bridge between the fantastical and the commonplace, now grounds countless fancies within the mud of our reality. With Interstellar, arguably his first ‘true’ science-fiction project, Nolan inverts expectation once again, with a film rooted in the mundanity of maths homework but spliced with the fantastic.

Born a year after the Apollo landing, Nolan grew up in the aftermath of the space race, when young eyes still turned upwards in wonder. Decades later, with the Space Shuttle decommissioned and children staring blearily down at the glow of their smartphones, it’s his disappointment at NASA’s broken promise that forms the driving force behind Interstellar.

Opening, tellingly, on a dusty model of the shuttle Atlantis, the film’s near-future setting sees humanity starving, squalid and devoid of hope. Eking out an existence in a post-millennial Dust Bowl, Matthew McConaughey ’s Cooper and his two children — ten year-old daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy) and her older brother Tom (Timothée Chalamet) — lead a life of agrarian survivalism (while, hearteningly, still reading a great many books). But in Cooper we find a new man cut from old cloth: an all-American hero pulled straight from Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff. Played with a drawling, Texan swagger underpinned by startling emotional depth, he is Nolan’s most traditional lead to date, embodying the wide-eyed wonder of the director’s youth; a man for whom we are “explorers and pioneers, not caretakers”, who casts his lot among the stars as the human race’s last, best hope.

With the ailing Blue Planet left behind, Interstellar shifts smoothly into second gear. The black abyss rolls out like Magellan’s Pacific; an unknowable frontier, final in a way that Roddenberry’s never was. According to über-boffin co-producer Kip Thorne, the spherical wormhole (it’s three-dimensional, obviously) and the spinning event horizon of the film’s black hole (named Gargantua) are mathematically modelled and true to life. Sitting before a 100-foot screen, though, you won’t give a toss about equations because Nolan’s starscape is the most mesmerising visual of the year. Gargantua is as captivating as it is terrible: an undulating maelstrom of darkness and light. Like the Hubble telescope on an all-night bender, this is space imagined with a dizzying immensity that would make Georges Méliès lose his shit.

The planets themselves are no less spectacular. Let The Right One In cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema (replacing Nolan regular Wally Pfister) captures the bleak expanse of southern Iceland as both a watery hell with thousand-foot waves and an icy expanse where even the clouds freeze solid. With more than an hour of footage shot in 70mm IMAX, you’ll want to park your arse in front of the biggest screen available to fully appreciate the spectacle.

In contrast to the grandeur of space, the ship itself is a scrapyard mutt. Modular and boxy, the Endurance looks like an A-Level CDT workshop, with no hint of aesthetic flourish or extraneous design. Ever the practical filmmaker, Nolan has constructed a functional, utilitarian vessel. Its robotic crew-members, TARS and CASE, are ’60s-inspired slabs of chrome; AI encased in LEGO bricks that twist and rearrange (manually operated by Bill Irwin — there’s no CG trickery here) to perform complex tasks with minimalist efficiency.

Beneath Interstellar’s flawless skin, the meat is bloodier and harder to chew. The science comes hard and fast, though Nolans Christopher and Jonah shore up the quantum mechanics with generous expository hand-holding. Astrophysics is the vehicle not the destination, however, and Interstellar’s gravitational centre is far more down to Earth. Embodied by Dylan Thomas’ Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night (quoted in the film at several points), this is a defiant paean to the human spirit that first took man to the stars. But far more than Thomas’ villanelle, Interstellar scales the heights and plumbs the depths of humanity, pitting the selfish against the selfless, higher morality against survival instinct. As Cooper, scientist Brand (Anne Hathaway) and crew draw closer to their destination, complications require tough decisions; the sanctity of the mission wars with the hope of a return trip. That the undertaking isn’t quite as advertised doesn’t come as a shock, but the cruelty of the deception lands like a body blow. Nature isn’t evil, muses Brand (played with soulful nuance by Hathaway). The only evil in space is what we bring with us.

When Interstellar began life back in 2006, Steven Spielberg, not Nolan, was the man in the cockpit; a presence still felt in the relationship between Cooper and Murph. The betrayal of a child abandoned is potent from the outset but the guilt is magnified tenfold when the Endurance’s first stop, within the influence of the black hole, means that a few hours stranded planet-side result in two decades passing back on Earth. Cooper’s tortured face as he watches his family unspool through 20 years of unanswered video missives is agony, raw and unadorned. Beneath everything else, this is a story about a father and his daughter, the ten-year-old giving way to Jessica Chastain ’s adult in the blink of a tear-filled eye.

With the endless pints of physics chased by shots of moral philosophy, Interstellar can at times feel like a three-year undergraduate course crammed into a three-hour movie. Or, to put it another way, what dinner and a movie with Professor Brian Cox might feel like. The final act compounds the issue, descending into a morass of tesseracts, five-dimensional space and gravitational telephony. It’s a dizzying leap from the grounded to the brain-bending that will baffle as many viewers as it inspires. More than the monolithic robot and his sarcastic, HAL-nodding asides (“I’ll blow you out of the airlock!”), it’s the psychedelic, transcendental climax that feels most indebted to Kubrick’s 2001; something that will undoubtedly prompt some to accuse Nolan of disappearing up his own black hole.

Inception posed questions without clear answers. Interstellar provides all the answers — you just might not understand the question. This is Nolan at his highest-functioning but also his least accessible; a film that eschews conflict for exploration, action for meditation and reflection. This isn’t the outer to Inception’s inner space (his dreams-within-dreams are airy popcorn-fodder by comparison), but it does wear its smarts just as proudly. Yet for the first time, here Nolan opens his heart as well as his mind. Never a comfortably emotional filmmaker, here he demonstrates a depth of feeling not present in his earlier work. It’s no coincidence that the film’s shooting pseudonym was Flora’s Letter, after Nolan’s own daughter. Interstellar is a missive from father to child; a wish to re-instil the wonder of the heavens in a generation for whom the only space is cyber. Anchored in the bottomless depths of paternal love, it’s a story about feeling as much as thinking. And if the emotional core is clumsily articulated at times (Brand’s “love transcends space and time” monologue being the worst offender), it’s no less powerful for it.

As a light-year-spanning quest to save the human race, this is the director’s broadest canvas by far, but also his most intimate. And against the alien backdrop of black holes, wormholes and strange new worlds, Interstellar stands as Nolan’s most human film to date.

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Den of Geek

Interstellar Review

Director Christopher Nolan’s long-awaited sci-fi epic Interstellar arrives. Read our review!

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“Haunting” is the word that keeps lingering as I reflect on Christopher Nolan’s new movie, Interstellar , over and over again in my mind. There is a somber tone to the film, an elegiac mood that is one of its most powerful assets. We feel the shroud of despair and apathy surrounding the people of Earth as it becomes clear that the planet is essentially turning against us, and we also experience the intense loneliness and isolation of the small crew of astronauts who travel an unimaginable distance on a last-chance mission to save the human race from extinction.

When Interstellar is at its best — which is frequent, but not constant — that mood has an emotional pull to it that bolsters the other plot elements which are designed to tug at your heart. It also suffuses the film’s often brilliant visuals, which effectively capture the grandeur of traveling across the universe while simultaneously detailing just how unimaginably small and alone we are against that vast and seemingly endless darkness. Nolan throws a lot of ideas — and a lot of movie — at us for Interstellar ’s nearly three-hour running time.

Matthew McConaughey stars as Cooper, a former NASA test pilot and widower who now runs a farm where he lives with his children Murph (Mackenzie Foy) and Tom (Timothee Chalamet), as well as his father-in-law Donald (John Lithgow). It’s the near future and an agricultural blight has descended upon the planet, destroying every crop but corn. There are hints that traditional institutions of society have been or are being dismantled as survival becomes the prime objective, but it’s undeniable that even that goal may elude humankind’s grasp.

The key to keeping the human race alive comes in the shape of a reconfigured remnant of NASA, to which Cooper and Murph are led to by a series of what must be described for now as inexplicable events. There they find a small team led by Professor Brand (Michael Caine) and his daughter Amelia (Anne Hathaway) who have detected the appearance of a wormhole near Saturn. Its origin is unknown, yet it was apparently meant to be found: it tunnels through time and space to a distant galaxy where planets exist that could support human life.

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Previous probes through the wormhole by solo explorers have returned ambiguous messages and data at best. Cooper is reluctantly persuaded by the Brands to pilot a new and perhaps final four-person mission, knowing that the titanic distances they travel will bend time in a way that decades may pass on Earth and Cooper may very well never see his children again. But the death of humanity is almost assured if a habitable planet — and a way to somehow transport our species there — is not found soon.

