Interstellar (2014)

There's a scene near the end of Interstellar where Matthew McConaughey is just screaming. Screaming his daughter's name. And I was sat there, as a father, absolutely broken by it. That's the moment this film stops being a space epic and becomes something deeply, uncomfortably personal. I'm not going to pretend I kept it together.

I love this film. I love it the way you love something that genuinely teaches you things while it's also wringing you out emotionally. I came out of Interstellar having actually learned about gravitational time dilation, about how proximity to an enormous gravitational mass bends time itself, not as a vague concept but as something I felt I could picture and explain. I came out understanding tesseracts better than I ever had from any textbook. That's a rare thing for a blockbuster to pull off, and Christopher Nolan pulls it off here. As someone who has always been fascinated by the science of the cosmos, this film is absolutely right up my street.

McConaughey carries the whole thing on his back, and I mean that with complete admiration. There was a period where people underestimated him, wrote him off as a rom-com fixture, and then he just quietly became one of the most compelling screen presences working. Here he's extraordinary. The weight of a father leaving his children, possibly forever, knowing time will devour the gap between them, is written all over his face in every single scene. It's not showy acting. It's lived-in, worn-out, desperate. I believed every second of it.

The Hans Zimmer score deserves its own paragraph. It's enormous and strange and it gets right under your skin. The fact that it's all over social media now, used to soundtrack emotional moments of every shape, is not a coincidence. It's become shorthand for a certain kind of awe, a reaching-for-something-just-beyond-your-grasp feeling. That's exactly what it does in the film itself. It doesn't tell you how to feel so much as it opens a door and pushes you through it.

I've seen Nolan do extraordinary things before. I loved Inception (2010) for the way it built its own internal logic and made you trust it, and The Prestige (2006) for its cold, precise sleight of hand. But Interstellar feels warmer than either of those. It has a genuine heart beating inside all that theory and spectacle. The science gives it bones, but the father-daughter story gives it blood.

Is it perfect? Not quite. There are stretches in the middle act where the pacing loosens its grip, and I know some people find the ending a step too far into the abstract. I get that, I do. But for me it earns it. The film has done the work. By the time we're inside that tesseract, I'm so invested in the relationship at the centre of it that the strangeness feels like a payoff rather than an indulgence.

This is our generation's 2001: A Space Odyssey. I genuinely believe that. I think in thirty years people will talk about Interstellar the way cinephiles talk about Kubrick's film now, as the one that captured a particular cultural moment of scientific anxiety and wonder, the one that dared to be serious about the cosmos and about love at the same time. The one that made you feel small and significant all at once.

Four and a half stars. One of the best things Nolan has ever put his name to, and a film I'll keep coming back to for the rest of my life.

Rating: ★★★★½  | Year: 2014  | Watched: 2015-06-11

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Christopher Nolan: Insomnia (2002) · The Prestige (2006) · Inception (2010) · Memento (2000)
More with Matthew McConaughey: Killer Joe (2011) · Dazed and Confused (1993)
More from United Kingdom: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Shinjuku Boys (1995) · The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) · Blue (1993)
More from the 2010s: Wonder (2017) · Beautiful Boy (2018) · The Witch (2015) · What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
More adventure: Alice in Wonderland (1951) · The Eagle (1925) · Louisiana Story (1948) · The General (1926)
More drama: Viy (1967) · Wonder (2017) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Beautiful Boy (2018)