“INTERSTELLAR” (2014): AN EPIC SCIENCE FICTION FILM

It is a 2014 film directed, co-written and co-produced by Christopher Nolan. It stars Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain (the three have posts in my blog), Bill Irwin, Ellen Burstyn, Matt Damon, and Michael Caine (the two have posts in my blog). Set in a dystopian future where humanity is struggling to survive, the film follows a group of astronauts who travel through a wormhole near Saturn in search of a new home for humanity.

Brothers Christopher and Jonathan Nolan wrote the screenplay, which had its origins in a script Jonathan developed in 2007. Christopher produced Interstellar with his wife, Emma Thomas, through their production company Syncopy, and with Lynda Obst through Lynda Obst Productions. Caltech theoretical physicist Kip Thorne was an executive producer, acted as scientific consultant, and wrote a tie-in book, The Science of Interstellar. Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros., and Legendary Pictures co-financed the film. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema shot it on 35 mm in anamorphic format and IMAX 70 mm. Principal photography began in late 2013 and took place in Alberta (Canada), Iceland and Los Angeles. Interstellar uses extensive practical and miniature effects and the company Double Negative created additional digital effects.

Interstellar premiered on October 26, 2014, in Los Angeles, California. In the United States, it was first released on film stock, expanding to venues using digital projectors. The film had a worldwide gross of over $677 million, making it the tenth-highest-grossing film of 2014. Interstellar received positive reviews for its screenplay, direction, themes, visual effects, musical score, acting, and ambition. At the 87th Academy Awards, the film won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, and was nominated for Best Original Score, Best Sound Mixing, Best Sound Editing and Best Production Design.

Plot

In 2067, crop blights and dust storms threaten humanity's survival. Corn is the last viable crop. The world has also regressed into a post-truth society where younger generations are taught ideas such as the Apollo moon missions were faked. Widowed engineer and former NASA pilot Joseph Cooper is now a farmer. Living with him are his father-in-law, Donald; his 15-year-old son, Tom; and 10-year-old daughter, Murphy. After a dust storm, strange dust patterns inexplicably appear on Murphy's bedroom floor; she attributes the anomaly to a ghost. Cooper eventually deduces the patterns were caused by gravity variations and that they are a binary code for geographic coordinates. Cooper follows the coordinates to a secret NASA facility headed by Professor John Brand, Cooper's former supervisor. Professor Brand says gravitational anomalies have happened elsewhere. 48 years earlier, unknown beings positioned a wormhole near Saturn, opening a path to a distant galaxy with twelve potentially habitable worlds located near a black hole named Gargantua. Twelve volunteers traveled through the wormhole to individually survey the planets. Astronauts Miller, Edmunds, and Mann reported positive results. Based on their data, Professor Brand conceived two plans to ensure humanity's survival. Plan A involves developing a gravitational propulsion theory to propel a mass exodus, while Plan B involves launching the Endurance spacecraft carrying 5,000 frozen human embryos to colonize a habitable planet.

Cooper is recruited to pilot the Endurance. The crew includes scientists Dr. Amelia Brand (Professor Brand's daughter), Dr. Romilly, Dr. Doyle, and robots TARS and CASE. Before leaving, Cooper gives a distraught Murphy his wristwatch to compare their relative time for when he returns. After traversing the wormhole, Romilly studies the black hole while Cooper, Doyle, and Brand descend in a landing craft to investigate Miller's planet, an ocean world. After finding wreckage from Miller's ship, a gigantic tidal wave kills Doyle and delays the lander's departure. Due to the proximity of the black hole, time is severely dilated: as a result, 23 years have elapsed for Romilly on Endurance by the time Cooper and Brand return.

Edmunds' planet has slightly better telemetry, while Mann broadcasts positive data. Cooper rules to use their remaining fuel to reach Mann's planet. On Mann's planet, the Endurance crew revive him from cryostasis. Meanwhile, Murphy, now a scientist, transmits a message announcing Professor Brand has died. She has learned that Plan A, requiring unattainable data from within a black hole, was never viable. Plan B was always Professor Brand's only option. Murphy accuses Amelia and Cooper of knowing those left on Earth were doomed. Mann's frozen planet is uninhabitable; he had sent falsified data in order to be rescued. Mann attempts to murder Cooper, then escapes in a lander and heads for Endurance. Romilly is killed by Mann's booby trap and Amelia and Cooper race to the Endurance in another lander. Mann dies during a failed manual docking operation, severely damaging Endurance. After a difficult docking maneuver, Cooper regains control of the damaged but functional Endurance.