To delve much deeper into the plot (the script was co-written by Nolan and his brother and frequent collaborator Jonathan) would demand the revelation of spoilers that I’m not prepared to give away. But what happens throughout the rest of the film is a balancing act between the personal, emotional, and intimate story of Cooper and his family, and the larger canvas of what is easily the most complex “hard sci-fi” film in a long time. Cooper and his crew — Amelia plus scientists Romilly (David Gyasi) and Doyle (Wes Bentley) — venture to other worlds, grapple with the effects of relativity and even tangle with a black hole, while back home characters age, some die, and others strive to find their own answers to the same questions the crew of the Endurance are trying to solve untold light years from home.

Like many of Nolan’s films before this one — including The Dark Knight , Inception, and The Dark Knight Rises — the filmmaker’s desire to tell us as much story as he possibly can occasionally gets tripped up by both his own heavy-handedness, as well as leaps in logic or story structure that can test one’s suspension of disbelief. The Nolans’ script is big and ragged and feels bloated in some ways: there are scenes — most of them on Earth — that could be compressed or dismissed altogether with a cleverly thought-out image or perhaps a bit of exposition, although this is already an exposition-heavy movie. The director’s propensity for stacking up climaxes or set-pieces and then cross-cutting between them actually works to his detriment here (unlike, say, in Inception ), because it lessens the impact of what is happening in his main story, with Cooper and the crew (I hate to imagine a scenario where an actress like Jessica Chastain could have her role diminished considerably in a film, but that’s kind of the case here).

And yet despite those issues and a penchant for repetition when it comes to his key themes (by the fourth time we hear the main verse from Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” I found myself thinking, “Okay, we get it.”) I can’t help but be dazzled, occasionally moved by, and haunted (that word again) by Nolan’s galactic adventure. I ultimately have the same relationship with this movie that I have with most of his previous ones, especially the Batman blockbusters and Inception : their sheer ambition, production value, scope, and earnestness outweigh their flaws in the end.

Nolan to me is really a darker, more serious-minded and adult-oriented version of Steven Spielberg when he’s working in genre, only with two or three endings in his films instead of one contrived happy one that is grafted onto the story like a reverse appendectomy. He shares the same desire to go as big as possible and show the audience sights they’ve never seen before, and he believes in the story he’s telling and the theme he’s trying to get across, even if he lacks some of the skills necessary to transmit them as effectively as possible. And yet he is also still capable of a quietly devastating moment like the one in which the crew of the Endurance find out just how much of an effect the theory of relativity and the distortion of time has on one short trip to a planet’s surface (it all comes down to just two words of dialogue and nothing else).

There are some big ideas in the movie, and their visual components are handled brilliantly from start to finish. On a pure filmmaking level, Interstellar is jaw-dropping and almost demands to be seen in IMAX. The film is so immersive that you will feel like you’re flying through that wormhole or plunging into that black hole. Cinematographer Hotye van Hoytema ( Her ) and production designer Nathan Crowley ( The Dark Knight Rises ) do a splendid job in creating and filming our blighted future Earth, the mysterious expanses of space and the surfaces of the planets that the Endurance visits. Nolan’s trademark requirement that everything be grounded and functional has led to a hybrid of miniatures, fully constructed sets, and CG that is pretty much seamless.

Once again, he has also surrounded himself with a strong cast who make the most out of roles that are, to some degree, more archetypal in nature. McConaughey shines as Cooper, playing a character who seems closer to the actor himself that some of his other recent work, and centering the film with his innate decency and everyman worldview. Hathaway is striking as Amelia Brand, whose icy, guarded exterior hides a vulnerable core. The scene-stealer of the lot is actor-comedian Bill Irwin, who controls the movement of the crew’s two robot companions, TARS and CASE, and voices TARS with a delightful blend of dry humor and matter-of-fact observational wit (CASE, who is the more reserved personality, is voiced by Josh Stewart).

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Credit also to composer Hans Zimmer, who likewise goes very big in his scores — especially for Nolan — and whose trademark style on the Dark Knight films has been aped and parodied for the past few years. The score here is just as grandiose, but he employs as his main instrument the organ, which provides the perfect musical equivalent for the film’s tone and can embody both the finality of death and the infinite mysteries of the heavens at the same time. I loved his work here — I’m a huge fan of the organ — even if the music and some of the sound effects frankly drowned out large swaths of dialogue at the screening I attended (although I understand that this was most likely an issue with the theater itself — the TCL Chinese in Hollywood — than the film).

Interstellar is a huge film and strives to do what science fiction does at its best: show us some truth about the human condition through the filter of scientific discovery or theory. It doesn’t succeed as well as it could; its worst moments are clunky and disjointed, but its finest moments are extraordinary. This is top-notch filmmaking by a director who wants to make the most ambitious film he can in whatever genre he’s working in. Interstellar may not be as mind-blowing as many of us hoped, and may be too manipulative for others, but Christopher Nolan reaches for the stars with this one, and his journey is just rich enough to keep us along for the ride.

Interstellar opens on IMAX screens on Wednesday, November 5 and in theaters everywhere on Friday, Nov. 7th.

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Don Kaye | @donkaye

Don Kaye is an entertainment journalist by trade and geek by natural design. Born in New York City, currently ensconced in Los Angeles, his earliest childhood memory is…

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DVD & Streaming

Interstellar

Action/Adventure , Drama , Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Content Caution

In Theaters

November 5, 2014
Matthew McConaughey as Cooper; Anne Hathaway as Amelia; Wes Bentley as Doyle; David Gyasi as Romilly; Jessica Chastain as Murph; Matt Damon as Dr. Mann; Mackenzie Foy as Young Murph; Michael Caine as Professor Brand; Casey Affleck as Tom

Home Release Date

March 31, 2015
Christopher Nolan

Distributor

Paramount Pictures

Movie Review

Everything has its time, we’re told in Ecclesiastes. And for planet Earth, it’s time for death.

Not that you’d know it from a cursory glance. In fact, most folks hope the old girl is on the road to recovery decades after an environmental cataclysm wiped out most of the globe’s food supply. Now, severely depopulated and humbled, we’re getting back to the basics: growing food, maintaining shelter, spending time with family. A few of us might even take in a ball game on a lazy afternoon.

But a nitrogen-eating blight is again cutting down crops, one by one. Wheat, rice, okra … nothing survives the disease these days except corn, and that may not last much longer. Massive dust storms sweep across the land, choking out light and life alike. And even as people push through day by day, it seems society has lost something critical: it’s desire to explore, to search for something better.

“We used to look up in the sky and wonder at our place in the stars,” former astronaut Cooper says. “Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.”

And that place in the dirt for Coop means scraping together a living as a farmer instead of continuing his career as an astronaut. It means having to deal with his high-tech combines taking off in their directions instead of doing what he’s programmed them to do. And listening to his 10-year-old daughter, Murphy, saying there’s a ghost in her room. Then, when a dust storm blows through Murph’s open window, it seems the grime has made strange patterns on the floor … as if it—the dirt itself—was trying to tell them something.

It is, actually. And Coop discovers the dusty lines are binary code that, when translated, become coordinates on a map. When he and Murph go there, they find a massive, secret science facility—perhaps humanity’s last real hope. The scientists and engineers who work there, led by Coop’s old NASA associate Dr. Brand, have found a mysterious wormhole near Saturn that leads to a new galaxy. They’ve already sent a dozen intrepid scientists through the hole and to some promising planets beyond, but they need another ship to now shoot through, retrieve data from the 12 and return home with it.

And, Brand tells Coop, they could sure use a good pilot to fly the thing. If all goes well and the theory of relatively works as it ought, he could get back home in, oh, a few decades or so—looking no worse for wear and ready to save whatever’s left of humanity.

If not … well, Coop should give Murph an extra-long hug goodbye.

Positive Elements

Coop and the mission scientists, Amelia Brand (daughter of the good doctor), Romilly and Doyle, accept this bold mission through the wormhole in a selfless effort to save humanity. They do so without any guarantees of success or safety. They know the odds are long, but they’re determined to give it a shot.

But to undertake this worthwhile mission means Coop will leave behind his kids, whom he clearly loves more than anything. Throughout the movie we see just how much he cares for them, even from afar, and how much it hurts him to leave them. And even though Murph’s angry with her dad for leaving, the love the two share proves to be a pivotal element in the tale’s resolution. Indeed, Interstellar posits that love , not wormholes or black holes, is the mightiest force in the universe.

Spiritual Elements

One whole wall of Murph’s room is devoted to a bookshelf, and there are times when the thing seems to be a little haunted. Books tumble to the floor, seemingly on their own. A lunar lander model is knocked over. Murph tells her father that it’s a ghost. Coop says that ghosts aren’t real—but clearly something’s going on. So he asks Murph to document what she sees and treat it like a scientific problem.

