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Christopher Nolan’s  "Interstellar ," about astronauts traveling to the other end of the galaxy to find a new home to replace humanity’s despoiled home-world, is frantically busy and earsplittingly loud. It uses booming music to jack up the excitement level of scenes that might not otherwise excite. It features characters shoveling exposition at each other for almost three hours, and a few of those characters have no character to speak of: they’re mouthpieces for techno-babble and philosophical debate. And for all of the director’s activism on behalf of shooting on film, the tactile beauty of the movie’s 35mm and 65mm textures isn’t matched by a sense of composition. The camera rarely tells the story in Nolan’s movies. More often it illustrates the screenplay, and there are points in this one where I felt as if I was watching the most expensive NBC pilot ever made.

And yet "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. I’ve packed the first paragraph of this review with those objections (they could apply to any Nolan picture post "Batman Begins"; he is who he is) so that people know that he’s still doing the things that Nolan always does. Whether you find those things endearing or irritating will depend on your affinity for Nolan's style. 

In any case, t here’s something pure and powerful about this movie. I can’t recall a science fiction film hard-sold to a director’s fans as multiplex-“awesome” in which so many major characters wept openly in close-up, voices breaking, tears streaming down  their  cheeks. Matthew McConaughey ’s widowed astronaut Cooper and his colleague Amelia Brand ( Anne Hathaway ) pour on the waterworks in multiple scenes, with justification: like everyone on the crew of the Endurance , the starship sent to a black hole near Jupiter that will slingshot the heroes towards colonize-able worlds, they’re separated from everything that defines them: their loved ones, their personal histories, their culture, the planet itself. Other characters—including Amelia's father, an astrophysicist played by Michael Caine , and a space explorer (played by an  un-billed  guest actor) who’s holed up on a forbidding arctic world—express a vulnerability to loneliness and doubt that’s quite raw for this director. The film’s central family (headed by Cooper, grounded after the  dismantling  of NASA) lives on a  corn  farm, for goodness’ sake, like the gentle Iowans in " Field of Dreams " (a film whose daddy-issues-laden story syncs up nicely with the narrative of  " Interstellar"). Granted, they're growing the crop to feed the human race, which is whiling away its twilight hours on a planet so ecologically devastated that at first you mistake it for the American Dust Bowl circa 1930 or so; but there's still something amusingly cheeky about the notion of corn as sustenance, especially in a survival story in which the future of humanity is at stake. ( Ellen Burstyn plays one of many witnesses in a documentary first glimpsed in the movie's opening scene—and which, in classic Nolan style, is a setup for at least two twists.)

The state-of-the-art sci-fi landscapes are deployed in service of Hallmark card homilies about how people should live, and what’s really important. ("We love people who have died—what's the social utility in that?" "Accident is the first step in evolution.") After a certain point it sinks in, or should sink in, that Nolan and his co-screenwriter, brother Jonathan Nolan , aren’t trying to one-up the spectacular rationalism of “2001." The movie's science fiction trappings are just a wrapping for a spiritual/emotional dream about basic human desires (for home, for family, for continuity of bloodline and culture), as well as for a horror film of sorts—one that treats the star voyagers’ and their earthbound loved ones’ separation as spectacular metaphors for what happens when the people we value are taken from us by death, illness, or unbridgeable distance. (“Pray you never learn just how good it can be to see another face,” another astronaut says, after years alone in an interstellar wilderness.) 

While "Interstellar" never entirely commits to the idea of a non-rational, uncanny world, it nevertheless has a mystical strain, one that's unusually pronounced for a director whose storytelling has the right-brained sensibility of an engineer, logician, or accountant. There's a ghost in this film, writing out messages to the living in dust. Characters strain to interpret distant radio messages as if they were ancient texts written in a dead language, and stare through red-rimmed eyes at video messages sent years ago, by people on the other side of the cosmos. "Interstellar" features a family haunted by the memory of a dead mother and then an absent father; a woman haunted by the memory of a missing father, and another woman who's separated from her own dad (and mentor), and driven to reunite with a lover separated from her by so many millions of miles that he might as well be dead. 

With the possible exception of the last act of " Memento"  and the pit sequence in "The Dark Knight Rises"—a knife-twisting hour that was all about suffering and transcendence—I can’t think of a Nolan film that ladles on  misery and  valorizes  gut feeling (faith)  the way this one does; not from start to finish, anyway.  T he  most stirring sequences are less about driving the plot forward than contemplating what the characters' actions mean to them, and to us. The  best of these is the lift-off sequence, which starts with a countdown heard over images of Cooper leaving his family. It continues in space, with Caine reading passages from Dylan Thomas's villanelle "Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night": "Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light." (If it wasn't already obvious, this sequence certifies Nolan as the most death-and-control obsessed major American filmmaker, along with Wes Anderson .)

The film's widescreen panoramas feature harsh interplanetary landscapes, shot in cruel Earth locales; some of the largest and most detailed starship miniatures ever built, and space sequences presented in scientifically accurate silence, a la "2001." But for all its high-tech glitz, "Interstellar" has a defiantly old-movie feeling. It's not afraid to switch, even lurch, between modes. At times, the movie's one-stop-shopping storytelling evokes the tough-tender spirit of a John Ford picture, or a Steven Spielberg film made in the spirit of a Ford picture: a movie that would rather try to be eight or nine things than just one. Bruising outer-space action sequences, with astronauts tumbling in zero gravity and striding across forbidding landscapes, give way to snappy comic patter (mostly between Cooper and the ship's robot, TARS, designed in Minecraft-style, pixel-ish boxes, and voiced by Bill Irwin ). There are long explanatory sequences, done with and without dry erase boards, dazzling vistas that are less spaces than mind-spaces, and tearful separations and reconciliations that might as well be played silent, in tinted black-and-white, and scored with a saloon piano. (Spielberg originated "Interstellar" in 2006, but dropped out to direct other projects.)

McConaughey, a super-intense actor who wholeheartedly commits to every line and moment he's given, is the right leading man for this kind of film. Cooper proudly identifies himself as an engineer as well as an astronaut and farmer, but he has the soul of a goofball poet; when he stares at intergalactic vistas, he grins like a kid at an amusement park waiting to ride a new roller coaster. Cooper's farewell to his daughter Murph—who's played by McKenzie Foy as a young girl—is shot very close-in, and lit in warm, cradling tones; it has some of the tenderness of the porch swing scene in " To Kill a Mockingbird ." When Murph grows up into Jessica Chastain —a key member of Caine's NASA crew, and a surrogate for the daughter that the elder Brand "lost' to the Endurance 's mission—we keep thinking about that goodbye scene, and how its anguish drives everything that Murph and Cooper are trying to do, while also realizing that similar feelings drive the other characters—indeed, the rest of the species. (One suspects this is a deeply personal film for Nolan: it's about a man who feels he has been "called" to a particular job, and whose work requires him to spend long periods away from his family.)

The movie's storytelling masterstroke comes from adherence to principles of relativity: the astronauts perceive time differently depending on where Endurance is, which means that when they go down onto a prospective habitable world, a few minutes there equal weeks or months back on the ship. Meanwhile, on Earth, everyone is aging and losing hope. Under such circumstances, even tedious housekeeping-type exchanges become momentous: one has to think twice before arguing about what to do next, because while the argument is happening, people elsewhere are going grey, or suffering depression from being alone, or withering and dying. Here, more so than in any other Nolan film (and that's saying a lot), time is everything. "I'm an old physicist," Brand tells Cooper early in the film. "I'm afraid of time." Time is something we all fear. There's a ticking clock governing every aspect of existence, from the global to the familial. Every act by every character is an act of defiance, born of a wish to not go gently.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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Film Credits

Interstellar (2014)

Rated PG-13 for some intense perilous action and brief strong language

169 minutes

Matthew McConaughey as Cooper

Wes Bentley as Doyle

Anne Hathaway as Brand

Jessica Chastain as Murph

Michael Caine as Dr. Brand

John Lithgow as Donald

Topher Grace

Casey Affleck as Tom

Mackenzie Foy as Young Murph

Ellen Burstyn as Old Murph

Bill Irwin as TARS (voice)

Collette Wolfe as Ms. Kelly

David Oyelowo as Principal

William Devane as Old Tom

• Christopher Nolan
• Jonathan Nolan

Director of Photography

• Hoyte van Hoytema

Original Music Composer

• Hans Zimmer

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Film Review: ‘Interstellar’

Christopher Nolan hopscotches across space and time in a visionary sci-fi trip that stirs the head and the heart in equal measure.

By Scott Foundas

Scott Foundas

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We begin somewhere in the American farm belt, which Nolan evokes for its full mythic grandeur — blazing sunlight, towering corn stalks, whirring combines. But it soon becomes clear that this would-be field of dreams is something closer to a nightmare. The date is an unspecified point in the near future, close enough to look and feel like tomorrow, yet far enough for a number of radical changes to have taken hold in society. A decade on from a period of widespread famine, the world’s armies have been disbanded and the cutting-edge technocracies of the early 21st century have regressed into more utilitarian, farm-based economies.

“We’re a caretaker generation,” notes one such homesteader (John Lithgow) to his widower son-in-law, Cooper ( Matthew McConaughey ), a former NASA test pilot who hasn’t stopped dreaming of flight, for himself and for his children: 15-year-old son Tom (Timothee Chalamet) and 10-year-old daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy), the latter a precocious tot first seen getting suspended from school for daring to suggest that the Apollo space missions actually happened. “We used to look up in the sky and wonder about our place in the stars,” Cooper muses. “Now we just look down and wonder about our place in the dirt.”

But all hope is not lost. NASA (whose massive real-life budget cuts lend the movie added immediacy) still exists in this agrarian dystopia, but it’s gone off the grid, far from the microscope of public opinion. There, the brilliant physicist Professor Brand (Michael Caine, forever the face of avuncular wisdom in Nolan’s films) and his dedicated team have devised two scenarios for saving mankind. Both plans involve abandoning Earth and starting over on a new, life-sustaining planet, but only one includes taking Earth’s current 6-billion-plus population along for the ride. Doing the latter, it seems, depends on Brand’s ability to solve an epic math problem that would explain how such a large-capacity vessel could surmount Earth’s gravitational forces. (Never discussed in this egalitarian society: a scenario in which only the privileged few could escape, a la the decadent bourgeoisie of Neill Blomkamp’s “Elysium.”)

Many years earlier, Brand informs, a mysterious space-time rift (or wormhole) appeared in the vicinity of Saturn, seemingly placed there, like the monoliths of “2001,” by some higher intelligence. On the other side: another galaxy containing a dozen planets that might be fit for human habitation. In the wake of the food wars, a team of intrepid NASA scientists traveled there in search of solutions. Now, a decade later (in Earth years, that is), Brand has organized another mission to check up on the three planets that seem the most promising for human settlement. And to pilot the ship, he needs Cooper, an instinctive flight jockey in the Chuck Yeager mode, much as McConaughey’s laconic, effortlessly self-assured performance recalls Sam Shepard’s as Yeager in “The Right Stuff” (another obvious “Interstellar” touchstone).

