While cinema gets bigger every year: bigger budgets, bigger battles, bigger explosions, and a bigger box-office, the ideas and ambition of the medium steadily get smaller. The idea that cinema can be a transformative experience, the notion that movies can challenge or test the audience, the belief that movies can help us to dream, has long since dissipated in an industry dominated by mega-corporations and the reign of the filthy lucre.
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It is the era of the sequel, the prequel, the reboot, the reimagining. Zero-risk formulaic cinema that gives us multiple Spiderman reboots, each successively worse than the one before; three Hobbit films, each three hours long, based on a book 365 pages in length (fuck you, Peter Jackson); or insipid remakes of classics like Total Recall or Robocop. We have entered an era of cinema that cannibalises itself, where producers fervently believe in the short memories and limited imagination of the viewing public. 
In this way, Interstellar is an old fashioned film: it dares to dream big, and it dares to trust the audience to dream with it.
Because Christopher Nolan made some faceless Megacorp trillions of dollars with his excellent Batman trilogy, he’s one of the few directors allowed to make the films he wants to make. So, for example, he was allowed to make Inception, a labour of love he’d aspired for many years to create (which still, incidentally, made a bucket load of money).
But where Inception was ultimately a very clever movie about making movies, and the propensity in all of us to want to believe the lie (Memento and The Prestige are also about us wanting to believe the comforting lie), Interstellar fervently believes in the ability of cinema to inspire, and the need for human beings to believe in something bigger than the small patch of earth they walk upon.
The film follows Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) a widowed engineer and test pilot. Cooper is forced to become a farmer in a world that no longer needs engineers or test pilots, but food. When a scientist from NASA, Professor Brand (Michael Caine) asks Cooper to go on a mission to find another habitable planet (for climatic reasons, Earth will be unable to produce food for much more than a generation) Cooper must choose between the children he loves, or – rather grandly – the fate of all mankind. As Professor Brand rather unhelpfully reminds him, the fate of mankind kind of includes his children.
He joins the mission, of course, and with a crew of four humans (including Brand’s daughter, Amelia, played by Anne 
Hathaway) and two robots – both of which brim with character and humour, sometimes more so than the human crew – flies into a wormhole.
The movie is long – nearly three hours in length, but is never dull. It is by turns breathtaking, exciting, and heartbreaking, and there isn’t a moment that drags.
The film has some minor problems (that some reviewers have focussed disproportionally on, getting themselves bound up over minutia and missing the bigger picture entirely – and in doing so proving one of the main arguments of Interstellar precisely). For example, Cooper’s decision to join the mission seems hasty and the means of him finding out about the mission unnecessarily complicated.
So, yes, Interstellar is not without its small flaws. But these are obliterated by its vision, its heart, and powerful performances, in particular from Mathew McConaughey. There is one scene, in particular, where McConaughey’s character watches messages from his children that – due to relativity – means he has aged only a few hours while they have aged many years. The shot stays focussed on Cooper’s face as he watches his children grow up and tell him about their lives, tragedies and triumphs. McConaughey is incandescent in this scene, evoking without any dialogue whatsoever the heartbreak and loss of a father who has missed his children’s lives. It is devastating.
The science of Interstellar is fascinating and some of it – like using gravity to communicate through time – completely mind-bending. Nonetheless, as a lay person with little aptitude for the sciences, I found the movie surprisingly accessible. The influence of Kip Thorne – an eminent physicist who conceived the original idea for the film – is clear. Thorne is renowned for taking complex problems associated with theoretical physics and making them explicable to the lay person.
Kip Thorne apparently stipulated that the movie be scientifically plausible as a condition for his involvement as an adviser. This only makes the scenes of interstellar space travel, worm holes, supermassive black holes and relativity in the film even more mind-blowing (you can watch a documentary about the science of Interstellar, featuring Kip Thorne, here).
Nolan has said that he wanted the film to make people care again about spaceflight and exploration. He achieves this. He dreams and creates on a grand scale, far beyond the facile bean-counting and focus-group driven film-making that plagues the major studios.
Nolan’s aspiration and lament can be summed up by a line from Cooper: “We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars, now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.”
A line that resonates more than ever in the world today. We don’t care to fund ambitious space programs anymore, but rather live in a society that puts its best brains into designing algorithms for the derivatives market or developing Mountain Dew-flavoured Doritos. We don’t dream of civilisations fuelled by innovations in renewable energy, but instead invent conspiracies that suggest all scientists are part of a grand lie to deprive us of our right to pollute freely.
Indeed, Western countries – in particular the United States – have seen anew the march of anti-science, anti-enlightenment forces. Whether those conspiracy theories (and conspiracy theories are always the most comforting of lies) are around climate change, or wind farms, or vaccinations, science is being trounced by greed-driven dogma and political myopia.
At the start of the Interstellar we discover that textbooks in America have been changed to say that the moon landing was faked in order to lure the Soviet Union into a space race that would send them bankrupt. This is meant to encourage students to worry themselves with preserving what resources are left, rather than dreaming about the stars. We also quickly learn that NASA, after officially being disbanded, runs secretly underground. The reason being that the population would never accept tax-payer’s money being spent on exploration, rather than trying to eke out a living on a dying earth.
Interstellar is a rallying cry against this narrow-minded defeatism. While Nolan’s films often have bleak endings, here he opts for hope: the passionate belief that the human spirit can override our petty, self-destructive tendances. A cry for us to not believe the comforting lies, but to face the difficult truths.
Interstellar dares to dream.Visually, intellectually, and emotionally, it is sublime.
Watch it, share in that vision.
Score: Four and a half stars (out of five) Bechdel test: pass