[ Spoiler Warning ] Murph’s ghost does have a sorta-science-like explanation, as do all the other oddities we see here. For all its talk of love and its sometimes spiritual-feeling vibe, Interstellar appears to embrace a primarily humanist worldview. We hear references to evolution. And though scientists talk about a mysterious “they” helping us from a distant galaxy, neither god nor alien make an explicit appearance. Our saviors, the story suggests, are us.

Still, the initial flights through the wormhole to save humanity are called the Lazarus Projects, named after the man Jesus raised from the dead.

Sexual Content

Cooper is a widower. His father-in-law suggests he should woo a local teacher and do his part to repopulate the Earth. “Start pulling your weight,” he jokes.

Violent Content

Astronauts fight, one pushing another off a cliff, and the two wrestle in their space suits. One cracks the visor of the other’s helmet, hoping to murder him. Other folks expire in explosions. One is killed after being thrashed around by a giant wave of water. Humans and human-sounding robots sacrifice their lives/existences for what they see as a greater good.

We hear something of the disaster that befell Earth and know it must’ve resulted in catastrophic death. And we hear about/know about other, closer-to-home deaths as well, some of them natural, others not so much. Coop and his kids nearly drive into a lake while racing after a drone. Someone sets fire to a field of corn as a diversionary tactic. Someone else brandishes a tire iron.

Crude or Profane Language

One f-word, six s-words and a dribble of other profanities, including “a–,” “b–ch,” “d–n” and “h—.” God’s name is paired once with “d–n,” and Jesus’ name is abused twice.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Coop and his father-in-law share a beer.

Other Negative Elements

A scientist deceptively continues to tell folks for years that there’s hope for them, long after he’s given up on that dream and moved on to a colder, more heartless plan. Other characters also mislead, often for reasons they think are good. And even the computers have their “honesty” parameters set at 90% because (as one computer tells us) being completely honest with emotinal humans is often a mistake.

Whatever its faults, Interstellar does not lack ambition.

This epic story is director Christopher Nolan’s biggest movie to date, however you want to define the word “big.” (And that’s saying something, since this is the man responsible for The Dark Knight trilogy as well as Inception and Memento .) Interstellar is nearly three hours long. It’s visually massive. And it’s devoted to huge cosmological themes predicated on mind-bending physics. (Kip Thorn, one of the world’s foremost experts on the theory of relativity, was an executive producer.)

And it’s also about love conquering all.

It’s a fascinating film, even if it tries to do a little too much. And it will inspire lots of different reactions from moviegoers. Some will see the majesty of the universe and the mighty hand of God at work behind it all. Others may take it as a humanist-minded scientific screed, one that goes out of its way to say we’re on our own out here in interstellar space.

It seems pretty obvious that the movie wants its explanations to reside in the naturalistic, humanistic realm: There are no moments of divine transcendence here, not even the subtle nods we see in Gravity to the eternal soul and prayer. And yet, even for its lack of interest in theology, there’s still something deeply spiritual undergirding this work.

The adventure that Coop and his fellow scientists go on contains the barest of hints of biblical narrative: They, like Noah, are trying to save a remnant of creation. They, like Moses, are looking for a “promised land,” one seemingly pointed to via an incredibly providential wormhole. One, as a mirror of Jesus, sacrifices himself to save the world and is even figuratively resurrected long after he should be dead. In Interstellar , we see humanity’s “best” fail. And we see what we know to be God’s best for us, bound up in love and family, transcend every law of physics imaginable.

Love is a mystical but very real force in Interstellar . To see God behind it requires only one small step for moviegoers.

Interstellar has its problems, of course. Though it’s not designed to expand the PG-13 universe, the language can be sometimes a bit harsh, and flurries of violence are disquieting, especially given their unnatural-feeling contexts. And if that small step toward God I mentioned isn’t taken, the movie’s worldview becomes problematic as it sits undefined and unredeemed. So Interstellar is a film that practically demands discussion.

“Mankind was born on Earth,” Coop says, “but it was never meant to die here.” And the grandly scientific, often confusing concepts in Interstellar can’t be allowed to uncritically blink out of existence the minute we stand up during the credits either.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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Godzilla Minus One Is The First Godzilla Movie I've Ever Seen & I'm Worried It's Ruined The 70-Year-Old Franchise For Me

The lego movie’s villain story calls back to a 32-year-old change made by the real toy company, does bad boys: ride or die have a post-credits scene, interstellar is an imaginative movie, but a heavy-handed mix of personal sacrifice and theoretical physics doesn't leave much room for subtle storytelling..

In the not-too-distant future of Interstellar , Earth has been ravaged by an environmental disaster known as the Blight - forcing humanity to abandon technology and the dreams of discovery, in order to focus on basic survival. To that end, former NASA pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a widowed father of two, is now a farmer tasked with growing one of the planet's last remaining sustainable crops: corn. In a time when humankind has been asked to put aside personal desire in the interest of a greater good, Cooper has attempted to make peace with farm life, providing for his teenage children, Tom (Timothée Chalamet) and Murph (Mackenzie Foy), as well as his aging father-in-law (John Lithgow). Yet, even as conditions become increasingly dire on Earth, Cooper's thirst for scientific discovery remains.

However, when Cooper is reunited with an old colleague, Professor Brand (Michael Caine), he is offered a new chance to fulfill an old ambition. Informed that the situation on Earth is much more serious than he previously knew, Cooper is asked to leave his family behind (in an increasingly dangerous world) and set out on an uncertain journey into space - to find humankind a new planet.

Matthew McConaughey as Cooper in 'Interstellar'

Director Christopher Nolan has built a career on cerebral storytelling - starting with his feature debut, Following , in 1998. Since that time, the filmmaker has delivered one thought-provoking drama after another ( Insomnia , Memento , The Prestige , and Inception ) - while also setting a new bar for comic book adaptations with a contemplative three-film exploration of Batman (and his iconic villains). As a result, it should come as no surprise that Nolan's Interstellar offers another brainy (and visually arresting) moviegoing experience - one that will, very likely, appeal to his base (those who spent hours pouring over minute details in the director's prior works); however, it may not deliver the same casual appeal that made Inception and The Dark Knight cross-demographic hits.

Interstellar is an imaginative movie, but a heavy-handed mix of personal sacrifice and theoretical physics doesn't leave much room for subtle storytelling (or particularly memorable action). For a film that is rooted in the love between a father and his daughter, Interstellar offers surprisingly cold (and often stiff) drama - albeit drama that is buoyed by high-minded science fiction scenarios and arresting visuals. Nolan relies heavily on lengthy scenes of surface-level exposition, where characters debate or outright explain complicated physics and philosophical ideas, to educate the audience and ruminate on humanity (both good and bad) in the face of death and destruction.

It's a smart foundation to juxtapose personal desire and our place in the larger universe - as well as evolved levels of understanding we have yet to achieve - but unlike Nolan's earlier works, the filmmaker's passion is most apparent in his science (based on the theories of physicist Kip Thorne) - rather than his characters. This isn't to say that Interstellar doesn't provide worthwhile drama, but there's a stark contrast between the lofty spacetime theories and the often melodramatic characters that populate the story.

Viewers who reveled in McConaughey's philosophical musings on True Detective will find the actor treading similar territory as Cooper. McConaughey ensures his lead character is likable as well as relatable, and manages to keep exposition-heavy scenes engaging. Still, despite a 169 minute runtime, Interstellar never really develops its central heroes beyond anything but static outlines - and Cooper is no exception. Viewers will root for him, and come to understand what he cherishes and believes about humanity, but any major revelations come from what happens to him - not necessarily what he brings to the table or how he evolves through his experiences.

The same can be said with regard to the supporting cast. Everyone involved provides a quality turn in their respective roles, but they're shackled by straightforward arcs - limited exposition machines that add to the film's thematic commentary and/or advance the plot, but aren't particularly well-realized or as impactful as Nolan intends. To that end, in a cast that includes Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Casey Affleck, and Matt Damon, two of the most memorable characters are actually non-humans - quadrilateral-shaped robots, TARS and CASE, that aid the crew on their adventure (and inject much-needed humor into the proceedings).

Interstellar is also playing in IMAX theaters and the added charge is definitely recommended. Much of the film was shot with actual IMAX cameras and the filmmaker makes worthwhile use out of the increased screen space and immersive sound - especially when the crew visits alien worlds. IMAX won't be a must for all viewers, but given that the film's visuals (many of which relied on practical sets and effects) are one of Interstellar 's biggest selling points, moviegoers who are excited about Nolan's latest project shouldn't hesitate in purchasing a premium ticket.