Already by this point — and we have not yet left the Earth’s surface — “Interstellar” (which Nolan co-wrote with his brother and frequent collaborator, Jonathan) has hurled a fair amount of theoretical physics at the audience, including discussions of black holes, gravitational singularities and the possibility of extra-dimensional space. And, as with the twisty chronologies and unreliable narrators of his earlier films, Nolan trusts in the audience’s ability to get the gist and follow along, even if it doesn’t glean every last nuance on a first viewing. It’s hard to think of a mainstream Hollywood film that has so successfully translated complex mathematical and scientific ideas to a lay audience (though Shane Carruth’s ingenious 2004 Sundance winner “Primer” — another movie concerned with overcoming the problem of gravity — tried something similar on a micro-budget indie scale), or done so in more vivid, immediate human terms. (Some credit for this is doubtless owed to the veteran CalTech physicist Kip Thorne, who consulted with the Nolans on the script and receives an executive producer credit.)

It gives nothing away, however, to say that Nolan maps his infinite celestial landscape as majestically as he did the continent-hopping earthbound ones of “The Prestige” and “Batman Begins,” or the multi-tiered memory maze of “Inception.” The imagery, modeled by Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema on Imax documentaries like “Space Station” and “Hubble 3D,” suggests a boundless inky blackness punctuated by ravishing bursts of light, the tiny spaceship Endurance gleaming like a diamond against Saturn’s great, gaseous rings, then ricocheting like a pinball through the wormhole’s shimmering plasmic vortex.

With each stop the Endurance makes, Nolan envisions yet another new world: one planet a watery expanse with waves that make Waimea Bay look like a giant bathtub; another an ice climber’s playground of frozen tundra and sheer-faced descents. Moreover, outer space allows Nolan to bend and twist his favorite subject — time — into remarkable new permutations. Where most prior Nolan protagonists were forever grasping at an irretrievable past, the crew of the Endurance races against a ticking clock that happens to tick differently depending on your particular vantage. New worlds mean new gravitational forces, so that for every hour spent on a given planet’s surface, years or even entire decades may be passing back on Earth. (Time as a flat circle, indeed.)

This leads to an extraordinary mid-film emotional climax in which Cooper and Brand return from one such expedition to discover that 23 earth years have passed in the blink of an eye, represented by two decades’ worth of stockpiled video messages from loved ones, including the now-adult Tom (a bearded, brooding Casey Affleck) and Murphy (Jessica Chastain in dogged, persistent “Zero Dark Thirty” mode). It’s a scene Nolan stages mostly in closeup on McConaughey, and the actor plays it beautifully, his face a quicksilver mask of joy, regret and unbearable grief.

That moment signals a shift in “Interstellar” itself from the relatively euphoric, adventurous tone of the first half toward darker, more ambiguous terrain — the human shadow areas, if you will, that are as difficult to fully glimpse as the inside of a black hole. Nolan, who has always excelled at the slow reveal, catches even the attentive viewer off guard more than once here, but never in a way that feels cheap or compromises the complex motivations of the characters.

Nolan stages one thrilling setpiece after another, including several hairsbreadth escapes and a dazzling space-docking sequence in which the entire theater seems to become one large centrifuge; the nearly three-hour running time passes unnoticed. Even more thrilling is the movie’s ultimate vision of a universe in which the face of extraterrestrial life bears a surprisingly familiar countenance. “Do not go gentle into that good night/Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” harks the good Professor Brand at the start of the Endurance’s journey, quoting the melancholic Welshman Dylan Thomas. And yet “Interstellar” is finally a film suffused with light and boundless possibilities — those of the universe itself, of the wonder in a child’s twinkling eyes, and of movies to translate all that into spectacular picture shows like this one.

It’s hardly surprising that “Interstellar” reps the very best big-budget Hollywood craftsmanship at every level, from veteran Nolan collaborators like production designer Nathan Crowley (who built the film’s lyrical vision of the big-sky American heartland on location in Alberta) and sound designer/editor Richard King, who makes wonderfully dissonant contrasts between the movie’s interior spaces and the airless silence of space itself. Vfx supervisor Paul Franklin (an Oscar winner for his work on “Inception”) again brings a vivid tactility to all of the film’s effects, especially the robotic TARS, who seamlessly inhabits the same physical spaces as the human actors. Hans Zimmer contributes one of his most richly imagined and inventive scores, which ranges from a gentle electronic keyboard melody to brassy, Strauss-ian crescendos. Shot and post-produced by Nolan entirely on celluloid (in a mix of 35mm and 70mm stocks), “Interstellar” begs to be seen on the large-format Imax screen, where its dense, inimitably filmic textures and multiple aspect ratios can be experienced to their fullest effect.

Reviewed at TCL Chinese Theatre, Hollywood, Oct. 23, 2014. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 165 MIN.

• Production: A Paramount (in North America)/Warner Bros. (international) release and presentation in association with Legendary Pictures of a Syncopy/Lynda Obst Prods. production. Produced by Emma Thomas, Christopher Nolan, Obst. Executive producers, Jordan Goldberg, Jake Myers, Kip Thorne, Thomas Tull.
• Crew: Directed by Christopher Nolan. Screenplay, Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan. Camera (Fotokem color and prints, partial widescreen, 35mm/70mm Imax), Hoyte Van Hoytema; editor, Lee Smith; music Hans Zimmer; production designer, Nathan Crowley; supervising art director, Dean Wolcott; art directors, Joshua Lusby, Eric David Sundahl; set decorator, Gary Fettis; set designers, Noelle King, Sally Thornton, Andrew Birdzell, Mark Hitchler, Martha Johnston, Paul Sonski, Robert Woodruff; costume designer, Mary Zophres; sound (Datasat/Dolby Digital), Mark Weingarten; sound designer/supervising sound editor, Richard King; re-recording mixers, Gary A. Rizzo, Gregg Landaker; visual effects supervisor, Paul Franklin; visual effects producer, Kevin Elam; visual effects, Double Negative, New Deal Studios; special effects supervisor, Scott Fisher; stunt coordinator, George Cottle; assistant director, Nilo Otero; casting, John Papsidera.
• With: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Ellen Burstyn, John Lithgow, Michael Caine, Casey Affleck, Wes Bentley, Bill Irwin, Mackenzie Foy, Topher Grace, David Gyasi, Timothee Chalamet, David Oyelowo, William Devane, Matt Damon.

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Movie Review

Off to the Stars, With Grief, Dread and Regret

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Anatomy of a Scene | ‘Interstellar’

Christopher nolan discusses a sequence from his film..

By A.O. Scott

• Nov. 4, 2014

Like the great space epics of the past, Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” distills terrestrial anxieties and aspirations into a potent pop parable, a mirror of the mood down here on Earth. Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” blended the technological awe of the Apollo era with the trippy hopes and terrors of the Age of Aquarius. George Lucas’s first “Star Wars” trilogy, set not in the speculative future but in the imaginary past, answered the malaise of the ’70s with swashbuckling nostalgia. “Interstellar,” full of visual dazzle, thematic ambition, geek bait and corn (including the literal kind), is a sweeping, futuristic adventure driven by grief, dread and regret.

Trying to jot down notes by the light of the Imax screen, where lustrous images (shot by Hoyte van Hoytema and projected from real 70-millimeter film) flickered, I lost count of how many times the phrase “I’m sorry” was uttered — by parents to children, children to parents, sisters to brothers, scientists to astronauts and astronauts to one another. The whole movie can be seen as a plea for forgiveness on behalf of our foolish, dreamy species. We messed everything up, and we feel really bad about it. Can you please give us another chance?

The possibility that such a “you” might be out there, in a position to grant clemency, is one of the movie’s tantalizing puzzles. Some kind of message seems to be coming across the emptiness of space and along the kinks in the fabric of time, offering a twinkle of hope amid humanity’s rapidly darkening prospects. For most of “Interstellar,” the working hypothesis is that a benevolent alien race, dwelling somewhere on the far side of a wormhole near one of the moons of Saturn, is sending data across the universe, encrypted advice that just may save us if we can decode it fast enough.

Movie Review: ‘Interstellar’

The times critic a. o. scott reviews “interstellar.”.

What our planet and species need saving from is a slow-motion environmental catastrophe. Rather than explain how this bleak future arrived through the usual montages of mayhem, Mr. Nolan (who wrote the screenplay with his brother Jonathan) drops us quietly into what looks like a fairly ordinary reality. We are in a rural stretch of North America, a land of battered pickup trucks, dusty bluejeans and wind-burned farmers scanning the horizon for signs of a storm. Talking-head testimony from old-timers chronicles what sounds like the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, until we spot a laptop on the table being set for family dinner.

The head of the family in question is Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a widower who lives with his two children and his father-in-law (John Lithgow). Once a NASA pilot, Cooper now grows corn, the only thing that will grow after a blight has wiped out most of the planet’s other crops. The human population has shrunk to a desperate remnant, but the survivors cling to the habits and rituals of normal life. For now, there is plenty of candy and soda and beer (thanks to all that corn); there are parent-teacher conferences after school; and Cooper’s farmhouse is full of books and toys. But the blight is spreading, the dust storms are growing worse, and the sense of an ending is palpable.

The Nolans cleverly conflate scientific denialism with technophobia, imagining a fatalistic society that has traded large ambition for small-scale problem solving and ultimate resignation. But Christopher Nolan , even in his earlier, more modestly budgeted films, has never been content with the small scale. His imagination is large; his eye seeks out wide, sweeping vistas; and if he believes in anything, it is ambition. As it celebrates the resistance to extinction — taking as its touchstone Dylan Thomas’s famous villanelle “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” with its repeated invocation of “rage against the dying of the light” — “Interstellar” becomes an allegory of its own aspirations, an argument for grandeur, scale and risk, on screen and off.

Dick Cavett , a son of Nebraska, used to ask (quoting Abe Burrows), “How you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm, after they’ve seen the farm?” Cooper and “Interstellar” are clearly marked for something other than agrarian pursuits, but the first section of the movie is the richest and most haunting, establishing a delicately emotional tone and clear moral and dramatic stakes for the planet-hopping to follow. Cooper is devoted to his children, in particular his daughter, Murph, played as a young girl by the preternaturally alert and skeptical Mackenzie Foy and as an adult by Jessica Chastain. When her father is recruited for a secret NASA mission to search for a habitable new planet, Murph is devastated by his departure. Her subsequent scientific career is both a tribute to his memory and a way of getting even.

The Nolans are fond of doubled characters and mirrored plots, and so “Interstellar” is built around twinned father-daughter stories. Among Cooper’s colleagues on board the spaceship is Dr. Brand (Anne Hathaway), whose father, also called Dr. Brand (Michael Caine), has developed the theories behind their quest. He and Murph remain on the ground, crunching the numbers and growing older in the usual earthly way, while Cooper and the younger Brand, thanks to relativity, stay pretty much the same age. (Cooper’s son, Tom, played by Timothée Chalamet as a boy, matures into Casey Affleck). The two pairs of daughters and dads perform variations on the theme of paternal and filial love, finding delicate and moving passages of loyalty, rebellion, disillusionment and acceptance.

