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Being director Christopher Nolan’s first film since The Dark Knight Rises, the hype and anticipation for Hollywood’s most sought-after filmmaker’s latest adventure has been relentless.
Famously secretive, Nolan has ensured very little information about the cast, script and plot have been released (or worse, leaked) for public consumption, and the trailers have been minimalistic at best.
On the one hand, this ensured excitement reached fever pitch, but on the other, there was the foreboding sense that the movie could never match the expectation and would disappoint.
Well, I can safely say that after an hour all my fears were allayed. I was engrossed, unable to peel my eyes away from the events unfolding before me. By the end, I was completely and utterly mesmerised.
With respect to the director’s wishes in mind, I will keep plot details to a minimum and only divulge what was shown in pre-release footage. In an age where the best jokes and scenes, if not the whole movie, seem to be spoiled in trailers, it was hugely refreshing to go into the screening blind and watch events unfold off a blank slate.
Essentially, in the very near future, Earth is no longer able to sustain humanity as a plague called The Blight has ravaged crops to the extent that only corn remains. Furthermore, the mass burning of farmland in an attempt to prevent the plague spreading has led to huge dust storms that ravage the landscape and cause widespread and fatal lung disease.
Society now needs farmers, not intellectuals, which is where Cooper (McConaughey) comes in as a former NASA test pilot and engineer now living on a remote farm purely with the goal of keeping himself and his family alive.
After being mysteriously guided to a secret NASA installation led by Professor Brand (Caine), Cooper is told that humanity’s only chance of survival is to traverse through a wormhole that has appeared near Saturn and colonise new worlds in another galaxy. Naturally, NASA needs a pilot with experience, and so Cooper and his team (including Anne Hathaway as Amelia) set off aboard Endurance to save humanity.
The only fitting place to start is with the visuals, which (pun intended) are out of this world. Earth is painted in shades of brown and yellow to emphasise its decline into an arid, uninhabitable wasteland, whilst Space is a vast expanse of darkness peppered with bright and colourful nebulas that takes your breath away and makes you feel like you are really there. This is the sort of movie that makes you pray for an IMAX theatre to open soon in Bahrain.
Similarly, composer Hans Zimmer furthers his legend with a sweeping score that makes the film even more colossal than it already is, with teeth-rattling crescendos and gentle harmonies in equal measure.
The special effects are on a par with last year’s Gravity, which, while admittedly stunning from a cinematographic sense, was little more than ‘Oscar bait’ with dreadful characters and a boring, plodding story.
Luckily there is nothing to fear of a repeat here, with the film never dragging despite its butt-numbing three-hour runtime, with long yet engrossing dialogue scenes punctuated perfectly by breathless, edge-of-your-seat action sequences.
The fact your attention never wanders is down to the ability of the cast, who are on stunning form. McConaughey continues one of the most remarkable career renaissances in recent memory with a performance conveying incredible emotion, steel and vulnerability, delivered via his iconic Texas drawl, while Nolan regulars Hathaway and Caine are convincing and engaging despite a lot of their lines being scientific guff.
There’s also a brilliant and surprising cameo from a mainstream actor that was somehow kept quiet until release ... I won’t spoil it, but keep an eye out!
Even in such a serious situation as the threat of mankind’s survival, there are many laugh-out loud moments to be found here, particularly from the two on-board AI robots CASE and TARS. Refreshingly, they do the job they were actually programmed to do and avoid the ‘destroy mission from inside’ cliché which began with HAL and has seemingly appeared in every sci-fi film since.
Never one for a straight-up adventure movie, Nolan populates the script with philosophy and themes that question the nature of the universe and mankind. Underlying this point is that no matter how many problems science can solve and how we base our theories on fact, the universe cannot equate for the one, incalculable variable innate in all of us: love.
It takes the film onto another level and leaves it as thought-provoking as it is exhilarating, although the dialogue-heavy script devotes plenty of time discussing scientific theory, quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity, which might put off younger viewers or those with short attention spans.
I promised myself I’d never watch Nolan’s Inception (one of my all-time favourites) with another person again as I was sick of explaining what on earth was happening, and I can foresee a similar situation here!
While a strong attempt was made to be as realistic as possible with regard to depictions of black holes and physics, this is still science fiction at its roaring best. With obvious influences from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of a Third Kind and even Alien, this is a movie that will deservedly join that pantheon of greats.
Nolan has managed to hit a home run yet again, with a stunning and beautiful tour-de-force which has plenty to say about the universe and the great unknown, but also manages to embrace what makes us human at the same time. Essential viewing ... just bring a comfy pillow!
* Showing in Cineco, Seef I, Al Jazira and Saar Cineplex