Jessica Chastain and Casey Affleck in 'Interstellar'

Casual filmgoers who were wowed by the director's recent filmography may find that Interstellar isn't as accessible as Nolan's prior blockbuster movies - and dedicates too much time unpacking dense scientific theories. Nevertheless, while the movie might not deliver as much action and humor as a typical Hollywood space adventure, the filmmaker succeeds in once again producing a thought-provoking piece of science fiction. For fans who genuinely enjoy cerebral films that require some interpretation, Interstellar should offer a satisfying next installment in Nolan's well-respected career.

That said, for viewers who are simply looking to get lost in a thrilling adventure with memorable characters (from the director of Inception and The Dark Knight ), Interstellar may not provide enough traditional entertainment value to balance out its brainy scientific theorizing. On many levels, it's a very good film, but Interstellar could leave certain moviegoers underwhelmed - and feeling as though they are three-dimensional beings grasping for straws in a five-dimensional movie experience.

_____________________________________________________________

Interstellar runs 169 minutes and is Rated PG-13 for some intense perilous action and brief strong language. Now playing in IMAX theaters with a full release Friday, November 7th.

Confused about Interstellar 's ending? Read our Interstellar Ending & Space Travel Explained article.

Let us know what you thought of the film in the comment section below. If you’ve seen the movie and want to discuss details about the film without worrying about spoiling it for those who haven’t seen it, please head over to our Interstellar Spoilers Discussion . For an in-depth discussion of the film by the Screen Rant editors check out our Interstellar episode of the Screen Rant Underground Podcast .

Agree or disagree with the review? Follow me on Twitter @ benkendrick to let me know what you thought of Interstellar .

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Love and Physics

By David Denby

Through a wormhole Matthew McConaughey leads a mission to another galaxy in Christopher Nolans “Interstellar.”

“Interstellar,” an outer-space survivalist epic created by the director Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan, with whom he co-wrote the screenplay, is ardently, even fervently incomprehensible, a movie designed to separate the civilians from the geeks, with the geeks apparently the target audience. Nolan’s 2010 movie, “Inception,” offered layers of dreaming consciousness, each outfitted with its own style of action. The film was stunning but meaningless—a postmodern machine, with many moving parts, dedicated to its own workings and little else. In “Interstellar,” however, Nolan goes for a master narrative. Like so many recent big movies, “Interstellar” begins when the earth has had it. The amount of nitrogen in the air is increasing, the oxygen is decreasing, and, after a worldwide crop failure, dust storms coat the Midwest, drying out the corn, the only grain that is still growing. But all is not lost. God or Fortune or a Higher Intelligence (take your pick) has entered the game, and has placed near Saturn a traversable wormhole, a tunnel in space-time, providing an expressway out of the galaxy and on to the countless stars and planets beyond.

The commander of an underground nasa outpost, Professor Brand (Michael Caine), sends a favored pilot, Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), on a mission: Cooper and his crew, including Brand’s daughter, Amelia (Anne Hathaway), are to retrace the flights of three astronauts who a decade earlier were sent to planets thought to be capable of sustaining human life. Are the explorers alive? What did they find? Can the earth’s billions be moved through the wormhole? As the crew members enter the distant passage, with its altered space-time continuum, they testily debate one another, referring, in passing, to theories advanced by Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, and Kip Thorne. (Thorne, a theoretical physicist and a longtime friend of Hawking’s, served as an adviser and an executive producer on the film.) Black holes, relativity, singularity, the fifth dimension! The talk is grand. There’s a problem, however. Delivered in rushed colloquial style, much of this fabulous arcana, central to the plot, is hard to understand, and some of it is hard to hear. The composer Hans Zimmer produces monstrous swells of organ music that occasionally smother the words like lava. The actors seem overmatched by the production.

Nolan, who made the recent trilogy of night-city Batman movies, must love the dark. In “Interstellar,” he and the designer, Nathan Crowley, and the cinematographer, Hoyte van Hoytema, send Cooper’s ship, the Endurance, hurtling through the star-dotted atmosphere, or whirling past seething and shimmering clouds of intergalactic stuff. The basic color scheme of the space-travel segments is white and silver-gray on black, and much of it is stirringly beautiful. There’s no doubting Nolan’s craft. Throughout “Interstellar,” the camera remains active, pursuing a truck across a cornfield or barrelling through sections of the Endurance. All this buffeting—in particular, the crew’s rough-ride stress—is exciting from moment to moment, but, over all, “Interstellar,” a spectacular, redundant puzzle, a hundred and sixty-seven minutes long, makes you feel virtuous for having sat through it rather than happy that you saw it. The Nolans provide a pair of querulous robots, the more amusing of which is voiced by Bill Irwin, but George Lucas’s boffo jokiness and Stanley Kubrick’s impish metaphysical wit live in a galaxy far, far away. ****

Cooper has two children back on Earth and, like Leonardo DiCaprio’s Cobb, in “Inception,” he longs to return to his family. That leads to fights with Amelia, who wants to journey on to the planet where her lover, one of the astronauts on the earlier mission, was sent, in the hope of reuniting with him. McConaughey does his stylized, hyper-relaxed drawl, and Hathaway, with short Ph.D. hair, is crisp but also angry and passionate, and the two stars clash with professional skill. Cooper’s side of the argument sets up the movie’s finest scene. After paying a quick visit to a planet in another galaxy, the crew returns to the ship and discovers that on Earth more than twenty years has passed. Cooper watches video messages from his family, including his daughter, Murph, who was a young girl when he left but has grown up to be Jessica Chastain. Through her tears, she lashes out at him, as only Jessica Chastain can lash out, for leaving her. The Nolans take us into the farthest mysteries of space-time, where, they assure us, love joins gravity as a force that operates across interstellar distances. The Earth may die, but love will triumph. For all his dark scenarios, Christopher Nolan turns out to be a softie.

The belief that love, as much as gravity, holds galaxies together, may have held some interest for Stephen Hawking, but in a more attainable setting than on a planet beyond the Milky Way. “The Theory of Everything” tells the story of Hawking and his first wife, Jane Wilde Hawking. The film begins in 1963, when Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) is a graduate student in cosmology at Cambridge University. At a party, he meets Jane (Felicity Jones), who is studying “arts,” as she says, and they begin a charmingly awkward courtship in which she jollies him along as he confesses his modest desire to create “one single unified equation that explains everything in the universe.” But an earlier scene, in which he races a friend around a field, shows something odd about his gait. It is the first sign of motor-neuron disease. As the illness progresses, Hawking takes a bad fall in front of his residence hall, after which he retreats to his room, listening over and over to Wagner’s “Die Walküre,” an opera in which goddesses ride stallions through the air. He is expected to live no more than two years, but Jane, tougher than a British Army officer, marries him and keeps him going.

The couple went on to have three children. In one scene, a male friend at Cambridge carries Hawking up some stone steps and asks him, “Does your disease affect, you know, everything?” Hawking, who is still able to speak a little, says, “Different system.” The film, at its best, doesn’t mince words or scenes about Hawking’s disability. It’s also a revelatory portrait of his strength, including his surprising gaiety, the jokes and the ironies that he drew from God knows what reserves of energy. In this movie, his illness and his productivity are intimately linked.

The film is based on Jane Wilde Hawking’s 2007 memoir, “Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen,” which the screenwriter, Anthony McCarten, and the director, James Marsh, have made into a physically detailed and touching but, all in all, rather conventional against-all-odds bio-pic. Some of the scenes are predictable: The hero commits prodigious feats of casual English genius, such as solving a difficult mathematical problem on the back of a railway timetable. He is wheeled before Cambridge dons and distinguished scientists, many of whom are amazed that the shrunken man at the front of the room, barely able to speak, has a remarkable talent for theoretical speculation. (It isn’t made clear, though, how Hawking does his calculations—his work can’t be all speculation.)

Eddie Redmayne’s performance is astonishing, as eloquent, though in a different way, as Daniel Day-Lewis’s work in “My Left Foot.” Day-Lewis, playing the Irish artist Christy Brown, a man whose mobility is reduced to a single limb, deployed his left foot, a bushy black beard, and minimal, mangled speech to create a ferociously willful and sexually miserable man. Redmayne is a gentler actor; he was the noble youth in “Les Misérables” who sang, in a fine light tenor, the tear-stained but upbeat “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables.” Tall and slender, with freckles and a flattened upper lip, he wears his brown hair in a heavy mop that in this film falls across his forehead to meet enormous black-framed glasses. With his narrow shoulders, he initially looks like an abashed scarecrow. Redmayne uses his eyebrows, his mouth, a few facial muscles, and the fingers of one hand to suggest not only Hawking’s intellect and his humor but also the calculating vanity of a great man entirely conscious of his effect on the world.