A lot of other stuff happens, too, as it tends to out in space. A cynical critic might suppose that the last two hours of “Interstellar” were composed in a fit of spoiler hysteria. Nondisclosure pleas from the studio have been unusually specific. Forget about telling you what happens: I’m not even supposed to tell you who’s in the thing, aside from the people you’ve seen on magazine covers. I guess I can disclose that Cooper and Brand are accompanied by two other astronauts, played by a witty, scene-stealing David Gyasi and a deadpan Wes Bentley, and also by a wry robot who speaks in the voice of Bill Irwin.

The touches of humor those characters supply are welcome, if also somewhat stingily rationed. Nobody goes to a Christopher Nolan movie for laughs. But it is hard to imagine that his fans — who represent a fairly large segment of the world’s population — will be disappointed by “Interstellar.” I haven’t always been one of them, but I’ve always thought that his skill and ingenuity were undeniable. He does not so much transcend genre conventions as fulfill them with the zeal of a true believer. It may be enough to say that “Interstellar” is a terrifically entertaining science-fiction movie, giving fresh life to scenes and situations we’ve seen a hundred times before, and occasionally stumbling over pompous dialogue or overly portentous music. (In general, the score, by Hans Zimmer, is exactly as portentous as it needs to be.)

Of course, the film is more than that. It is in the nature of science fiction to aspire to more, to ascend fearlessly toward the sublime. You could think of “Interstellar,” which has a lot to say about gravity, as the anti-"Gravity.” That movie, which would fit inside this one twice, stripped away the usual sci-fi metaphysics, presenting space travel as an occasion for quiet wonder and noisy crisis management. Mr. Nolan takes the universe and eternity itself as his subject and his canvas, brilliantly exploiting cinema’s ability to shift backward and sideways in time (through flashbacks and cross cuts), even as it moves relentlessly forward.

But “Gravity” and “Interstellar” are both ultimately about the longing for home, about voyages into the unknown that become odysseys of return. And “Interstellar” may take its place in the pantheon of space movies because it answers an acute earthly need, a desire not only for adventure and novelty but also, in the end, for comfort.

“Interstellar” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). A few expletives, a lot of peril.

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• Review: <i>Interstellar</i> Shows the Wonder of Worlds Beyond

Review: Interstellar Shows the Wonder of Worlds Beyond

“We’ve forgotten who we are,” says Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper. “Explorers, pioneers — not caretakers.” That could be Christopher Nolan speaking about movies in this timid age of old genres endlessly recycled and coarsened. He’s the rare filmmaker with the ambition to make great statements on a grand scale, and the vision and guts to realize them.

Nolan is also a consummate conjuror. Memento, his amnesiac movie, ran its scenes in reverse order. In The Prestige, magicians devised killer tricks for each other and the audience. Inception played its mind games inside a sleeper’s head, and the Dark Knight trilogy raised comic-book fantasy to Mensa level. But those were the merest études for Nolan’s biggest, boldest project. Interstellar contemplates nothing less than our planet’s place and fate in the vast cosmos. Trying to reconcile the infinite and the intimate, it channels matters of theoretical physics — the universe’s ever-expanding story as science fact or fiction — through a daddy-daughter love story. Double-domed and defiantly serious, Interstellar is a must-take ride with a few narrative bumps.

In the near future, a crop disease called “the blight” has pushed the Earth from the 21st century back to the agrarian 1930s: the world’s a dust bowl, and we’re all Okies. In this wayback culture, schools teach that the Apollo moon landings were frauds, as if America must erase its old achievements in order to keep people from dreaming of new ones.

Farmer Coop, once an astronaut, needs to slip this straitjacket and do something. So does his daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy); she’s getting “poltergeist” signals from her bookshelves. A strange force leads them to a nearby hideout for NASA, whose boss, Dr. Brand (Michael Caine), drafts Coop to pilot a mission to deep space. With Brand’s daughter Amelia (Anne Hathaway) and two others as his crew, Coop is to find a wormhole near Saturn that may provide an escape route for humanity. “We’re not meant to save the world,” Brand says. “We’re meant to leave it.”

Coop, a widower, wasn’t meant to leave his children. Son Tom (Timothée Chalamet) can manage; but the precocious Murph sees abandonment and betrayal in Dad’s journey to save billions of humans. Coop, who thinks a parent’s main role is to be “the ghosts of our children’s future,” shares Murph’s ache. He needs her. He goes out so he can come back.

What’s out there? New worlds of terror and beauty. Transported by the celestial Ferris wheel of their shuttle, Coop and the crew find the wormhole: a snow globe, glowing blue. One planet it spins them towards has a giant wall of water that turns their spacecraft into an imperiled surfboard. Another planet, where treachery looms, is icy and as caked with snow granules as Earth was with dust. Interstellar may never equal the blast of scientific speculation and cinematic revelation that was Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, but its un-Earthly vistas are spectral and spectacular.

Someone on the icy planet says, “Our world is cold, stark but undeniably beautiful.” Shuttling between the grad-school blackboard and the family hearth, this undeniably beautiful film blows cold and hot, stark and sentimental by turns. Taking the visual wow factor as a given, you may feel two kinds of wonder: a child’s astonishment at the effects and a bafflement that asks, “I wonder why that’s happening.”

It’s not just that the rules of advanced physics, as tossed out every 15 minutes or so, are beyond the ken of most movie-goers. It’s also that some scenes border on the risible — a wrestling match in space suits — and some characters, like Amelia, are short on charm and plausibility. In story terms, her connection with Coop is stronger than that of the two astronauts in Gravity. But Sandra Bullock and George Clooney gave their roles emotional heft, in a film more approachable and affecting than this one.

If the heart of Interstellar is Coop’s bond with Murph, its soul is McConaughey’s performance as a strong, tender hero; in the film’s simplest, most potent scene, he sheds tears of love and despair while watching remote video messages from his kids. He is the conduit to the feelings that Nolan wants viewers to bathe in: empathy for a space and time traveler who is, above all, a father.

With Interstellar, Nolan’s reach occasionally exceeds his grasp. That’s fine: These days, few other filmmakers dare reach so high to stretch our minds so wide. And our senses, all of them. At times, dispensing with Hans Zimmer’s pounding organ score, Nolan shows a panorama of the spacecraft in the heavens — to the music of utter silence. At these moments, viewers can hear their hearts beating to the sound of awe.

Go Behind the Scenes of Interstellar

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Movie Review: Interstellar (2014)

• Howard Schumann
• Movie Reviews
• 18 responses
• --> November 9, 2014

When I was growing up, reading science fiction from such authors as Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke meant discovering new worlds of imagination and wonder. Sadly, what passes for science fiction today is mostly a reflection of a world imprisoned by fear. Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar , a visually thrilling film of almost three hours in length, does its best to recapture the wonder of space exploration as envisioned by its earliest dreamers, but even though it falls short, it has the courage to see the possibility of a world beyond our three-dimensional model, a world where love transcends time and space.

Co-written by Nolan and his brother Jonathan, Interstellar opens sometime in the future with the Earth in the midst of an environmental disaster and the survival of humanity threatened. Dust storms have destroyed the wheat harvests leaving only corn to save the planet from starvation. Cooper (Matthew McConaughey, “ Dallas Buyers Club ”), a single father and former NASA pilot, now works as a farmer to support his teenage son Tom (Timotheé Chalamet, “ Men, Women & Children ”) and daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy, “ The Conjuring ”). “We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars,” he tells his father-in-law (John Lithgow, “ The Campaign ”). “Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.”

Murph tells her dad, however, that she has seen a ghost in her room that hangs around her bookcase, disturbing objects. When this poltergeist sends a coded message with directions to an underground NASA base, Coop again begins to look up at the sky. He soon discovers that one of his old teachers, Professor Brand (Michael Caine, “ The Dark Knight Rises ”) directs the NASA facility and has a startling story to tell him. Years earlier, five-dimensional beings created a wormhole near the planet Saturn to allow mankind to be transported to a galaxy far, far away when it became necessary.

Initial probes identified three potential planets that might be capable of sustaining life and Brand wants Coop to pilot a large ring-shaped ship called The Endurance to rescue a stranded astronaut, find the most suitable planet for colonization, and complete the mission. One of the problems identified by Professor Brand, however, is that there is a nearby black hole that will skew time so that one hour spent on the planet’s surface is the equivalent of seven years on Earth.

To undertake the mission, Cooper must leave his son and daughter behind with uncertainty as to whether he will ever come back or what age his children will be when he returns. Though the parting is swift, it is not without tears. Leaving his family behind, Coop is accompanied by Professor Brand’s daughter Amelia (Anne Hathaway, “ Les Misérables ”), two astronauts (David Gyasi and Wes Bentley), and the android TARS (voiced by Bill Irwin). Stunning state-of-the art visual technology and the cinematography of Hoyte Van Hoytema bring outer space closer than ever.

We are stunned when the crew encounters mile-high tidal waves rolling over the ship, when we witness the docking with another ship that has spun out of control, visit a planet filled only with water, and another where the surface is blocked by frozen clouds in the atmosphere. There are also emotional high points. For example, when the abandoned astronaut, Dr. Mann (in a surprise appearance by a major star) is overjoyed at being rescued but soon loses his grip on reality. In another moving sequence, Cooper views communications from home that span a period of twenty years (Jessica Chastain plays his grown-up daughter) and realizes that his children have given up the idea of ever seeing him again.

Interstellar maintains its tension throughout but, unfortunately, is hampered by poor sound mixing, banal dialogue, and a convoluted story that gives your brain a good working over but is inordinately filled with scientific jargon that eventually becomes off-putting. McConaughey does a creditable job in the lead role, however, but somehow remains aloof and never quite draws us into his character. Both Hathaway and Chastain do the best with the roles they are given, but their characters are seriously undeveloped.

Regardless of its flaws, Interstellar is a welcome change from standard Hollywood fare and is definitely worth seeing. Though you may have other interpretations of its meaning, to me the film is about humanity turning away from what is crumbling before our eyes and, rather than endlessly reciting Dylan Thomas’ poem about “going gentle into that good night,” letting go of our rage and welcoming the ineffable beauty of the light.

Tagged: astronaut , Earth , explorer , family , space

I am a retired father of two living with my wife in Vancouver, B.C. who has had a lifelong interest in the arts.

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'Movie Review: Interstellar (2014)' have 18 comments

November 9, 2014 @ 2:29 am OKeeps

Contrary to what’s being said Interstellar is not Nolan’s best work.

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November 9, 2014 @ 2:46 am tropicslumberparty

To think humanity survival was because of one mans psychosis is a definite mind-trip.