With insufficient fuel to reach Edmunds' planet, they use a slingshot maneuver so close to Gargantua that time dilation adds another 51 years. In the process, Cooper and TARS jettison themselves to shed weight and ensure Endurance reaches Edmunds' planet. Slipping through the event horizon of Gargantua, they eject from their respective craft and find themselves inside a massive tesseract, possibly constructed by future humans. Across different time periods, Cooper can see through the bookcases of Murphy's old room on Earth and weakly interact with its gravity. Cooper realizes he was Murphy's "ghost" and manipulates the second hand of the wristwatch he gave her, using Morse code to transmit the quantum data that TARS collected from inside the event horizon. Cooper and TARS are ejected from the tesseract. Cooper is picked up and awakens on a space habitat orbiting Saturn, where he reunites with an elderly Murphy. Using the quantum data sent by Cooper, the younger Murphy had solved the gravitational propulsion theory for Plan A, enabling humanity's exodus and survival. Nearing death and with her own family, Murphy urges Cooper to return to Amelia. Cooper and TARS take a spacecraft to rejoin Amelia and CASE on Edmunds' habitable planet.

RECEPTION

Box office

Interstellar grossed $188 million in the US and Canada, and $487.1 million in other countries, for a worldwide total of $677.5 million against a production budget of $165 million. After calculating all expenses, Deadline Hollywood estimated the film made a profit of $47.2 million. It sold an estimated 22 million tickets domestically.

The film set an IMAX opening record worldwide with $20.5 million from 574 IMAX theaters, surpassing the $17.1 million record held by The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013), and is also the best opening for an IMAX 2D, non-sequel, and November IMAX release. It had a worldwide opening of $132.6 million, which was the tenth-largest opening of 2014, and it became the tenth-highest-grossing film of 2014. Interstellar is the fourth film to gross over $100 million worldwide from IMAX ticket sales. Interstellar was released in the UK, Ireland and Malta on November 6, 2014, and debuted at number one earning £5.37 million ($8.6 million) in its opening weekend, which was lower than the openings of The Dark Knight Rises (£14.36 million), Gravity (£6.24 million) (both of them have posts in my blog)

and Inception (£5.91 million). The film was released in 35 markets on the same day, including major markets like Germany, Russia, Australia, and Brazil earning $8.7 million in total. Through Sunday, it earned an opening weekend total of $82.9 million from 11.1 million admissions from over 14,800 screens in 62 markets. It earned $7.3 million from 206 IMAX screens, at an average of 35,400 viewers per theater. It went to number one in South Korea ($14.4 million), Russia ($8.9 million), and France ($5.3 million). Other strong openings occurred in Germany ($4.6 million), India ($4.3 million), Italy ($3.7 million), Australia ($3.7 million), Spain ($2.7 million), Mexico ($3.1 million), and Brazil ($1.9 million). Interstellar was released in China on November 12 and earned $5.4 million on its opening day on Wednesday, which is Nolan's biggest opening in China after surpassing the $4.61 million opening record of The Dark Knight Rises. It went on to earn $41.7 million in its opening weekend, accounting for 55% of the market share. It is Nolan's biggest opening in China, Warner Bros' biggest 2D opening, and the studio's third-biggest opening of all time, behind 2014's The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies ($49.5 million) and 2013's Pacific Rim ($45.2 million).

It topped the box office outside North America for two consecutive weekends before being overtaken by The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 (2014) in its third weekend. Just 31 days after its release, the film became the 13th-most successful film and 3rd most successful foreign film in South Korea with 9.1 million admissions trailing only Avatar (13.3 million admissions), and 2013's Frozen (10.3 million admissions) (both of them have posts in my blog). The film closed down its theatrical run in China on December 12, with total revenue of $122.6 million. In total earnings, its largest markets outside North America and China were South Korea ($73.4 million), the UK, Ireland and Malta ($31.3 million), and Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) ($19 million). Interstellar and Big Hero 6 (it has a post in my blog) opened the same weekend (November 7–9, 2014) in the US and Canada. Both were forecast to earn between $55 million and $60 million. In North America, the film is the seventh-highest-grossing film to not hit No. 1, with a top rank of No. 2 on its opening weekend. Interstellar had an early limited release in the US and Canada in selected theaters on November 4 at 8:00 pm, coinciding with the 2014 US midterm elections. It topped the box office the following day, earning $1.35 million from 249 theaters (42 of which were IMAX screens); IMAX accounted for 62% of its total gross. Two hundred and forty of those theaters played in 35mm, 70mm, and IMAX 70mm film formats. It earned $3.6 million from late-night shows for a previews total of $4.9 million. The film was widely released on November 7 and topped the box office on its opening day, earning $17 million ahead of Big Hero 6 ($15.8 million). On its opening weekend, the film earned $47.5 million from 3,561 theaters, debuting in second place after a neck-and-neck competition with Disney's Big Hero 6 ($56.2 million). IMAX comprised $13.2 million (28%) of its opening weekend gross, while other premium large-format screens comprised $5.3 million (10.5%) of the gross. In its second weekend, the film fell to No. 3 behind old rival Big Hero 6 and newcomer Dumb and Dumber To (2014), and dropped 39% earning $29.1 million for a two-weekend total of $97.8 million. It earned $7.4 million from IMAX theaters from 368 screens in its second weekend. In its third week, the film earned $15.1 million and remained at No. 3, below newcomer The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 and Big Hero 6.