Hawking doesn’t discover a unified equation, but he settles for black holes and a comprehensive and remarkably lucrative obsession with time. (“A Brief History of Time” has sold more than ten million copies worldwide.) The movie is a love story and a success story, ending with Hawking’s refusal of a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth, for reasons that aren’t explained. His relationships with women in general here are baffling. We’re puzzled by the black hole in his character that causes him, after twenty-five years of loving marriage, to leave the devoted, accomplished, and beautiful Jane for a young nurse (Maxine Peake) who treats him like a baby, and dominates him. After one brief outburst, Jane doesn’t protest but happily escapes into the arms of a strapping but gentle choirmaster (Charlie Cox). So we have to do a little speculating ourselves: Did Jane want to get out of the marriage? Or did she suppress an entirely understandable rage in order to keep the portrait of the marriage as pleasant (and salable) as possible? “The Theory of Everything” makes a pass at the complexities of love, but what’s onscreen requires a bit more investigation. ♦

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By Zach Helfand

Review: Who watches ‘The Watchers’? Those who don’t expect that much from a mystery box of a movie

Two women stand in a room looking in a mirror.

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Let us consider the dilemma of the Interesting Shot, announcing itself to the viewer as a considered expression of artistic merit, from a conscientious director thinking outside the common realm of composition and wielding perfect design that betrays nothing unwarranted.

With the Interesting Shot, who needs life? Or storytelling? Case in point: “The Watchers,” the first feature of Ishana Night Shyamalan (you’ve seen her dad’s movies), about a quartet of people trapped in the woods like caged animals by mysterious entities. Regrettably, the movie itself feels trapped by its airless gallery of carefully crafted images, familiar to the high-toned end of the horror genre: elegantly mood-thick surroundings, deliberately half-seen creatures, actors positioned as if in a still life.

Not that talent doesn’t go into the Interesting Shot. But in prioritizing her collaboration with cinematographer Eli Arenson over elements such as dialogue, acting, editing and interior logic, she drains her waking nightmare of a set-up (based on the 2021 book by author A.M. Shine) of anything that might connect us on a human level. All that’s left is the stuff that signals a cautiously planned experience. Even her opening, of a guy frantically trying — and failing — to escape menacing woods comes with some explanatory narration (“There’s a forest in Ireland not on any map”) that feels like our sense of discovery has been childproofed.

Dakota Fanning is that narrator, who we learn is Mina, first seen as a bored-looking, chain-vaping worker in a Galway pet shop, tasked by her boss with driving a golden parrot to Belfast. The journey takes her through those eerie woods, where the car suddenly conks out. Lost and carrying the bird — who briefly gets its own POV Interesting Shot — she stumbles upon a severe-looking, white-haired woman named Madeline (Olwen Fouéré), who demands Mina follow her through the open doorway of a boxy one-room structure if she wants to live.

Inside what Madeline calls the Coop — one side of which is a window that becomes a trick mirror at night — Mina finds another young woman, easygoing Ciara (Georgina Campbell). There’s also a wide-eyed teenager named Daniel (Oliver Finnegan) and many rules. The most vital is that after sundown, they must all face the mirror so an audience of deadly forest beings called Watchers can observe their nightly imprisonment. In the daytime, they can be outside, but within specified boundaries marked by freaky stick figures and signs scrawled with “Point of No Return.”

Fanning reliably imbues Mina, who bears guilt from a childhood trauma, with a risk-taking independence; she quickly bristles at the notion that escape is impossible. But her rebellious attitude puts her at odds with the humorless, imperious Madeline, a character so laughably charged with meaning beyond what we’re shown, she might as well have “Just You Wait” tattooed on her forehead. Conversely, Ciara and Daniel are about as forgettable as characters can be. The only thing the foursome has to watch on their vintage TV is — wink, wink — a DVD of a “Big Brother”-style program. The irony, however, is that the level of character storytelling on any given episode of a dumb reality show is better than “The Watchers.”

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After a couple of hairy close calls with their predatory captors and some minimal detective work, the gang eventually learns information about their situation that suggests a way out, and an answer to the why of their lab-specimen experience. But it’s way too late: By the point “The Watchers” has pivoted to its pull-the-rug endgame (clearly a family thing with the Shyamalans), the level of exposition and explanation — rules, backstory, folklore, history, video diaries, an old cassette tape — has thoroughly overwhelmed any authentic drama or peril. Between the clunky narrative and the Interesting Shots, you feel defeated by both show and tell.

'The Watchers'

Rating: PG-13, for violence, terror and some thematic elements Running time: 1 hour, 42 minutes Playing: In wide release Friday, June 7

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Scientists call the region of space influenced by the Sun the heliosphere – but without an interstellar probe, they don’t know much about its shape

The heliosphere, the area of space influenced by the Sun, is over a hundred times larger than the distance from the Sun to the Earth.
The heliosphere acts as a shield from cosmic radiation and neutral particles streaming in from the local interstellar medium, protecting Earth and spacecraft.
NASA is considering developing an interstellar probe to study the heliosphere from the outside, potentially launching on a trajectory intersecting the heliosphere’s flank toward the tail direction.

The Sun warms the Earth, making it habitable for people and animals. But that’s not all it does, and it affects a much larger area of space. The heliosphere , the area of space influenced by the Sun, is over a hundred times larger than the distance from the Sun to the Earth.

The Sun is a star that constantly emits a steady stream of plasma – highly energized ionized gas – called the solar wind. In addition to the constant solar wind , the Sun also occasionally releases eruptions of plasma called coronal mass ejections , which can contribute to the aurora , and bursts of light and energy, called flares .

The plasma coming off the Sun expands through space, along with the Sun’s magnetic field. Together they form the heliosphere within the surrounding local interstellar medium – the plasma, neutral particles and dust that fill the space between stars and their respective astrospheres. Heliophysicists like me want to understand the heliosphere and how it interacts with the interstellar medium.

The eight known planets in the solar system, the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and the Kuiper Belt – the band of celestial objects beyond Neptune that includes the planetoid Pluto – all reside within the heliosphere. The heliosphere is so large that objects in the Kuiper Belt orbit closer to the Sun than to the closest boundary of the heliosphere .

Heliosphere protection

As distant stars explode, they expel large amounts of radiation into interstellar space in the form of highly energized particles known as cosmic rays . These cosmic rays can be dangerous for living organisms and can damage electronic devices and spacecraft.

Earth’s atmosphere protects life on the planet from the effects of cosmic radiation, but, even before that, the heliosphere itself acts as a cosmic shield from most interstellar radiation.

In addition to cosmic radiation, neutral particles and dust stream steadily into the heliosphere from the local interstellar medium. These particles can affect the space around Earth and may even alter how the solar wind reaches the Earth .

Supernovae and the interstellar medium may have also influenced the origins of life and the evolution of humans on Earth. Some researchers predict that millions of years ago, the heliosphere came into contact with a cold, dense particle cloud in the interstellar medium that caused the heliosphere to shrink , exposing the Earth to the local interstellar medium.

An unknown shape

But scientists don’t really know what the heliosphere’s shape is. Models range in shape from spherical to cometlike to croissant-shaped. These predictions vary in size by hundreds to thousands of times the distance from the Sun to the Earth.

Scientists have, however, defined the direction that the Sun is moving as the “nose” direction and the opposing direction as the “tail” direction. The nose direction should have the shortest distance to the heliopause – the boundary between the heliosphere and the local interstellar medium.

No probe has ever gotten a good look at the heliosphere from the outside or properly sampled the local interstellar medium. Doing so could tell scientists more about the heliosphere’s shape and its interaction with the local interstellar medium, the space environment beyond the heliosphere.

Crossing the heliopause with Voyager

In 1977, NASA launched the Voyager mission : Its two spacecraft flew past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune in the outer solar system. Scientists have determined that after observing these gas giants, the probes separately crossed the heliopause and into interstellar space in 2012 and 2018, respectively.

While Voyager 1 and 2 are the only probes to have ever potentially crossed the heliopause, they are well beyond their intended mission lifetimes. They can no longer return the necessary data as their instruments slowly fail or power down.

These spacecraft were designed to study planets, not the interstellar medium. This means they don’t have the right instruments to take all the measurements of the interstellar medium or the heliosphere that scientists need.

That’s where a potential interstellar probe mission could come in. A probe designed to fly beyond the heliopause would help scientists understand the heliosphere by observing it from the outside.

An interstellar probe

Since the heliosphere is so large, it would take a probe decades to reach the boundary , even using a gravity assist from a massive planet like Jupiter.

The Voyager spacecraft will no longer be able to provide data from interstellar space long before an interstellar probe exits the heliosphere. And once the probe is launched, depending on the trajectory, it will take about 50 or more years to reach the interstellar medium. This means that the longer NASA waits to launch a probe, the longer scientists will be left with no missions operating in the outer heliosphere or the local interstellar medium.