November 9, 2014 @ 6:03 am Carl Sr.

What an exhausting movie. So much abstraction to comprehend it practically begs to be seen multiple times.

November 9, 2014 @ 3:24 pm Starth

Yep, and it absolutely needs to be experienced in a theater too.

November 9, 2014 @ 8:31 am Tamora

Beautiful movie.

November 9, 2014 @ 9:45 am Lowell

“Go big or go home” – Christopher Nolan

Not sure if he can top this but I can’t wait to see what he’s got planned for us next…

November 10, 2014 @ 12:34 am R3d M3rcury

The production is definitely big no doubt about it. The story however, pretty much follows the same recycled path we’ve walked before and is hampered with underdeveloped characters.

November 9, 2014 @ 9:58 am MattRiggins

This makes Gravity look like childs play. The sequence when McConaughey was trying to dock the ship to the spinning station was so much more intense than anything Bullock went through.

November 9, 2014 @ 3:27 pm Starth

The blackhole sequence was even more exhilarating.

November 9, 2014 @ 12:00 pm dickie

Matt Damon you selfish son of a bitch.

November 10, 2014 @ 5:57 pm Deb

That WAS such the surprise.

November 9, 2014 @ 6:31 pm Roman

Care to explain the ending to me?

November 9, 2014 @ 11:11 pm General Disdain

Absolutely.

November 9, 2014 @ 6:53 pm ZappaEnthusiast

I’m usually one to faun over the Hans Zimmer Chris Nolan collaboration but I thought the deafening bass overpowered a lot of the dialogue. Loved the movie otherwise.

November 12, 2014 @ 2:39 am Tom Watson

This review is pure fucking garbage. Hazy generalizations and plot summary. Just give up and put your time into something else.

November 12, 2014 @ 11:08 pm General Disdain

Like comment trolling, slick? Now go back to your hole lest we sic the billy goats on you . . .

November 19, 2014 @ 7:23 pm Howard Schumann

Sorry you didn’t like my review, Tom. Now if you could offer something constructive instead of childish insults, your comment might be of some use.

May 17, 2015 @ 9:15 pm Sick Boy

I liked “Interstellar” immensely but I cannot subscribe to its main premise – that it’s the humans who could or should carry life over to other worlds once this one is spent. Evolutionary speaking – humans cannot exist outside a pretty narrow margins set within the current biosphere, not without immense technological backup which is neither practical nor feasible. If anything is to be sent up there – it’s the viruses and the bacteria, lifeforms that have a much, much better shot at fast adapting to any new conditions they meet. And they’re already traveling with Voyagers I and II. If it’s not enough for some because it will not be your kids, just remember that we have more in common with viruses than any organic entity has with the inorganic ones.

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Interstellar

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Watch Interstellar with a subscription on Prime Video, Paramount+, rent on Fandango at Home, or buy on Fandango at Home.

What to Know

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.

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Christopher Nolan

Matthew McConaughey

Anne Hathaway

Amelia Brand

Jessica Chastain

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Interstellar (2014)

Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar demands for a patient, open-minded and perceptive audience. For this very reason, it is destined to divide. Missing are the exhilarating action set pieces that viewers have come to expect from the director. At its core, Nolan’s three-hour epic is a high concept, science fiction love letter that mourns for mankind’s pioneering past and embraces the transcendent power of love.

Set in the not-so-distant future, Earth’s natural resources are scarce and overrun by a plague known as ‘blight’. Mankind has lost the need for scientists and engineers. Inquisition and expedition are skills that we as a species can no longer afford to indulge. The vast majority of the human race have been reduced to the role of farmers, in an effort to prevent worldwide starvation. Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a former NASA pilot, eyes set permanently towards the heavens, longs for something more than the fate that has mysteriously sentenced the Earth to extinction.

“We’re explorers, not caretakers.”

A series of odd and unexplainable occurrences involving Cooper’s daughter Murphy and a ‘ghost’ that communicates through coded messages, leads Cooper to uncovering a secret NASA base and a last-ditch mission to save the earth. NASA’s remaining scientists have discovered a wormhole, and on the other side, could be the salvation for mankind.

It’s the sort of mind-bending ambitious filmmaking that the director has shown consistently throughout his filmography. But even by his own standards, Interstellar is without question Nolan’s most ambitious (and sentimental) work yet. This film is no Dark Knight or Inception . It can be best described as the modern day equivalent to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey . Both films aim to examine the existential mysteries of our universe and the role of humankind. Each film uses scientific experimentation and intergalactic exploration as the lens by which our existence is questioned. Though thematically and visually similar, what separates the work is how this inquisition is handled.

Kubrick’s film was almost without dialogue for much of its runtime. It was a visual piece of cinema that allowed the audience to reach their own conclusions and understandings privately. Nolan’s film is equally as beautiful on the eyes, but it relishes and embraces the critical scientific debate.

Viewers and critics may find the insistent exposition dumps taxing, while others may marvel at the intellectual theorising with wonderment. Nolan clearly indulges in the science and wants the audience to partake in the investigation. Going as far as hiring theoretical physicist Kip Thorne in an effort to add validity and plausibility to the discussion.

Underlining the audacious concepts and intellectualism is a powerful tale of a father’s endless love for this children; more specifically his daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy).

In agreeing to partake on this impossible mission across dimensions of space and time, Cooper leaves with the knowledge that his children will age and possibly die while he’s away trying to save the world. The severe time dilation allows for Murphy to mature into adulthood (played by Jessica Chastain), while McConaughey’s Cooper stays the same age.

McConaughey’s career transformation continues in full and impressive fashion here as Nolan’s leading man. There’s an endearing charisma to everything he does on screen. The sound design doesn’t always help in understanding his southern drawl, but that doesn’t stop from believing completely in Cooper’s torment and regret that follows him throughout the universe.

The film swells with idealist sentimentality and it’s not hard to envision Steven Speilberg directing this piece as he was originally intended to. Nolan (perhaps channeling his own inner-Speilberg) doesn’t shy away from being unashamedly sentimental in his handling of the family drama. The bending of quantum physics, allows for some truly powerful dramatic moments. While the quantifying of love may be a step too far for some audiences (and scientists), the idea that love can drive, impassion and connect people throughout time and space is a beautiful concept. While the science obviously cannot be proven, the emotions do not lie.

Interstellar longly dreams of a time when humans could reach their vast potential and achieve miracles. It’s an intelligent and moving piece of cinema that forces the audience to engage in something far greater than your average film. It’s an emotionally-charged and richly rewarding experience for those who are open to the ideas of love and hope conquering the limitations of our own knowledge and understanding.

I implore audiences to open themselves up to the challenge.

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Movie Review: Interstellar

Read this short review of the movie Interstellar. Pay particular attention to the words in bold:

Inspired by Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, Interstellar is a new science fiction movie about a team of space travellers who journey through a wormhole in search of a new habitable planet.

Set in a dystopian future, director Christopher Nolan shows us a world where massive dust storms have destroyed Earth's crops. The situation is so bad that the government decide that mankind needs a new home among the stars. Matthew McConaughey plays the starring roll as the brave space explorer chosen with saving mankind.

Interstellar is probably one of the most audacious science fiction films ever made. The complexities of space are on screen, but the film's message is about mankind, our planet and the consequences of actions.

Our recommendation is get comfortable (the movie is 169 minutes long), enjoy the movie's jaw-dropping visuals and don't worry about getting lost in the science of a very confusing plot.

This epic movie is a dazzling journey that we think will become a science fiction classic.

Now choose the correct word for each definition:

• 1) A place in good enough condition to live in: Audacious Consequence Inspire Complexities Explorer Jaw-dropping Dystopia Habitable
• 2) An imagined place in which everything bad: Complexities HabitableC Jaw-dropping Dystopia Consequence Explorer Audacious Inspire
• 3) A willingness to take surprisingly bold risks: Habitable Consequence Dystopia Jaw-dropping ComplexitiesC Explorer Inspire Audacious
• 4) To give someone an idea: Habitable Inspire Audacious Complexities Consequence Jaw-droppingC Dystopia Explorer
• 5) Amazing: Jaw-dropping Inspire Dystopia Consequence Habitable Complexities Explorer Audacious
• 6) Complications: Inspire Habitable Complexities Audacious Jaw-dropping Dystopia Explorer Consequence
• 7) A person who investigates unknown places: Explorer Complexities Audacious Inspire Dystopia Jaw-dropping Consequence Habitable
• 8) The result: Inspire Audacious Consequence Explorer Complexities Dystopia Habitable Jaw-dropping

• Lesson Index

Seven Letters

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Interstellar Review

07 Nov 2014

166 minutes

Interstellar

Warning: this review contains mild spoilers

Christopher Nolan is a director whose name has, quite literally, become synonymous with realism. The Nolanisation of cinema, which made the gloomy streets of Gotham a bridge between the fantastical and the commonplace, now grounds countless fancies within the mud of our reality. With Interstellar, arguably his first ‘true’ science-fiction project, Nolan inverts expectation once again, with a film rooted in the mundanity of maths homework but spliced with the fantastic.

Born a year after the Apollo landing, Nolan grew up in the aftermath of the space race, when young eyes still turned upwards in wonder. Decades later, with the Space Shuttle decommissioned and children staring blearily down at the glow of their smartphones, it’s his disappointment at NASA’s broken promise that forms the driving force behind Interstellar.

Opening, tellingly, on a dusty model of the shuttle Atlantis, the film’s near-future setting sees humanity starving, squalid and devoid of hope. Eking out an existence in a post-millennial Dust Bowl, Matthew McConaughey ’s Cooper and his two children — ten year-old daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy) and her older brother Tom (Timothée Chalamet) — lead a life of agrarian survivalism (while, hearteningly, still reading a great many books). But in Cooper we find a new man cut from old cloth: an all-American hero pulled straight from Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff. Played with a drawling, Texan swagger underpinned by startling emotional depth, he is Nolan’s most traditional lead to date, embodying the wide-eyed wonder of the director’s youth; a man for whom we are “explorers and pioneers, not caretakers”, who casts his lot among the stars as the human race’s last, best hope.

With the ailing Blue Planet left behind, Interstellar shifts smoothly into second gear. The black abyss rolls out like Magellan’s Pacific; an unknowable frontier, final in a way that Roddenberry’s never was. According to über-boffin co-producer Kip Thorne, the spherical wormhole (it’s three-dimensional, obviously) and the spinning event horizon of the film’s black hole (named Gargantua) are mathematically modelled and true to life. Sitting before a 100-foot screen, though, you won’t give a toss about equations because Nolan’s starscape is the most mesmerising visual of the year. Gargantua is as captivating as it is terrible: an undulating maelstrom of darkness and light. Like the Hubble telescope on an all-night bender, this is space imagined with a dizzying immensity that would make Georges Méliès lose his shit.

