INTERSTELLAR DVD (2014)
SYNOPSIS: From director Christopher Nolan comes the story of a team of pioneers undertaking the most important mission in human history. Academy Award winner Matthew McConaughey stars as ex-pilot-turned-farmer Cooper who must leave his family and a floundering Earth behind to lead an expedition travelling beyond this galaxy to discover whether mankind has a future among the stars.
MOVIE REVIEW:
Christopher Nolan always tries to bring something extra to the table. Be it a comic book adaptation (The Dark Knight), a crime thriller (Memento) or a simple drama involving magicians (The Prestige). He never makes the viewing experience easy for the audience and Interstellar marks his most ambitious project ever.
Approximately 50 years from now, Earth is dying, crops are dying and people are dying. Academy Award winner Matthew McConaughey stars as ex-Nasa-pilot-turned-farmer Cooper who is being lured back to his craft by a certain Professor John Brand (Michael Caine) to lead a mission into deep space in search of an alternative galaxy for survival. Together with Brand’s daughter Amelia (Anne Hathaway), Romilly (David Gyasi) and Doyle (Wes Bentley), Cooper unwillingly left his young son and daughter behind to embark on the dangerous mission to save mankind.
Running nearly at a bulging three hours, Interstellar is one movie that combines the intelligence of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Contact which indirectly means it’s going to test your patience and digestive power. Thinking that Interstellar is going to be liked Gravity, the award-winning survival space adventure is foolhardy because watching the former is already survival itself.
Don’t get me wrong though; it’s obvious the story by Christopher and Jonathan Nolan under the influence of theoretical physicist Dr. Kip Thorne Interstellar is not going to dumb things down purely for box-office sake. You got to admire the wonderfully researched scientific details and not be put off by often mind-blogging jargons, brainy exposition and slightly convoluted plotting. Don’t be shocked when the laws of space and time can caused a great time dilation and there’s in fact a greater use of Morse code. Time travel has taken on a new format. Almost every moment is provocatively created not just in the form of storytelling but the visuals as well. The Nolans have achieved their biggest spectacle by the clever combination of CG and miniatures.
If you thought Nolan actually has no sense of humour, you are wrong. In fact, he introduced not one but two robots, TARS (voiced by Bill Irwin) and CASE (voiced by Josh Stewart)as sidekicks in addition to the crew. The performances of the cast on the whole are flawless with McConaughey returning to familiar ground after his leading role in Contact. Nolan’s regular collaborators such as production designer Nathan Crowley and composer Hans Zimmer returned to lend him a hand in churning out the extraordinary looking sets and unnecessarily loud cues.
It’s recommended to go into Interstellar with an open mind. At the heart of this epic space adventure, it’s a movie about family love and sacrifices. You might not necessarily enjoy the experience but you might gain a new knowledge of wormholes. The late Carl Sagan and Arthur C. Clarke will be so proud.
SPECIAL FEATURES:
NIL
AUDIO/VISUAL:
Images look consistently strong and the color palette changes flawlessly according to the narrative. Dialogue are clear and the immersive sound effects are often aggressive and atmospherics except the score by Zimmer tends to be overly loud and distracting.
MOVIE RATING:
DVD RATING :
Review by Linus Tee