NASA is considering developing an interstellar probe . This probe would take measurements of the plasma and magnetic fields in the interstellar medium and image the heliosphere from the outside. To prepare, NASA asked for input from more than 1,000 scientists on a mission concept.

The initial report recommended the probe travel on a trajectory that is about 45 degrees away from the heliosphere’s nose direction. This trajectory would retrace part of Voyager’s path, while reaching some new regions of space. This way, scientists could study new regions and revisit some partly known regions of space.

This path would give the probe only a partly angled view of the heliosphere, and it wouldn’t be able to see the heliotail, the region scientists know the least about.

In the heliotail, scientists predict that the plasma that makes up the heliosphere mixes with the plasma that makes up the interstellar medium. This happens through a process called magnetic reconnection , which allows charged particles to stream from the local interstellar medium into the heliosphere. Just like the neutral particles entering through the nose, these particles affect the space environment within the heliosphere.

In this case, however, the particles have a charge and can interact with solar and planetary magnetic fields. While these interactions occur at the boundaries of the heliosphere, very far from Earth, they affect the makeup of the heliosphere’s interior.

In a new study published in Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences, my colleagues and I evaluated six potential launch directions ranging from the nose to the tail. We found that rather than exiting close to the nose direction, a trajectory intersecting the heliosphere’s flank toward the tail direction would give the best perspective on the heliosphere’s shape.

A trajectory along this direction would present scientists with a unique opportunity to study a completely new region of space within the heliosphere. When the probe exits the heliosphere into interstellar space, it would get a view of the heliosphere from the outside at an angle that would give scientists a more detailed idea of its shape – especially in the disputed tail region.

In the end, whichever direction an interstellar probe launches, the science it returns will be invaluable and quite literally astronomical.

This article is republished from The Conversation , a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Sarah A. Spitzer , University of Michigan

Solar storms can destroy satellites with ease – a space weather expert explains the science

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Earth’s magnetic field protects life on Earth from radiation, but it can move, and the magnetic poles can even flip

Sarah A. Spitzer works as a research fellow for the University of Michigan department of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering. She receives funding from the the University of Michigan and from grants supported by organizations such as NASA. She is affiliated with the University of Michigan and the Interstellar Probe Study Team.

‘The Watchers’ Review: Ishana Night Shyamalan Directs a Glossy Woodland Horror Thriller. The Twist? The Film Is More Promising Than Good

Dakota Fanning is a lost soul trapped in a house in the woods in a thriller that's well-made (for a while), with a mythology that grows top-heavy.

By Owen Gleiberman

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THE WATCHERS, Dakota Fanning, 2024. © Warner Bros. /Courtesy Everett Collection

“ The Watchers ” is the first film directed by Ishana Night Shyamalan , the 24-year-old daughter of M. Night Shyamalan. Its title refers to a race of spindly ash-gray monsters who haunt an Irish woods, gathering at night around a concrete fortress where the film’s four characters have holed up in a state of semi-permanent refuge. The building has just one room, an entire wall of which is a two-way mirror through which the Watchers peer, all because..they like to watch.

Reviewed at Dolby 88, New York, June 5, 2024. MPA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 102 MIN.

Production: A Warner Bros. Pictures release of a New Line Cinema, Blinding Edge Pictures, Inimitable Pictures production. Producers: M. Night Shyamalan, Ashwin Rajan, Nomitt Mankad. Executive producers: Jo Homewood, Stephen Dembitzer.
Crew: Director, screenplay: Ishana Night Shyamalan. Camera: Eli Arenson. Editor: Job ter Burg. Music: Abel Korzeniowski.
With: Dakota Fanning, Georgina Campbell, Oliver Finnegan, Olwen Fouéré.

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A Groundbreaking Scientific Discovery Just Gave Humanity the Keys to Interstellar Travel

In a first, this warp drive actually obeys the laws of physics.

If a superluminal—meaning faster than the speed of light—warp drive like Alcubierre’s worked, it would revolutionize humanity’s endeavors across the universe , allowing us, perhaps, to reach Alpha Centauri, our closest star system, in days or weeks even though it’s four light years away.

However, the Alcubierre drive has a glaring problem: the force behind its operation, called “negative energy,” involves exotic particles—hypothetical matter that, as far as we know, doesn’t exist in our universe. Described only in mathematical terms, exotic particles act in unexpected ways, like having negative mass and working in opposition to gravity (in fact, it has “anti-gravity”). For the past 30 years, scientists have been publishing research that chips away at the inherent hurdles to light speed revealed in Alcubierre’s foundational 1994 article published in the peer-reviewed journal Classical and Quantum Gravity .

Now, researchers at the New York City-based think tank Applied Physics believe they’ve found a creative new approach to solving the warp drive’s fundamental roadblock. Along with colleagues from other institutions, the team envisioned a “positive energy” system that doesn’t violate the known laws of physics . It’s a game-changer, say two of the study’s authors: Gianni Martire, CEO of Applied Physics, and Jared Fuchs, Ph.D., a senior scientist there. Their work, also published in Classical and Quantum Gravity in late April, could be the first chapter in the manual for interstellar spaceflight.

POSITIVE ENERGY MAKES all the difference. Imagine you are an astronaut in space, pushing a tennis ball away from you. Instead of moving away, the ball pushes back, to the point that it would “take your hand off” if you applied enough pushing force, Martire tells Popular Mechanics . That’s a sign of negative energy, and, though the Alcubierre drive design requires it, there’s no way to harness it.

Instead, regular old positive energy is more feasible for constructing the “ warp bubble .” As its name suggests, it’s a spherical structure that surrounds and encloses space for a passenger ship using a shell of regular—but incredibly dense—matter. The bubble propels the spaceship using the powerful gravity of the shell, but without causing the passengers to feel any acceleration. “An elevator ride would be more eventful,” Martire says.

That’s because the density of the shell, as well as the pressure it exerts on the interior, is controlled carefully, Fuchs tells Popular Mechanics . Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, according to the gravity-bound principles of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity . So the bubble is designed such that observers within their local spacetime environment—inside the bubble—experience normal movement in time. Simultaneously, the bubble itself compresses the spacetime in front of the ship and expands it behind the ship, ferrying itself and the contained craft incredibly fast. The walls of the bubble generate the necessary momentum, akin to the momentum of balls rolling, Fuchs explains. “It’s the movement of the matter in the walls that actually creates the effect for passengers on the inside.”

Building on its 2021 paper published in Classical and Quantum Gravity —which details the same researchers’ earlier work on physical warp drives—the team was able to model the complexity of the system using its own computational program, Warp Factory. This toolkit for modeling warp drive spacetimes allows researchers to evaluate Einstein’s field equations and compute the energy conditions required for various warp drive geometries. Anyone can download and use it for free . These experiments led to what Fuchs calls a mini model, the first general model of a positive-energy warp drive. Their past work also demonstrated that the amount of energy a warp bubble requires depends on the shape of the bubble; for example, the flatter the bubble in the direction of travel, the less energy it needs.

THIS LATEST ADVANCEMENT suggests fresh possibilities for studying warp travel design, Erik Lentz, Ph.D., tells Popular Mechanics . In his current position as a staff physicist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, Lentz contributes to research on dark matter detection and quantum information science research. His independent research in warp drive theory also aims to be grounded in conventional physics while reimagining the shape of warped space. The topic needs to overcome many practical hurdles, he says.

Controlling warp bubbles requires a great deal of coordination because they involve enormous amounts of matter and energy to keep the passengers safe and with a similar passage of time as the destination. “We could just as well engineer spacetime where time passes much differently inside [the passenger compartment] than outside. We could miss our appointment at Proxima Centauri if we aren’t careful,” Lentz says. “That is still a risk if we are traveling less than the speed of light.” Communication between people inside the bubble and outside could also become distorted as it passes through the curvature of warped space, he adds.

While Applied Physics’ current solution requires a warp drive that travels below the speed of light, the model still needs to plug in a mass equivalent to about two Jupiters. Otherwise, it will never achieve the gravitational force and momentum high enough to cause a meaningful warp effect. But no one knows what the source of this mass could be—not yet, at least. Some research suggests that if we could somehow harness dark matter , we could use it for light-speed travel, but Fuchs and Martire are doubtful, since it’s currently a big mystery (and an exotic particle).

Despite the many problems scientists still need to solve to build a working warp drive, the Applied Physics team claims its model should eventually get closer to light speed. And even if a feasible model remains below the speed of light, it’s a vast improvement over today’s technology. For example, traveling at even half the speed of light to Alpha Centauri would take nine years. In stark contrast, our fastest spacecraft, Voyager 1—currently traveling at 38,000 miles per hour—would take 75,000 years to reach our closest neighboring star system.