The planets themselves are no less spectacular. Let The Right One In cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema (replacing Nolan regular Wally Pfister) captures the bleak expanse of southern Iceland as both a watery hell with thousand-foot waves and an icy expanse where even the clouds freeze solid. With more than an hour of footage shot in 70mm IMAX, you’ll want to park your arse in front of the biggest screen available to fully appreciate the spectacle.

In contrast to the grandeur of space, the ship itself is a scrapyard mutt. Modular and boxy, the Endurance looks like an A-Level CDT workshop, with no hint of aesthetic flourish or extraneous design. Ever the practical filmmaker, Nolan has constructed a functional, utilitarian vessel. Its robotic crew-members, TARS and CASE, are ’60s-inspired slabs of chrome; AI encased in LEGO bricks that twist and rearrange (manually operated by Bill Irwin — there’s no CG trickery here) to perform complex tasks with minimalist efficiency.

Beneath Interstellar’s flawless skin, the meat is bloodier and harder to chew. The science comes hard and fast, though Nolans Christopher and Jonah shore up the quantum mechanics with generous expository hand-holding. Astrophysics is the vehicle not the destination, however, and Interstellar’s gravitational centre is far more down to Earth. Embodied by Dylan Thomas’ Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night (quoted in the film at several points), this is a defiant paean to the human spirit that first took man to the stars. But far more than Thomas’ villanelle, Interstellar scales the heights and plumbs the depths of humanity, pitting the selfish against the selfless, higher morality against survival instinct. As Cooper, scientist Brand (Anne Hathaway) and crew draw closer to their destination, complications require tough decisions; the sanctity of the mission wars with the hope of a return trip. That the undertaking isn’t quite as advertised doesn’t come as a shock, but the cruelty of the deception lands like a body blow. Nature isn’t evil, muses Brand (played with soulful nuance by Hathaway). The only evil in space is what we bring with us.

When Interstellar began life back in 2006, Steven Spielberg, not Nolan, was the man in the cockpit; a presence still felt in the relationship between Cooper and Murph. The betrayal of a child abandoned is potent from the outset but the guilt is magnified tenfold when the Endurance’s first stop, within the influence of the black hole, means that a few hours stranded planet-side result in two decades passing back on Earth. Cooper’s tortured face as he watches his family unspool through 20 years of unanswered video missives is agony, raw and unadorned. Beneath everything else, this is a story about a father and his daughter, the ten-year-old giving way to Jessica Chastain ’s adult in the blink of a tear-filled eye.

With the endless pints of physics chased by shots of moral philosophy, Interstellar can at times feel like a three-year undergraduate course crammed into a three-hour movie. Or, to put it another way, what dinner and a movie with Professor Brian Cox might feel like. The final act compounds the issue, descending into a morass of tesseracts, five-dimensional space and gravitational telephony. It’s a dizzying leap from the grounded to the brain-bending that will baffle as many viewers as it inspires. More than the monolithic robot and his sarcastic, HAL-nodding asides (“I’ll blow you out of the airlock!”), it’s the psychedelic, transcendental climax that feels most indebted to Kubrick’s 2001; something that will undoubtedly prompt some to accuse Nolan of disappearing up his own black hole.

Inception posed questions without clear answers. Interstellar provides all the answers — you just might not understand the question. This is Nolan at his highest-functioning but also his least accessible; a film that eschews conflict for exploration, action for meditation and reflection. This isn’t the outer to Inception’s inner space (his dreams-within-dreams are airy popcorn-fodder by comparison), but it does wear its smarts just as proudly. Yet for the first time, here Nolan opens his heart as well as his mind. Never a comfortably emotional filmmaker, here he demonstrates a depth of feeling not present in his earlier work. It’s no coincidence that the film’s shooting pseudonym was Flora’s Letter, after Nolan’s own daughter. Interstellar is a missive from father to child; a wish to re-instil the wonder of the heavens in a generation for whom the only space is cyber. Anchored in the bottomless depths of paternal love, it’s a story about feeling as much as thinking. And if the emotional core is clumsily articulated at times (Brand’s “love transcends space and time” monologue being the worst offender), it’s no less powerful for it.

As a light-year-spanning quest to save the human race, this is the director’s broadest canvas by far, but also his most intimate. And against the alien backdrop of black holes, wormholes and strange new worlds, Interstellar stands as Nolan’s most human film to date.

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‘interstellar’: what the critics are saying.

Christopher Nolan's space-set epic stars Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Ellen Burstyn, John Lithgow, Michael Caine and Casey Affleck

By Ashley Lee

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Interstellar , out Wednesday in Imax and Friday nationwide, is the space-set epic that searches for a suitable home for humans in another dimension, yet is grounded in a story about love and family . Directed by Christopher Nolan , the super-secret drama stars  Matthew McConaughey , Anne Hathaway , Jessica Chastain , Ellen Burstyn , John Lithgow , Michael Caine , Casey Affleck , Wes Bentley and Mackenzie Foy .

Read more THR Cover: Interstellar’s’ Christopher Nolan, Stars Gather to Reveal Secrets of the Year’s Most Mysterious Film

See what top critics are saying about Interstellar :

The Hollywood Reporter’s Todd McCarthy  warns, “ Interstellar so bulges with ideas, ambitions, theories, melodrama, technical wizardry, wondrous imagery and core emotions that it was almost inevitable that some of it would stick while other stuff would fall to the floor. … 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. … For all its adventurous and far-seeing aspects, Interstellar remains rather too rooted in earthly emotions and scientific reality to truly soar and venture into the unknown, the truly dangerous.” Hans Zimmer ‘s compositions add up to an “often soaring, sometimes domineering and unconventionally orchestrated wall-of-sound score.”

The theme of the parent-child bond “is overstressed in a narrow manner. Murph’s [Chastain] persistent anger at her father is essentially her only character trait and becomes tiresome; she’s a closed-off character. Her brother [Affleck] remains too thinly developed to offer a substantial contrast to her attitude.” Additionally, “what goes on among the astronauts is not especially interesting and Amelia [Hathaway], in particular, remains an annoyingly vague and unpersuasive character in contrast to McConaughey’s exuberant, if regret-laden, mission leader, a role the actor invests with vigor and palpable feeling.”

See more ‘Interstellar’ Premiere: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Christopher Nolan Hit Hollywood

The New Yorker ‘s David Denby says the film “is ardently, even fervently incomprehensible, a movie designed to separate the civilians from the geeks, with the geeks apparently the target audience. … There’s a problem, however. Delivered in rushed colloquial style, much of this fabulous arcana, central to the plot, is hard to understand, and some of it is hard to hear. The composer Zimmer produces monstrous swells of organ music that occasionally smother the words like lava. The actors seem overmatched by the production.” Visually, the film’s “basic color scheme of the space-travel segments is white and silver-gray on black, and much of it is stirringly beautiful. There’s no doubting Nolan’s craft. … But, over all, Interstellar , a spectacular, redundant puzzle, a hundred and sixty-seven minutes long, makes you feel virtuous for having sat through it rather than happy that you saw it.”

USA Today ‘s  Claudia Puig  gives the film three out of four stars. Among impressive special effects are “minimalist exchanges between McConaughey and Hathaway, whose chemistry as space-exploring partners is lacking. Hathaway’s character is not given much dimension. Other members of the space team are even less well-drawn, so it’s hard to care what befalls them.” Also, “what is meant as a climactic humanistic ending seems to tie things up far too neatly for a film about the complex messiness that comes with a world that has taken dramatic wrong turns.”

See more ‘Interstellar’: Inside THR’s Roundtable With Christopher Nolan and Matthew McConaughey

Time ‘s  Richard Corliss  calls it “a must-take ride with a few narrative bumps. …  Interstellar  may never equal the blast of scientific speculation and cinematic revelation that was  Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey , but its un-Earthly vistas are spectral and spectacular.” In comparison to  Gravity , “ Sandra Bullock  and  George Clooney  gave their roles emotional heft, in a film more approachable and affecting than this one.” Still, “McConaughey’s performance as a strong, tender hero is notable.”

The Guardian ‘s Henry Barnes writes, “ Interstellar only really gets going once it’s up in the air. … It saves its beauty for the cosmos and its humanity for the machines. The actors — even those of the calibre of McConaughey and Hathaway — are script-delivering modules, there to output exposition and process emotional data. The best lines, those that seem truly spontaneous and responsive, go to TARS, the crew’s AI assistant.”

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Interstellar Review

A STUNNING SPACE ODYSEEY

Of cinematic nunances and quantum confusion.

Christopher Nolan has sure made a name for himself in the world of movies. When he creates a movie, everyone notices it with a heightened sense of wonder and intrigue. Nolan started out with good, but lesser known feature films such as Following , Memento , Insomnia , and The Prestige . He eventually became largely well-known for his superhero blockbuster The Dark Knight trilogy ( Batman Begins , The Dark Knight , and The Dark Knight Rises ) and his mind-bending dreamscape drama Inception . Those four films grossed incredible numbers at the box-office and skyrocketed Nolan to being a sought out director in Hollywood. Now, two year after releasing The Dark Knight Rises , Christopher Nolan’s directional magic returns to the big screen with his much anticipated film Interstellar . Does Nolan’s newest film reach for the stars or just sets adrift into the vastness of space?

Set sometime into the future, the Earth is dying and on its last breath. Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a former NASA pilot and now turned engineer and agricultural farmer, is trying to find a balance between raising his kids, Tom (Timothee Chalmet) and Murphy (Mackenzie Foy) and growing crops to save the populace. After uncovering a mysterious code, Cooper finds the last remnants of NASA organization, which went undergrounded sometime ago, and is persuaded by Professor Brand (Michael Caine) to pilot a space shuttle on a dangerous mission; passing through a nearby wormhole and finding a sustainable planet on the other side. With the fate of mankind (literally) on his shoulder, Cooper elects to pilot the mission, leaving behind his family, which emotionally destroys Murphy, and joins team members Brand (Anne Hathaway), Doyle (Wes Bentley), Romilly (David Gyasi), and the two robots TARS (Billy Irwin) and CASE (Josh Stewart) on a journey into the unknowns of space, hoping to save humanity from extinction.

THE GOOD / THE BAD

For the most part, Interstellar has been kept shroud in secrecy with its trailers and promos not truly giving anything “spoiler-ish” away (Beyond the basic premise of the plot) and media embargos placed until the movie got released. This, of course, makes the film that more refreshing and entertaining as you watch the film with intrigue of what’s going to happen and how will it end. Though Nolan interjects a lot of scientific realism into the picture, the movie itself is the stuff of science fiction with its characters blasting off into space, exploring the unknown, venturing into wormholes, searching for other habitable worlds, and subtle hints at intelligent “higher beings” (Aliens). Nolan seems to pull from other classic sci-fi films (or at least harkening back to) such as 2001: Space Odyssey , Contact , and even a little bit of Gravity for this movie. So, in a sense, if you like those movies, you’ll probably find Interstellar to your liking.

