Throwback - Interstellar
Matthew McConaughey as Joseph Cooper in Interstellar
I know, this one’s embarrassing.
Interstellar has been, consistently, at the top of my watchlist. This is a huge, huge blind spot for me. However, I’m happy to say that I’ve finally seen this behemoth (no less, in IMAX), and I’m equally pleased to report that I should’ve gotten around to it way sooner. This is a transcendent, if a tad choppy, visual banquet with Nolan at his most optically extravagant.
Nolan’s character dialogue has been the weakest aspect of his work as a filmmaker (remember Tenet? Yeesh), but even I can’t deny how moving Interstellar can be at times. As we seem to creep closer to our extinction by the minute, the supersonic will to carry humanity forward is something that binds us emotionally. Corny? Perhaps, but Nolan has created something so genuinely touching and inspiring, that you’d have to be icy inside to say something else.
I’m simply thrilled to have seen this for the first time in IMAX. At times I felt like I was aboard a rollercoaster ride through dimensions, swirling through colossal vortexes of spinning interdimensional beauty. It’s a captivating, glorious spectacle. The standout moment is the initial descent into the wormhole, where the sense of scale dragged my stomach through the ringer and plunged me into a void of darkness. Horrifying, yet breathtakingly awesome.
Interstellar borrows a lot of inspiration from 2001: A Space Odyssey without coming off as a pale imitation. Nolan, admirably, doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel and keeps in tune with the same gravity defying set-pieces cut from the same cloth as Inception. The film, as a whole, is undeniably a riff on 2001, it’s just not (to its benefit) directly inspired by it as one might think.
Overall, I’m more than satisfied. This is a great, grandiose space epic of enormous proportions (both in runtime and look), and I absolutely did the right thing in waiting for a time where I could see it on the biggest screen possible. Streaming it on a television the fraction of the size of the BFI IMAX would’ve made poor Christopher weep. As they say, patience is a virtue.