Of course, as you approach the actual speed of light, things get truly weird, according to the principles of Einstein’s special relativity . The mass of an object moving faster and faster would increase infinitely, eventually requiring an infinite amount of energy to maintain its speed.

“That’s the chief limitation and key challenge we have to overcome—how can we have all this matter in our [bubble], but not at such a scale that we can never even put it together?” Martire says. It’s possible the answer lies in condensed matter physics, he adds. This branch of physics deals particularly with the forces between atoms and electrons in matter. It has already proven fundamental to several of our current technologies, such as transistors, solid-state lasers, and magnetic storage media.

The other big issue is that current models allow a stable warp bubble, but only for a constant velocity. Scientists still need to figure out how to design an initial acceleration. On the other end of the journey, how will the ship slow down and stop? “It’s like trying to grasp the automobile for the first time,” Martire says. “We don’t have an engine just yet, but we see the light at the end of the tunnel.” Warp drive technology is at the stage of 1882 car technology, he says: when automobile travel was possible, but it still looked like a hard, hard problem.

The Applied Physics team believes future innovations in warp travel are inevitable. The general positive energy model is a first step. Besides, you don’t need to zoom at light speed to achieve distances that today are just a dream, Martire says. “Humanity is officially, mathematically, on an interstellar track.”

Before joining Popular Mechanics , Manasee Wagh worked as a newspaper reporter, a science journalist, a tech writer, and a computer engineer. She’s always looking for ways to combine the three greatest joys in her life: science, travel, and food.

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‘Am I OK?’ Review: When It’s Time to Grow Up

Dakota Johnson stars in an expansive friendship comedy about coming out in your 30s and finding yourself.

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A woman in a dark jacket sits in a room with a half-smile on her face.

By Alissa Wilkinson

The appeal of the late bloomer movie is rooted in its parent genre: the coming-of-age story. Our heroine begins a little naïve and learns some hard but good lessons, maybe falls in love. Sometimes a mentor provides wisdom before leaving her to stand on her own two feet. In a traditional coming-of-age story, the protagonist is usually very young, so that world is full of possibility. Anything could happen next.

But with a late bloomer, the world’s possibilities have been shut down a little, and that shifts the tone. Decisions about career, friendships and family have already been made; the stakes of change are higher. That means a late bloomer story could be a comedy, or it could feel more melancholy, even like a tragedy. There’s an inherent realism in a film like “All of Us Strangers” or “Her” or “20th Century Women” that’s bracing and invigorating.

Depending on your age, Lucy (Dakota Johnson), who is 32, may not feel old enough to be termed a late bloomer. But she certainly feels like she is. The protagonist of “Am I OK?” has settled into a quiet, unchallenging Los Angeles life. She’s the kind of person who stares at a diner menu full of options and then orders the same meal — veggie burger, sweet potato fries, black iced coffee — every time. She spends most of her free time with Jane (Sonoya Mizuno), her childhood best friend, and keeps her life ripple-free. She’s never been in love. At the end of dinners with Ben (Whitmer Thomas), the guy she’s ostensibly dating, she shakes his hand.

By her own admission, Lucy is nervous all the time, “scared of everything.” Worse, she says, she’s not sure if she’s ever been happy, or what even makes her happy. She has built herself a comfortable box to live in, as long as nothing changes.

Her box is about to cave in. One day, Jane announces that she’s moving to London for work, and Lucy suddenly feels unmoored. A feeling that’s been growing inside her is now too strong to ignore: Lucy knows she’s attracted to women. And she’s especially attracted to Brittany (Kiersey Clemons), the peppy new masseuse at the spa where she works as a receptionist.

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‘hit man’ review: richard linklater’s new netflix movie just isn’t very good.

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Glen Powell and Adria Arjona in 'Hit Man' on Netflix.

Richard Linkletter—the director of films like Dazed and Confused, School Of Rock, Bad News Bears and numerous other pop culture touchstones—has released one of his rare duds in Netflix’s new comedy-noir, Hit Man.

The film opens with a quotation from Nietzsche: “ the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves!”

This is spoken by the film’s protagonist, Gary Johnston, during a lecture to his college philosophy class. The rest of the quotation—the part he leaves out while asking his students for its meaning—reads:

“Be robbers and conquerors as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors, you seekers of knowledge! Soon the age will be past when you could be content to live hidden in forests like shy deer! At long last the search for knowledge will reach out for its due: — it will want to rule and possess, and you with it!”

Spoilers follow.

The rest of the film is spent, haltingly and with great clumsiness, exploring this notion. That a man who has lived rather timidly, very much in the shadow of others, could shed one identity and adopt another. That this man could take his normal life, cast it aside, and rather abruptly take on the life of a criminal, suffering no consequences whatsoever for his actions. It’s an odd take on morality.

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A movie with no identity.

Linklater’s story takes several shapes. At first, I thought it was just a goofy oddball comedy in which Gary (Glen Powell) would don funny wigs and personas to catch bad guys as a fake hit man working for the police.

Gary in one of his disguises.

This was a little bit funny and entertaining, though it was clear the movie wanted to get it out of the way as quickly as possible in order to get us to the plot. So after little more than a montage of Gary’s undercover work, we meet Madison.

Madison is played by Adria Arjona who I previously only knew as Bix in the wonderful Star Wars series, Andor. I didn’t even recognize her at first in Hit Man, though I thought she looked familiar and not just because she reminded me a bit of a young Salma Hayek.

After convincing Madison not to go through with a hit on her husband—they hit it off and he could tell she wasn’t doing it for money or out of hate, but because she felt imprisoned by her husband and so Gary felt sorry for her—she texts him sometime later and soon they have a blooming romance built on lies. He continues to tell her that he’s Ron, a hit man, and that their relationship can only continue in secret. She finds him exciting and kind and agrees to these conditions. Ron allows Gary to shed his old self and become the confident, sexy man he always wished he could be.

And here I wonder, if it’s not a goofy comedy about a dude in wigs with funny accents, is it actually just a rom-com? Is it mostly an excuse to have Arjano dress up in sexy outfits? Because the second third of the movie sure feels that way.

Madison and Gary

Then things go wrong. Madison convinces Ron/Gary to go out dancing. They run into her abusive soon-to-be-ex-husband and there’s a confrontation. Then they run into Gary’s crooked cop co-worker, Jasper (Austin Amelio of The Walking Dead ) who recognizes Madison. Then Madison’s ex-husband tries to hire Gary—not realizing it’s him—to kill her. It’s a comedy of errors at this point.

Gary, oddly enough, doesn’t just trick the husband and have him arrested. Instead, he makes it clear who he is and the man runs off spooked. Gary warns Madison that she has to make scarce because her husband might try to kill her, but she refuses. And then her husband turns up dead, shot to death with a .38—the same type of gun Madison owns.

At this point I’m starting to wonder if we’re actually watching Linklater’s oddly colorful take on film noir. The husband had an insurance policy, you see. And Madison admits to Gary that she killed him. She’s scared. She needs his help.

Clearly—clearly!—Madison is a femme fatale using Gary to get what she wants. It’s a classic setup, only it’s been disguised by all this goofy comedy and romance stuff, and the lack of any other indications that we’re watching a film noir. But now it all adds up. Madison has been using Gary, who she must have suspected wasn’t who he said he was, or at least she figured she could play him for a sucker.

I am still convinced of this theory as the end approaches, and when Jasper shows up and blackmails them, offering his silence for a big chunk of that insurance money, all the pieces come crashing together. When Madison poisons Jasper, it’s clear that my theory is correct. She acts scared—whatever will she do? If only someone could help her!

Naturally, Gary obliges. He puts a bag over Jasper’s head, suffocating him, telling Madison that he’ll dispose of the body and make it look like a suicide. Nobody will care about a crooked, vile cop like Jasper turning up dead.

All that we need now is for Madison to double-cross Gary. Once he crossed that line, crossed the moral Rubicon and became a killer, his protection from the femme fatale is destroyed. I’ve seen Double Indemnity and plenty of other film noirs. I’ve seen how this works. He’s fallen from grace and she’s bested him. Surely, he’s next. Or he’ll wake up and she’ll be gone, leaving him with a guilty conscience and an empty bed, while she drives away into the sunset with a million bucks.

Happily Ever After

None of this happens. Instead, they get away with it. They get married and have kids and apparently nobody notices or cares or thinks that’s suspicious. No further investigation into Madison’s husband’s death apparently takes place. They don't even try to make it look like Jasper did it in order to take the heat off of them. They sit around the table with their kids telling cute stories about how they met. The end.