From a visual standpoint, Interstellar is absolutely stunning. It’s clear from the get go that a lot of time and money has been spent on the film’s production and post-production. It just simple looks gorgeous with meticulous level of detail (Both practical and CG rendering effects). Truly, the cinematography, done by Hoyt Van Hoytema, is commendable whether it’s a simple earth setting or on a strange unworldly environment; working congruently in keeping with Nolan’s grand vision for his feature. Adding to the scope and visual flair of the film, Nolan enlists the famous composer Hans Zimmer to score this space opus of a film. Zimmer, who has collaborated with Nolan on several of his films, delivers a stellar and melodic score that fits perfectly and, moreover, beautifully with subtle approaches on quieter scenes, while powerful and bombastic pipe organs are played to convey scenes of emotion and dramatic tension. You simple just don’t listen to the music, you feel it. All in all, Interstellar’s sights and sounds are unparallel to any recent features out in theaters, making a grandiose movie experience to moviegoers. Seeing it in IMAX (Which I did) is the best possible way to see it and immersive yourself within its world.

There are several key problems with the Interstellar , which drag the film down and pulls focus from its space exploration yarn. With a running time of 168 minutes, the film stretches its complete story out with considerable pacing problems, making the feature feel too long and tedious at some points. There are also a great deal logical scientific references, which tries to give film plausible reasoning, but simply becomes nonsensical science techno babble. Unless you have a PHD in physics, you might be thing “What are they doing?” or “What did he/she say?” (I surely did). Then there is the climax of the movie where the direction of the film changes oddly. It branches into unknown territory in the universe and becomes a little strange and perhaps a little perplexing during this scene. (It has a kind of Deus Ex Machina feel to it). Finally, there are several piece of Interstellar’s plot that kind of don’t make sense as if Nolan just rushed through these events to move the narrative along or even simply didn’t have a clue how tackle said obstacles in the story’s writing process. (Again the whole Deus Ex Machina towards the film’s ending fits into this category). It’s disappointing because these things (Big or small points I make) cripple the film from truly reaching exalted greatness.

Interstellar pulls together some big names in Hollywood, a few smaller ones, and a couple of cameos that will surely surprise viewers. I won’t go into detail about some as that would spoil the movie, but here are the main ones. Matthew McConaughey leads the pact as the film’s main character Cooper. McConaughey, who has exploded this past year from the film Dallas Buyers Club and the HBO series True Detective , does a really good job in his performance, producing emotional effect fluently and believability. However, he does fumble a bit here and there with his “fast-talking” quips or perhaps just clunky dialogue written for his character. The same goes for Anne Hathaway’s character Brand, who delivers a good performance, but get weighs down with a couple jarring dialogue written for her. Jessica Chastain plays the older version Cooper’s daughter Murphy and does exemplary job in her performance role, offering powerful emotional scenes. The same thing can be said for Mackenzie Foy, who plays the younger Murphy. Lastly, it wouldn’t be a Christopher Nolan movie without the appearance of Michael Caine, who plays Anne Hathaway’s father and (per usual) serves as a minor character, who propels the narration further in several scenes.

As a final note, Interstellar presents an interesting theme in its narration. While the fate of the humanity is at stake, the film is framed by the dilemma of family and work /duty and the strenuous relationship love and anger between a parent and child (Cooper and Murphy in the movie), something that is common in our world.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Interstellar is ambitious, but imperfect. The film is Nolan’s love note to space travel from its exploration to the scientific, but perplexing space / time theories that will surely leave a few people scratching their heads with confusion and understanding. However, once viewers digest the quantum mechanics of it all and move pass the unexplainable narrative holes in the story, Interstellar becomes that more enjoyable. Ultimately, the likeability comes down to what each viewer takes away from the movie as it may vary from person to person. To me, it had its logical faults in its storytelling and its undertaking, but Interstellar delivers on scope and grandeur with spectacular visuals and emotional drama that collectively create a beautifully crafted cinematic experience.

4.0 out of 5 (Recommend)

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Interstellar

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

It’s damn near three hours long. There’s that. Also, Interstellar is a space odyssey with no UFOs, no blue-skinned creatures from another planet, no alien bursting from the chest of star Matthew McConaughey . It reveals a hopeful side of filmmaker Christopher Nolan that will piss off Dark Knight doomsayers. And, hey, didn’t Alfonso Cuarón just win an Oscar for directing Gravity ? How long are audiences expected to get high on rocket fumes?

Blah, blah, blah. Bitch, bitch, bitch. What the neg-heads are missing about Interstellar is how enthralling it is, how gracefully it blends the cosmic and the intimate, how deftly it explores the infinite in the smallest human details.

Of course, Nolan has never been the cold technician of his reputation. Watch  Memento again, or The Prestige , or the undervalued Insomnia . The sticking point here is that Interstellar finds Nolan wearing his heart on his sleeve. Nothing like emotion to hold a cool dude up to ridicule. But even when Nolan strains to verbalize feelings, and the script he wrote with his brother Jonathan turns clunky, it’s hard not to root for a visionary who’s reaching for the stars.

Which brings us to a plot full of deepening surprises I’m not going to spoil. The poster for Interstellar presents McConaughey surveying a wasteland. It’s meant to be Saturn, but it could just as well be Earth, where environmental recklessness has morphed the planet into a Dirt Bowl starving and choking its citizens.

Nolan spends the first third of the film in the American farm belt of the near future, introducing us to widower Cooper (McConaughey), a former test pilot, who depends on his father-in-law (John Lithgow) to help him raise 15-year-old son Tom (Timothée Chalamet) and 10-year-old daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy, superb). Like her dad, Murph is a rebel who refuses to buy into her school’s official dictum that the Apollo space program was a lie.

It’s when dad and daughter find the remnants of NASA, headed up by Cooper’s old boss Professor Brand (Michael Caine), that the story gains momentum. Cooper heads into space to find a new world to colonize, leaving behind two kids who may never forgive him.

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The physics lessons (Cal-tech’s Kip Thorne consulted) kick in when Coop captains the Endurance mother ship with a science team made up of Amelia ( Anne Hathaway ), Brand’s daughter; Romilly (David Gyasi); and Doyle (Wes Bentley). And don’t forget R2-D2 and C-3PO. Not really. The ex-military robots of Interstellar are called CASE and TARS. The great Bill Irwin voices TARS, a chatty monolith that looks like something out of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and sounds like that film’s HAL. (Note to viewers: Kubrick’s 1968 landmark and George Lucas’ Star Wars franchise are part of Nolan’s DNA. React accordingly.)

Next comes the wow factor that makes Interstellar nirvana for movie lovers. A high-tension docking maneuver. A surprise visitor. A battle on the frozen tundra. A tidal wave the size of a mountain. Cheers to Nolan and his team, led by cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema and VFX supervisor Paul J. Franklin ( Inception ). See Interstellar in IMAX, with the thrilling images oomphed by Hans Zimmer’s score, and you’ll get the meaning of “rock the house.”

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And yet it’s the final, quieter hour of Interstellar that gives the film resonance and lasting value. All the talk of black holes, wormholes and the space-time continuum take root in Coop when he realizes his two years in space have occupied 23 years on Earth. His children, the now-adult Tom (Casey Affleck) and Murphy ( Jessica Chastain ), spill out decades of joys and resentments in video messages that Coop watches in stunned silence. McConaughey nails every nuance without underlining a single one of them. He’s a virtuoso, his face a road map to the life he’s missed as his children bombard him with a Rorschach test of emotions.

In case you haven’t noticed, McConaughey is on a roll. And he partners beautifully with the sublime Chastain, who infuses Murph with amazing grit and grace. Familial love is the topic here, not the romantic or sexual kind. How does that figure into space exploration? Nolan gives Hathaway a monologue about it. But dialogue is no match for the flinty eloquence shining from the eyes of McConaughey and Chastain. They are the bruised heart of Interstellar, a film that trips up only when it tries to make love a science with rules to be applied. In 2001, Kubrick saw a future that was out of our hands. For Nolan, our reliance on one another is all we’ve got. That’s more the stuff of provocation than a Hallmark e-card. Nolan believes it’s better to think through a movie than to just sit through it. If that makes him a white knight, Godspeed.

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'Interstellar' Review: Christopher Nolan's Latest Might Be Too Ambitious

There's no denying the visceral power and prowess of Christopher Nolan 's Intersellar . The ninth film from the popular director is his most ambitious, and it looks jaw-droppingly gorgeous. The sets, miniatures, and images of space travel and planets all combine to make a film the scope of which rivals any other space movie.

Emotionally, the film comes close to achieving a similarly momentous effect. Interstellar follows Coop ( Matthew McConaughey ), a father forced to leave his family in a possibly mad attempt to preserve the future of humanity by finding another habitable planet. The tale is filled with drama, humor, intense action and surprising plot twists. There's rarely a dull moment in the movie because the story is so compelling and poignant.

But maybe it's all a bit too much. The script, by Nolan and his brother Jonathan, packs ideas and theories in every single scene. Concepts about love, survival, physics, and time burst from the film more prominently than the emotion and visuals. Even with a nearly three-hour runtime, so many ideas are presented that the film rarely has time to focus on one over another. The result is a technical marvel with a powerful narrative that ends up feeling a tad empty because we aren't sure exactly which point it's trying to make.

One of the best things about Interstellar is the manner in which it distinguishes itself from every other space movie. There's no big training sequence, the shuttle take off sequence is truncated, we don't get to space for 40 minutes of screen time. Right off the bat Nolan tells us we're going to see something different. Then once in space (which is where the majority of the movie takes place), everything gets bigger. He's not interested in our solar system. Nolan is interested in something far beyond it.

In the same way Intersellar attempts to stand out as a sci-fi film, it works to distinguish itself from a dramatic angle. On its own the story is direct, with good dramatic tension. Clear goals are presented, then attempted, and then either met or failed leading into the next scene. Anything you may think doesn't match up or feels superfluous eventually pays off in a pretty solid way. Sure there's a misstep here or there, but at its core, Interstellar is always interesting.

One of the biggest complaints in Nolan's earlier films is they rarely include rich female characters. This film has two of them, Coop's colleague Brand, played by Anne Hathaway , and the grown up version of his daughter Murph, played by Jessica Chastain . Each represents a step forward for Nolan as they're well-written and strong characters. Unfortunately, the relationships they develop are much weaker. The relationship between father and daughter Coop and Murph is a strained and incomplete one, but that's demanded by the narrative. Coop and Brand also have a bit of a budding connection which becomes increasingly important as the film goes along. However, it feels like an afterthought as it's casually dropped in with a few short lines of dialogue and then hardly developed.

Then, just when you start to scratch your head about Interstellar , it sucks you back in with its intense action scenes. They're few and far between but when they happen, you'll be glued to your seat. By taking his time to flesh out the story, Nolan earns lots of good will and you never quote know what's going to happen. There are at least two big turns later in the movie that really keep you on your toes and divert from some other issues.

Issues such as the fact he's provided so many different narrative strings and questions, he's forced into some convenient narrative choices near the conclusion. These pay off emotionally but when everything else in the film has been pushing toward unpredictability and originality, they're a little disappointing, albeit understandable.

