Interstellar

"Some kind of great film, and an unforgettable endeavor."
"A monumentally unimaginative movie."
"Succeeds magnificently on a cosmic scale."
"Morally pretentious, intellectually obscure and inordinately long... a film out of control."

Some criticism for you to chew over there, praise of both the highest and lowest order. Though it's not Interstellar they're talking about; rather Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film that polarised opinion when it hit screens in 1968. Nolan's film may not have had quite the impact 2001 had (audiences weren't quite so used to 'serious' effects-driven blockbusters at the time, let alone wide-eyed scientific musings on the nature of existence), but having taken in its IMAX-sized vision, it's easy to compare it to Kubrick's effort and indeed the confused reaction it elicited from audiences and critics alike (even the posters bear a striking resemblance here and here, oh and here and here too). There's a fine line between genius and madness; with Interstellar, its often hard to tell where that line actually is. But it's damn good fun trying to work it out.

Whilst marketed as a typical tentpole picture, director Christopher Nolan (Inception, The Dark Knight) along with his screenwriter brother Jonah have concocted something far more ambitious. Too ambitious, some might say; but when every other film on release is a franchise or a cheap comedy to bulk up the studio numbers for the year, you can't knock the Nolans (no, not those Nolans) for attempting to do something a little more daring, even by their own lofty standards. It's a film that in some ways feels out of time, a throwback to the likes of 2001 but also other films from decades past (Philip Kaufman's The Right Stuff was screened to cast and crew prior to shooting, McConaughey's Cooper practically a visual carbon copy of Sam Shepard's Chuck Yeager). Methodical pacing and character building are rare things in many a movie these days, let alone a Nolan one; his passion for exposition often coming at the expense of getting to know who you're rooting for. But from its dust-bowl opening all the way to its gravity-warping finale, it wears its influences firmly on its sleeve whilst going places not every audience member may want to travel to. For those willing to be taken along for the ride however, it delivers thrills and food for metaphysical thought in spades.

Setting up camp in what we assume to be the not-too-distant future, the world has found itself in the middle of a food crisis - a world caked in dust with the remnants of the human race living a meagre existence. Cooper, an ex-NASA pilot turned farmer ('ex' because the space missions were shelved, perceived to be a waste of public money), stumbles on some strange goings-on in his daughter Murphy's bedroom; gravitational waves that appear to be coordinates to an undisclosed location (okay, it looks daft when written down like this and it doesn't make much more sense on screen, but bare with me). Taking a punt and driving to where the supposed coordinates point to, he discovers NASA themselves - in hiding but still operational, and in need of a pilot to scout out new habitable planets beyond our galaxy (it really is starting to read badly now all this). Not one to turn down an opportunity to save the human race, Cooper signs up without barely reading the spacecraft manual; Anne Hathaway (as straight-laced astronaut Brand) must've looked him up and down and said "yep, he's man enough for the job". She'd seen him in Sahara and knew he'd come up trumps.

Now while I did say character building was a part of Interstellar, you might not know it from the opening 40 minutes. But a strained relationship with his daughter (later played by Jessica Chastain, who he leaves behind to fly off in his shiny new rocket) casts an arc across the entire film, an arc that literally comes full circle by the time we reach the film's black hole-enveloped climax. It's a film that plays with notions of time, space and the spaces in-between space; Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke toyed with such 'big ideas' in 2001 and Nolan does the same, pulling in theories about fifth dimensions and how time can speed up or slow down depending on gravity's pull (this is as true for real life astronauts as it is for Cooper and Brand, who at one point return to their mothership to find their crewmate having aged 23 years in three hours).

While much has been made of the dialogue being muffled at times, it's to Nolan's credit that he has made such an artistic decision in order to take the audience on a journey with the characters, for us to experience what they experience, to not to have everything spelled out in black and white on the biggest canvas possible. It takes tricksy science-fact and blurs it with theoretical science fiction, throwing in a huge measure of sentiment in an attempt to pull the whole thing together. Though equally, it could also be argued that in trying to create what Kubrick once termed "the proverbial 'really good' science-fiction movie" he's been given as much rope as he likes by his friends at Warner Brothers, noble intentions turning bloated and indulgent through lack of self-editing. The same happened to Tarantino by the time he made Kill Bill; J.K. Rowling's Potter books became sprawling behemoths once she had more clout than the publishers themselves. Interstellar arguably treads similar ground, its reach/grasp ratio only serving to alienate audiences and confound critics.

But this could be to miss the point. In dealing with such huge unknowns as wormholes, black holes and exactly what might happen when a tiny Matthew McConaughey gets trapped behind a giant five-dimensional bookcase, he's handing ownership of the film over to the viewer - it's for us to decide if he's failed or succeeded to entertain or inform. Like Kubrick and Clarke he's pondered the big questions, ending up not quite with an answer but with even more questions. Boiling it all down to 'love' may seem trite and almost throwaway, but in pondering the tangible nature of emotions and feelings that can stretch across time and space (steady on now) he's giving us the opportunity to consider new ways of thinking about our place in the universe. That's far more than what most films do, let alone a $165 million money-hoovering monster.

Interstellar is flawed, yes. But it's a film absolutely filled to the brim with moments of awe and wonder - not just in the visual sense (at Nolan's behest it's largely CGI-free, which beggars belief) but in the ideas it plays with, so much so that a second viewing is pretty much requisite. It demands your attention, it begs you to talk about it afterwards; throwaway entertainment this is not. It won't be to everyone's taste, but then again neither was 2001, nor The Right Stuff which bombed on initial release in 1983. Only time will tell if Interstellar can be held in the same high regard.