Ugh. I don’t think this needed to be a morality lesson, but there are some rules when you’re crafting a noir (or any good story) and this breaks them not in some clever or subversive way, but rather . . . I'm not really sure. Just to give the movie a garishly happy ending, I suppose. Treacly and cloying. We even get a final speech from Gary to his class about seizing their own identities. Carpe-friggin-diem. I suppose we can view it as irony or as some dark twist, but the guys they killed were terrible anyways, so why should we not celebrate? Madison double-crossing Gary would have at least been surprising.

Here’s the problem with such an atrocious ending: The rest of the movie was only average at best. At times it was plodding. Often it was implausible. It was rarely funny enough or steamy enough to work as a screwball comedy or a rom-com. Arjano is gorgeous and talented, and Powell is an attractive and charming guy, but they don’t have the star power to elevate such a thin script. Linklater has made some great films, but despite this one’s high critic and audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes, this isn’t one of them. The ending could have swayed me, could have convinced me that it was all a clever setup, tricking me until the last 20 minutes, with a great final twist of the knife. Instead, I was left rolling my eyes and wondering how on earth so many people thought this was a good movie.

And if this was some attempt to create a Nietzschean happy ending—where casting off the moral bonds of a weak society results in happiness and fulfilment—then I offer up this quotation from The Anti-Christ:

“The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in hardness against themselves and others, in experiments. Their joy is self-conquest: asceticism becomes in them nature, need, and instinct. Difficult tasks are a privilege to them; to play with burdens that crush others, a recreation. Knowledge–a form of asceticism. They are the most venerable kind of man: that does not preclude their being the most cheerful and the kindliest.”

Nothing that Gary does in the end is hard. He does not face burdens that would crush other men. He gets away with an easy murder he didn’t even plan, bags the girl with only the tiniest friction, and lives a boring life in the suburbs. What an empty ending to an empty film, with few laughs and little else to show for it.

P.S. Yes, this is based very loosely on a true story . No, none of the twists and turns and sex that serve as the film’s plot are part of that true story. Surely a better embellishment could have been dragged out of the subject matter. How bizarre.

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Close Encounters Of The Third Kind Streaming: Watch & Stream Online via Amazon Prime Video

By Silki Joshi

Close Encounters Of The Third Kind is a 1977-released sci-fi drama film helmed by Steven Spielberg. It follows an electrical engineer and a single mother who experience strange occurrences that draw them towards a mysterious encounter. Their paths converge as the government scrambles to understand unidentified aerial phenomena (UFOs).

Here’s how you can watch and stream Close Encounters Of The Third Kind via streaming services such as Amazon Prime Video.

Is Close Encounters Of The Third Kind available to watch via streaming?

Yes, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind is available to watch via streaming on Amazon Prime Video .

This Spielberg classic explores humanity’s first brush with extraterrestrial intelligence. Richard Dreyfuss portrays Roy Neary, an electrical engineer plagued by recurring visions and strange electrical anomalies. Meanwhile, Jillian Guiller experiences a terrifying close encounter with a UFO that leaves an undeniable mark on her life. As Roy and Jillian race against time to reach the designated spot, the film builds suspense, leaving viewers on the edge of their seats as humanity takes its first steps toward interstellar communication.

The cast features Richard Dreyfuss stars as Roy Neary, Melinda Dillon portrays Jillian Guiler, and François Truffaut steps in as Lacombe, a French scientist investigating UFO activity.

Watch Close Encounters Of The Third Kind streaming via Amazon Prime Video

Close Encounters Of The Third Kind is available to watch on Amazon Prime Video.

This streaming service, often included with Amazon Prime, lets you access a huge library of content. Indulge in binge-worthy TV shows and exclusive Amazon Originals like The Boys, The Summer I Turned Pretty, Fallout, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, and Fallout.

You can watch via Amazon Prime Video by following these steps:

Go to Amazon Prime Video
Select ‘Sign in’ and ‘Create your Amazon account’
$14.99 per month or $139 per year with an Amazon Prime membership
$8.99 per month for a standalone Prime Video membership

Amazon Prime is the online retailer’s paid service that provides fast shipping and exclusive sales on products, so the membership that includes both this service and Prime Video is the company’s most popular offering. However, you can also opt to subscribe to Prime Video separately.

Close Encounters Of The Third Kind’s official synopsis is as follows:

“ After an encounter with UFOs, an electricity linesman feels undeniably drawn to an isolated area in the wilderness where something spectacular is about to happen. “

NOTE: The streaming services listed above are subject to change. The information provided was correct at the time of writing.

Silki Joshi is a seasoned writer with over six years of experience, specialising in the pop culture, fintech, and entertainment. sectors. Her expertise includes creating user-friendly content tailored to the related industries. Check out her profile to read trending Entertainment Content!

Despicable Me 4 Clip Features Gru's Minions Becoming Super Soldiers

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Interstellar Review
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Off to the Stars, With Grief, Dread and Regret

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ඔලුව විකාර වෙන කාලතරණ කතාව
දරුවන් අතහැර අභ්‍යවකාශයට ගිය ගමන
I watched INTERSTELLAR for the First Time and
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Interstellar movie review & film summary (2014)
The film's widescreen panoramas feature harsh interplanetary landscapes, shot in cruel Earth locales; some of the largest and most detailed starship miniatures ever built, and space sequences presented in scientifically accurate silence, a la "2001." But for all its high-tech glitz, "Interstellar" has a defiantly old-movie feeling.
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Interstellar is a sci-fi masterpiece that explores the fate of humanity and the mysteries of the cosmos. With a stellar cast, stunning visuals, and a mind-blowing plot, this film will take you on ...
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"Interstellar," full of visual dazzle, thematic ambition, geek bait and corn (including the literal kind), is a sweeping, futuristic adventure driven by grief, dread and regret.
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Interstellar Movie Review:58 Interstellar Official trailer. Interstellar. Community Reviews. See all. Parents say (43) Kids say (183) age 12+ Based on 43 parent reviews . Melissa M. Parent. July 4, 2021 age 11+ Awesome movie. Kids will love it for different reasons as they grow up.
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Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 27, 2023. Nolan's most openly emotional film, he fully lived up to his "Stanley Kubrick's eye and Steven Spielberg's heart" identity with this ...
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Interstellar has been very consciously designed as an in-theatre event. In fact, viewers will rob themselves of a crucial piece of the film's appeal if they choose to experience it for the first ...
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Interstellar is sometimes confusing, melodramatic, and self-serious, but Nolan managed to make a space epic on a human scale. opens November 5th. It has the grand scope of Stanley Kubrick's 2001 ...
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Gordon-11 6 November 2014. This film tells the story of an ex-pilot in a world full of dust storms. He is chosen to travel to the uncharted parts of the space in search for a new habitable planet. "Interstellar" is a long film, and the first two hours of it does not seem like a typical Christopher Nolan film.
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Interstellar: Directed by Christopher Nolan. With Ellen Burstyn, Matthew McConaughey, Mackenzie Foy, John Lithgow. When Earth becomes uninhabitable in the future, a farmer and ex-NASA pilot, Joseph Cooper, is tasked to pilot a spacecraft, along with a team of researchers, to find a new planet for humans.
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Nolan spends the first third of the film in the American farm belt of the near future, introducing us to widower Cooper (McConaughey), a former test pilot, who depends on his father-in-law (John ...
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Interstellar was a mind blowing film. I went into this movie, not knowing a single thing besides 2 memes I heard about it, and at the time, I thought I was not going to enjoy this movie one bit; Of course until they went to the first planet by getting through a wormhole and the seeing a massive wave coming there way.
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Movie Review. Everything has its time, we're told in Ecclesiastes. And for planet Earth, it's time for death. ... Indeed, Interstellar posits that love, not wormholes or black holes, is the mightiest force in the universe. Spiritual Elements. One whole wall of Murph's room is devoted to a bookshelf, and there are times when the thing ...
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Interstellar is an imaginative movie, but a heavy-handed mix of personal sacrifice and theoretical physics doesn't leave much room for subtle storytelling.. In the not-too-distant future of Interstellar, Earth has been ravaged by an environmental disaster known as the Blight - forcing humanity to abandon technology and the dreams of discovery, in order to focus on basic survival.
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Interstellar is a 2014 epic science fiction drama film directed by Christopher Nolan, who co-wrote it with his brother Jonathan.It stars Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Bill Irwin, Ellen Burstyn, Michael Caine, and Matt Damon.Set in a dystopian future where Earth is suffering from catastrophic blight and famine, the film follows a group of astronauts who travel through a ...
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Close Encounters Of The Third Kind is a 1977-released sci-fi drama film helmed by Steven Spielberg. It follows an electrical engineer and a single mother who experience strange occurrences that ...

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