McConaughey has a lot of heavy lifting to do in Interstellar and he does it well. Obviously he's dynamic, charming and confident, but the real surprise is how he hits all the big dramatic peaks and valleys. Hathaway is steadfast with her limited role and Chastain, in an even more limited role, makes Murph the real star of the movie. She's a force to be reckoned with, infusing multiple layers into the few scenes she has.

As Interstellar ends, there's no doubt you've been on a ride. A thoroughly enjoyable and memorable cinematic experience that's well-made and acted. On those notes, Nolan totally succeeds. Afterwards though, you'll be more inclined to talk about the actions scenes and narrative twists rather than the multitude of themes he's placed throughout the film. That's because it's just too much to talk about. What does love mean? How do we handle time? What does it mean to survive? Is it okay to offer hope when there is none? The film's questions are endless and overwhelming.

Which leads to one last question, do we care? That's a something you'll have to decide. Interstellar is a good film with big flaws that may or may not matter because everything around them is done so well.

/Film rating: 7.5 out 10

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Interstellar, common sense media reviewers.

Ambitious intergalactic drama focuses on a father's promise.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Ultimately this is a story about the fierce love b

Cooper is an attentive, responsive father who talk

Several scenes of intense, impending peril -- part

Two adults kiss in celebration.

Strong language is infrequent but includes one or

Dell Latitude computer, several close-ups of a Ham

Parents need to know that Interstellar is a compelling sci-fi thriller/poignant family drama directed by Christopher Nolan ( The Dark Knight ) and starring Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway. As in Gravity , there are nail-bitingly intense (and life-threatening) sequences that take place in…

Positive Messages

Ultimately this is a story about the fierce love between a parent and his children. It explores the power of the intangible, unquantifiable feeling of love; the good of the man versus the good of mankind; and the certainty that there's more in the universe than we can possibly understand. The opening lines from Dylan Thomas' poem, "Do not go gentle into that good night," are repeated again and again as a reminder to not be complacent or accept death when there's a possible solution that could save your life. Cooper encourages his children to look hard for the answers to their questions.

Positive Role Models

Cooper is an attentive, responsive father who talks things through with his kids and always answers their questions. He sacrifices time with them in order to help the entire population of Earth, but he never forgets his promise to return to them. Amelia and her father believe in the virtue of sacrificing yourself for the good of the mission, but in the end, Amelia also understands that love needs to be taken into account, not just hard science. Murphy never stops looking for a way to explain her father's absence or to rescue the people of Earth.

Violence & Scariness

Several scenes of intense, impending peril -- particularly the parts of the movie that take place in space. Several characters die -- mostly in space, but one on Earth as well. Characters are usually killed by a hostile environment, but one dies of natural causes. Two men get into a dangerous physical confrontation in space.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Strong language is infrequent but includes one or two uses of "s--t," "a--hole," "son of a bitch," "dumb ass," and "f--king."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Dell Latitude computer, several close-ups of a Hamilton watch.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Interstellar is a compelling sci-fi thriller/poignant family drama directed by Christopher Nolan ( The Dark Knight ) and starring Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway . As in Gravity , there are nail-bitingly intense (and life-threatening) sequences that take place in space, but this is more than a survival tale: It's a relationship story about a father who has made a promise to his children to return to them, no matter what. The layered themes, intergalactic peril, and references to astrophysics may prove too dark and complicated for elementary school-aged tweens, but middle-schoolers and up will be drawn in by both the science and the parent-child bond that guides the central characters to keep searching for a way to reunite. Characters do die (both in space and on Earth), and there's some language ("s--t," one "f--king," etc.). To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Community Reviews

• Parents say (43)
• Kids say (183)

Based on 43 parent reviews

Awesome movie. Kids will love it for different reasons as they grow up.

The best movie ever, what's the story.

Director Christopher Nolan 's INTERSTELLAR takes place in a future in which severe drought has killed most of the world's crops, and humans are dying of starvation and disease on a doomed, dust-covered Earth. Cooper ( Matthew McConaughey ) is a former pilot/engineer who, like the majority of Americans, has had to trade in his defunct career to work as a farmer. Coop's love of science is evident in his young daughter, Murphy ( Mackenzie Foy ), who swears there's a ghost in her bedroom leaving her messages in code. Coop is unbelieving at first but then helps Murph decipher one of the codes, leading them to a secret lab run by Professor Brand ( Michael Caine ), who heads what's left of NASA. Brand reveals that they sent a group of scientists through a wormhole leading to another galaxy -- and that now a small group of brave souls must embark on a mission to see whether any of those scientists found an inhabitable planet. Brand convinces Coop to be the life-and-death mission's pilot, with the understanding that his time spent in outer space could mean missing many years on Earth (one hour on one planet equals seven years on Earth) -- years that he'd be away from his children. As the team tries to survive unthinkable odds, back on Earth, Murph grows into a brilliant scientist ( Jessica Chastain ) obsessed with finding her lost-in-space father.

Is It Any Good?

Unless you're well-versed in the physics of wormholes, don't expect to understand the intricacies of Interstellar' s science. And there's a lot of science, most of which sounds unbelievable, but it gets the story where Nolan and his brother Jonathan (who co-wrote the film), need it to go -- from the dust-smothered and scorched Earth to the dangerous outer reaches of space. The visuals are gorgeous, and not just in space, where Coop and his fellow astronauts -- Amelia ( Anne Hathaway ), Doyle ( Wes Bentley ), Romilly (David Gyasi), and the wise-cracking militarized robot, TARS, voiced by Bill Irwin -- travel from planet to planet, but also back on Earth, where time is passing so quickly that Coop's now grown children have all but lost faith that they'll see him again.

Occasionally the time-bending storyline starts to feel like it's stretching time for viewers as well, but somehow the missions -- both the one to save mankind and Coop's personal one to see his kids -- are compelling enough to keep audiences interested. McConaughey balances the line between dead serious, sarcastic, and heartfelt, and he plays well off of his co-stars (particularly his space team). Both the young and adult versions of Murphy are perfectly cast, and Caine -- whose professor has a penchant for quoting Dylan Thomas' poem "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" -- provides elder-statesman gravitas as he did in Nolan's Batman films. As Hathaway's character explains, love is a force that transcends time and space, so if you feel invested in Coop's promise to Murphy (and, to a lesser degree, his son, who grows up to be played by Casey Affleck ), you'll forgive some of the confusing and convenient plot loops and concentrate on the possibility that at some point, this father will embrace his children again.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how Interstellar is similar to, and different from, other serious/thoughtful space movies -- like Gravity , Contact , and 2001: A Space Odyssey . How would you describe it to friends -- as a sci-fi movie, a thriller, a family drama, or what?

Does the violence in the movie seem less upsetting when it's man vs. nature instead of man vs. man? Why do you think Professor Brand keeps quoting Dylan Thomas' poem "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night"? What does the poem mean?

Director Christopher Nolan is known for movies with psychological themes that play with time, space, memory, etc. How is Interstellar like his previous films? How is it a departure?

How would you describe the parent/child relationships in this movie? Are they realistic? Relatable?

Movie Details

• In theaters : November 5, 2014
• On DVD or streaming : March 31, 2015
• Cast : Matthew McConaughey , Anne Hathaway , Jessica Chastain
• Director : Christopher Nolan
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Paramount Pictures
• Genre : Science Fiction
• Topics : Space and Aliens
• Run time : 169 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : some intense perilous action and brief strong language
• Last updated : May 25, 2023

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Interstellar Explained — Plot, Meaning & the Ending Explained

T here’s no doubt about it: Interstellar was one of the most mentally-stimulating blockbusters of the 2010s. As such, a lot of people were confused about the Interstellar plot, high-concept science, and bold ending. It’s time for Interstellar explained – a deep-dive in which we answer some of the biggest questions audiences asked about the film. By the end, you’ll know the plot and meaning like the back of your hand; you might even say we’ll have an “interstellar explanation” for the fourth dimension.

Interstellar Ending Explained & Beat Sheet Breakdown

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Interstellar Explanation

Interstellar plot and summary.

Interstellar is a 2014 movie that was directed by Christopher Nolan and written by Christopher Nolan and Jonathan Nolan . The film received four Academy Award nominations for Best Original Score, Best Production Design, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Sound Editing – and the VFX (Visual Effects) were so well regarded that they won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects.

Although Interstellar received good-not-great reviews upon release, it’s since garnered more acclaim and it frequently places on lists of the best sci-fi movies ever made .

Interstellar is about Earth’s last chance to find a habitable planet before a lack of resources causes the human race to go extinct. The film’s protagonist is Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a former NASA pilot who is tasked with leading a mission through a wormhole to find a habitable planet in another galaxy.

Dr. Brand (Michael Caine) explains to Cooper that NASA previously sent another group (Lazarus) to find a habitable planet but they’ve gone silent.

Interstellar Movie Meaning  •  Dr. Brand Explains the Plan

There are two plans in the  Interstellar plot:

• Plan A involves Cooper transmitting quantum data back to Earth in order to develop a gravitational propulsion theory that will allow spacecrafts to carry people off Earth into the other galaxy.
• Plan B involves Cooper’s crew finding the remaining Lazarus crew and establishing a colony on another world.

Interstellar Summary & Setting

When is interstellar set.

We don’t know for certain when Interstellar is set, but the script implies that it takes place in the not-so-distant future. We imported the Interstellar script into StudioBinder’s screenwriting software to take a closer look at the film’s setting. This scene takes place near the beginning of the story and gives us a good hint at how many years in the future Interstellar is set.

Read the Interstellar Baseball Scene

We can infer by way of deductive reasoning that Interstellar takes place about 40-70 years into the future. How? Well, we know that Major League Baseball was still played when Donald was a kid. And we know that when Cooper was a kid, things were in such a state of disarray that no baseball was played.

So, if we assume that Cooper is about 40, and that things fell apart sometime before he was born, but not so far before that Donald didn’t live through a period of normalcy, then we can deduce that Interstellar is set between the ages of Donald and Cooper — roughly 40-70 years from “modern time” of 2014.

Water Planet - Interstellar Explained

What happens on the water planet.

The Endurance crew decides to scout out Miller’s planet because it was the one that had most recently transmitted data to them. But since the planet is so close to the black hole, time is extremely dilated — every hour on the water planet is equivalent to seven years on Earth.

Cooper, Brand (Anne Hathaway), and Doyle (Wes Bentley) land on the surface and attempt to locate Miller’s transponder. But just as Brand finds the device, a massive wave rolls in, forcing the crew to flee to the courier ship. Doyle dies but Cooper and Brand narrowly escape — and Brand realizes that Miller must’ve died seconds before they arrived because of the severe time dilation.

Cooper’s Family - Interstellar Explained

What happens to cooper’s family.

