10 years ago, 'Interstellar' was Christopher Nolan's turn into hard sci-fi

The film, released in 2014, sent Matthew McConaughey to space in an exploration of physics, big ideas, and fatherhood.

Interstellar is something of an oddity in the filmography of Christopher Nolan. Arriving in November of 2014, ten years ago this week, after The Dark Knight Rises and before Dunkirk, it’s a sci-fi movie, based on an original story, that’s much more about ideas, as well as black hole and wormhole paradoxes than it is about action or thrills. It’s also consumed with the question of what’s more important to a scientist- their mission, or their immediate family?

That isn’t to say that Interstellar isn’t exciting, featuring multiple direct homages to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which he would whip out again for Oppenheimer in 2023. There are some gorgeous visuals, which the original release rendered in Nolan’s cinematic format of choice, IMAX; I remember there being several different options for viewing it, including 70mm.

Interstellar was also the first of several Nolan movies in a row in which I noticed that the loud sounds, including Hans Zimmer’s score, often overwhelmed the dialogue throughout the film. However, Michael Caine’s repeated readings of the Dylan Thomas poem, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” were always perfectly audible.

Interstellar starred Matthew McConaughey, then early in his McConnaissance period, as Cooper, a retired NASA pilot, living on a barren Earth in 2067, who is drafted for a mission to find a habitable world. This separates him from his daughter (played at different ages by Mackenzie Foy, Jessica Chastain, and Ellen Burstyn), although various heady sci-fi concepts — all of them approved by the notoriously hard-to-please physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson — lead the characters to age at different paces.

The film was fairly successful financially, although not quite at the level of Nolan’s Batman pictures, or Inception. It was nominated for five Oscars, entirely in technical categories, and won for Best Visual Effects.

It’s a highly impressive film, although I never quite connected with it the way I did with some of Nolan’s other work.

To look at why, I now share with you my original review of Interstellar, published at the now-defunct website TechnologyTell, ten years ago today, on November 7, 2014:

Movie Review: “Interstellar, Or: ‘Contact 2: The Secular Humanist Years'” 

by Stephen Silver on November 7, 2014 at 12:00 pm