Interstellar (2014)
In ›Interstellar‹, director Christopher Nolan combines a journey through space and time with family intimacy - and fails at this balancing act. In ›Interstellar‹, there is a creaking in the 'woodwork' of the spaceship as it travels through cosmic phenomena such as a wormhole or a black hole. The noises inside contrast harshly with the silence when the camera's view shows the ship small and lost from the outside, in silent and cold space. This contrast also pervades the plot of ›Interstellar‹.
At the end of the 21st century, Earth's resources are scarce. Many people have died, the remnants of humanity struggle on their farms from the barren, arid soil the last surviving plants. Such is the fate of widower and ex-astronaut X - and now farmer - Cooper (Matthew McConaughey). He tries to help the rest of his family, Grandfather Donald (John Lithgow), his son Tom (Timothée Chalamet) and his daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy) survive on the dying planet.His astronaut dreams are over. At his children's school, technology is demonized and the moon landing is denied. (Nice sideswipe by Nolan at the crowd-dumbing creationists).But when Cooper and his daughter Murph decode a mysterious message, they stumble upon the last remnants of American pioneering spirit in the form of a ›submerged‹ (!) NASA, which is in hiding under the direction of scientist Prof. Brand (Michael Caine) has set in the head of mankind on an exoplanet in a distant galaxy to enable a continuation of life. Fittingly, a well-placed wormhole in the orbit of the planet Saturn moves the interstellar transport route into the realm of possibility. The story is also aided by the fact that Cooper is also a hell of an astronaut. Thus the - at first glance - harebrained story takes its course. At second glance, however, the brotherly screenwriting team Christopher and Jonathan Nolan simply alienate the instance of Deus Ex Machina by drawing on their own oeuvre (Memento and Inception come to mind). Thus, the story ultimately remains plausible. But there is a lot of grating in the plot.
Superstars like Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway are used and discarded like the sympathetic robot TARS (Bill Irwin).As an evangelist of the series ›Person Of Interest‹ which is also penned by Jonathan Nolan, I would like to assume that all the deep, emotional and good moments come from Jonathan Nolan. Everything cold, precise and pseudo-philosophical is guaranteed to come from the cool brother Christopher, who in my opinion gets too caught up in the ›Wim Wenders image trap‹, which gives more importance to the image than the plot of a film. Nolan's images are powerful and impressive, but the small, subtle moments are what then make ›Interstellar‹ just about bearable despite redundant scenes and a far too long game length.