Critical response

On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a 72% approval rating based on 349 reviews, with an average rating of 7.06/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "Interstellar represents more of the thrilling, thought-provoking, and visually resplendent filmmaking moviegoers have come to expect from writer-director Christopher Nolan, even if its intellectual reach somewhat exceeds its grasp." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 74 out of 100 based on 46 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.

Scott Foundas, chief film critic at Variety, said that Interstellar is "as visually and conceptually audacious as anything Nolan has yet done" and considered the film "more personal" than Nolan's previous films. Claudia Puig of USA Today praised the visual spectacle and powerful themes, while criticizing the "dull" dialogue and "tedious patches inside the space vessel." David Stratton of At the Movies rated the film four-and-a-half stars out of five, commending its ambition, effects, and 70mm IMAX presentation, though criticizing the sound for "being so loud" as to make some of the dialogue "inaudible." Conversely, co-host Margaret Pomeranz rated the film three out of five, as she felt the human drama got lost among the film's scientific concepts. Henry Barnes of The Guardian scored the film three out of five stars, calling it "a glorious spectacle, but a slight drama, with few characters and too-rare flashes of humour." James Berardinelli called Interstellar "an amazing achievement" and "simultaneously a big-budget science fiction endeavor and a very simple tale of love and sacrifice. It is by turns edgy, breathtaking, hopeful, and heartbreaking." He named it the best film of 2014, and the second best movie of the decade, deeming it a "real science fiction rather than the crowd-pleasing, watered-down version Hollywood typically offers".

It's been a while since somebody has come out with such a big vision to things ... Even the elements, the fact that dust is everywhere, and they're living in this dust bowl that is just completely enveloping this area of the world. That's almost something you expect from Tarkovsky or Malick, not a science fiction adventure movie.

—Quentin Tarantino on Interstellar.

Oliver Gettell of the Los Angeles Times reported that "film critics largely agree that Interstellar is an entertaining, emotional, and thought-provoking sci-fi saga, even if it can also be clunky and sentimental at times." James Dyer of Empire awarded the film a full five stars, describing it as "brainy, barmy, and beautiful to behold ... a mind-bending opera of space and time with a soul wrapped up in all the science." Dave Calhoun of Time Out London also granted the film a maximum score of five stars, stating that it is "a bold, beautiful cosmic adventure story with a touch of the surreal and the dreamlike." New York Post critic Lou Lumenick deemed Interstellar "a soulful, must-see masterpiece, one of the most exhilarating film experiences so far this century." Richard Roeper of Chicago Sun-Times awarded the film a full four stars and wrote, "This is one of the most beautiful films I have ever seen—in terms of its visuals, and its overriding message about the powerful forces of the one thing we all know but can't measure in scientific terms. Love."

Describing Nolan as a "merchant of awe," Tim Robey of The Telegraph thought that Interstellar was "agonisingly" close to a masterpiece, highlighting the conceptual boldness and "deep-digging intelligence" of the film. Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter wrote, "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." In his review for the Associated Press, Jake Coyle praised the film for its "big-screen grandeur," while finding some of the dialogue "clunky." He described it further as "an absurd endeavor" and "one of the most sublime movies of the decade." Scott Mendelson of Forbes listed Interstellar as one of the most disappointing films of 2014, stating that the film "has a lack of flow, loss of momentum following the climax, clumsy sound mixing," and "thin characters" despite seeing the film twice in order to "give it a second chance." He wrote that Interstellar "ends up as a stripped-down and somewhat muted variation on any number of 'go into space to save the world' movies." Matt Zoller Seitz of RogerEbert.com gave the film three-and-a-half out of four stars, saying that despite his usual quibbles regarding Nolan's excessive dialogue and its lack of a sense of composition, "[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 ... At times, the movie's one-stop-shopping storytelling evokes the tough-tender spirit of a John Ford picture, ... a movie that would rather try to be eight or nine things than just one."

The New York Times columnist David Brooks concludes that Interstellar explores the relationships among "science and faith and science and the humanities" and "illustrates the real symbiosis between these realms." Wai Chee Dimock, in the Los Angeles Review of Books, wrote that Nolan's films are "rotatable at 90, 180, and 360 degrees," and that "although there is considerable magical thinking here, making it almost an anti-sci-fi film, holding out hope that the end of the planet is not the end of everything, it reverses itself, however, when that magic falls short, when the poetic license is naked and plain for all to see." Author George R. R. Martin called Interstellar "the most ambitious and challenging science fiction film since Kubrick's 2001." In 2020, Empire magazine ranked it as one of the best films of the 21st century.

Accolades

Interstellar won the Best Visual Effects award at the 87th Academy Awards, with nominations for Best Original Score, Best Production Design, Best Sound Editing, and Best Sound Mixing.