Cooper leaves his family – daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy/Jessica Chastain), son Tom (Timothee Chalamet/Casey Affleck) and father in-law Donald (John Lithgow) – on Earth in order to lead the NASA mission. In his absence, his family develops a contentious relationship; but we don’t learn about it until Cooper does, 23 years into the future while watching old transmissions.

Interstellar  •  Screenplayed

Murph and Tom become foil characters , aka characters who serve to expose attributes in each other. Murph becomes a NASA researcher who desperately wants to solve the gravitational theory to save the people on Earth while Tom takes over the family farm and largely rejects science and the reality of his situation. Their two opposing worldviews work against each other and expose negative and positive aspects of their character.

Mann’s Planet - Interstellar Explained

Where did matt damon come from.

Matt Damon plays the role of Dr. Mann, the captain of the Lazarus mission. After the failure of the water planet mission, Cooper is left with a difficult choice – go to Dr. Edmunds’ planet or Dr. Mann’s planet.

Let’s go back to the script to read through one of the best scenes – the one in which Cooper has to make the right decision in order to have any hope of executing the mission.

Read the Interstellar Decision Scene

Cooper chooses Mann’s planet, taking the Endurance on a one-way trip to Matt Damon Town. When the crew arrives, they find Mann in cryosleep. It’s pretty much clear from the get-go that something is wrong with Mann – although considering the fact that he’s been in solitude/cryosleep for years, it’s not hard to see why.

But Mann has more than just a case of cabin fever, he’s full-blown bent on finishing the mission, no matter the cost.

Interstellar Summary

Plan a was a sham.

Back on Earth, Dr. Brand reveals to Murph that Plan A was always a sham and there’s no way the people of Earth could ever escape.

Interstellar Meaning  •  Plan A Was a Sham

Murph transmits a message to Cooper accusing him of knowing Plan A wasn’t possible, effectively leaving her to die. Cooper tells Mann, Brand and Romilly that he’s going to return to Earth to be with his children and the rest of them can stay on Mann’s planet to start a colony.

But Mann’s planet isn’t hospitable – and he needs the ship to go to Edmunds’ planet. In this scene, Nolan intercuts between Cooper’s confrontation with Mann and Murph’s confrontation with Tom.

Interstellar Movie Plot Explained  •  Dual Confrontations

Murph burns all of the crops in order to make Tom understand he needs to leave the farm. Romilly is killed by a trap mine. Brand and Cooper barely escape back to the Endurance.

What happens in the docking scene?

Interstellar Movie Meaning  •  Docking Scene

I love Interstellar but, boy oh boy, we’ve got a cringe-worthy exchange of dialogue here:

TARS: Cooper, it’s not possible.

COOPER: No, it’s necessary.

Not great – but it’s hard to pick holes in a script as sharp as Interstellar . After some impressive piloting, Cooper successfully docks his courier ship in the Endurance.

What is the Interstellar black hole?

The Interstellar black hole is called “Gargantua” due to its gargantuan size. For more on how Nolan and the team made Gargantua with CGI (computer generated imagery), check out this awesome video.

Interstellar Theory  •  Building a Black Hole

When Interstellar was released in 2014, there were no recorded images of a black hole. But in 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope took the first images of a black hole. This is what the central black hole of Messier 87 (a galaxy in the Virgo cluster) looks like.

Messier 87 Black Hole via NASA

As it turns out, the scientists and visual artists who worked on Interstellar were pretty close with the design of the black hole. But what is a black hole? To answer that question, we have to first answer the question: what is a wormhole? And to answer that, let’s watch a great analogical scene from the film.

Interstellar Movie Plot Explained  •  Wormholes

A common misconception is that black holes and wormholes are the same thing. But as Romilly (David Gyasi) explains, wormholes are like funnels that connect two distant points in spacetime. Hypothetically, objects could safely travel through a wormhole – but consequently, black holes are areas of spacetime that have such strong gravity that nothing can escape.

Note: I am not a PhD physicist and most of the astronomical science in Interstellar is theoretical.

Breaking Down the Interstellar Black Hole

Interstellar black hole explained.

I think the Interstellar black hole scene is where a lot of people got lost. Up until that point, everything made a good amount of sense:

• Wormholes allow people to travel long distances through spacetime
• Differences in gravity and relative velocity cause time dilation
• Planets need key life-sustaining elements to be hospitable

But the Interstellar black hole scene is where Nolan dove deep into theory – and there’s no way to tell whether he was “right” or “wrong” because we have no idea what exists beyond the event horizon.

The event horizon, as it relates to Einstein’s theory of relativity, is the point in a black hole where nothing can escape nor be observed. 

So, for Interstellar, Nolan said, “Let’s send Cooper beyond the event horizon and see what happens.” Let’s look to the film to see what happened — it's abstract and minimalist but a truly thrilling sequence.

Interstellar Gargantua Explained

Many theoretical physicists believe that the event horizon serves as a barrier to the unknown physics of a black hole’s singularity. It could be compressed spacetime, antimatter, etc. In the case of Interstellar, the singularity is a portal to the fourth dimension. But what is the fourth dimension? Let’s listen to Carl Sagan explain.

Carl Sagan Explains the 4th Dimension

So if we’re really trapped inside of a fourth dimension, how can we escape? Well, perhaps the answer exists beyond the event horizon.

Interstellar Movie Explained

Interstellar ending explained.

How does Interstellar end? In order to save Brand, Cooper slingshots around Gargantua to generate enough energy to send the Endurance to Edmunds’ planet. As a result, he slips into the black hole and beyond the event horizon. There, he finds himself trapped in the fourth dimension – a tesseract styled as a never-ending bookshelf.

Interstellar Ending Scene Explained

But Cooper realizes that he’s able to interact with Murph through spacetime. He asks TARS to relay the quantum data to him, which he communicates through morse code. Murph picks up on the morse code because she was fascinated by the gravitational anomalies in their house ever since she was a kid.

Turns out, those anomalies were caused by Cooper interacting through another dimension – sending himself on a mission to get the quantum data. Don’t just take my word for it – for more on the Interstellar ending explained, let’s listen to Neil deGrasse Tyson.

deGrasse Tyson Interstellar Last Scene Explained

The questions raised in this scene aren’t just plot-filler, they’re some of the most profound questions in the universe – epistemological themes, or stances taken on how we understand the world are hallmarks of Christopher Nolan’s directing style .

Interstellar Movie Explained (Continued)

Interstellar ending explained: part ii.

After Cooper successfully communicates the quantum data to Murph, he’s kicked out of the tesseract. Some time later, he wakes up on “Cooper Station” – a space station that’s orbiting Saturn. There he finds Murph on her deathbed; having saved humanity from extinction with the quantum data. Let’s read through their final conversation together.

Read the Interstellar Ending Scene Explained

The Interstellar meaning lies somewhere between astronomical science and intimate human connection. It’s simultaneously a story about traversing the stars and fighting for what you love. For many critics, it’s this dual-narrative structure that makes the story so good – even if it can be a little scientifically vague and cheesy.

Related Posts

• Read More: Inception Ending Explained →
• Mastering the Shot List Like Christopher Nolan →
• How Nolan Uses Circles to Warp Sight & Sound →

What is Tenet About?

Interstellar isn’t the only Christopher Nolan movie that left audiences scratching their heads. His 2020 film Tenet is just as, if not more confounding than Interstellar . In this next article, we break down the plot of Tenet and analyze some of the film’s biggest events.

Up Next: Tenet Movie Plot Explained →

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'Interstellar' Explained: Timeline, Ending, Themes, and Meaning

Get ready to travel through time and space with christopher nolan..

Interstellar is loud, sentimental, and filled with advanced scientific theories that work for the story, but are mostly theoretical in real life. I'm not one of those people who sit down to pluck apart the scientific plausibility of a screenplay unless I think it takes away from the story. In the case of Interstellar , I think it adds to it.

Interstellar juggles many different timeframes for the story. We cross from what's going on within Earth to the surface level of foreign planets, to the circling ship, and then to a fifth dimension that unites all of them. That's a lot to explain, so we're going to try to do it together.

Today, I want to get into the meaning and explanation for the movie Interstellar and even go over what happens in the movie. We'll talk about Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan working on the movie together and examine its ongoing themes. I'm excited to dive into this one.

So let's get started.

The Interstellar Movie: Explained

Christopher Nolan is one of the most interesting directors out there. He tackles huge concepts and doesn't dumb them down. A lot of times the audience is working to learn along with the characters, and on the edge of our seats as certain plot points jump out. Let's go through the summary of Interstellar and then tackle explaining the movie and the Interstellar premise.

The Interstellar movie characters

• Matthew McConaughey as Joseph Cooper, a widower and NASA pilot who became a farmer.
• Anne Hathaway as Dr. Amelia Brand, a NASA scientist, and astronaut
• Mackenzie Foy as young Murph
• Ellen Burstyn as old Murph
• John Lithgow as Donald, Cooper's elderly father-in-law
• Michael Caine as Professor John Brand, a high-ranking NASA scientist, ideator of Plan A, former mentor of Cooper, and father of Amelia
• David Gyasi as Romilly, another high-ranking NASA member, and Endurance crew member
• Wes Bentley as Doyle, a high-ranking NASA member, and Endurance crew member
• Timothée Chalamet as young Tom
• Matt Damon as Mann, a NASA astronaut sent to an icy planet during the Lazarus program
• Bill Irwin as TARS (voice and puppetry) and CASE (puppetry)
• Josh Stewart as CASE (voice)
• Topher Grace as Getty, Murph's colleague and love interest
• Leah Cairns as Lois, Tom's wife
• David Oyelowo as School Principal
• Collette Wolfe as Ms. Hanley
• William Devane as Williams, another NASA member
• Elyes Gabel as Administrator
• Jeff Hephner as Doctor
• Russ Fega as Crew Chief

Interstellar plot and summary

The year is 2067, and crop shortages and dust storms have devastated humanity. We meet Cooper, a widower, engineer, and former NASA pilot. Now he’s a mediocre farmer. He and his two kids live with his father-in-law, Donald. His kids are the teenage son, Tom, and his 10-year-old daughter, Murph.

A terrible dust storm leaves a pattern on Murph's bedroom floor. Murph thinks a ghost created them, but the scientific-minded Cooper realizes the patterns were made by gravity variations. After some math, he thinks they represent geographic coordinates in binary code. Cooper and Murph follow the coordinates to a secret NASA facility headed by Professor John Brand, whom Cooper knows from his past life working at NASA.

The NASA scientists fill them in on what’s been going on. Forty-eight years ago, unknown beings placed a wormhole near Saturn, opening a path to a distant galaxy with 12 potentially habitable worlds located near a supermassive black hole named Gargantua. Twelve volunteers traveled through the wormhole to survey the planets, and three—Dr. Mann, Laura Miller, and Wolf Edmunds—reported positive results. The rest are presumed dead.

Brand presents them with two plans to ensure humanity’s survival. Plan A involves developing an antigravitational propulsion theory to propel settlements into space. That is years ahead of the science they have and seems futile. In contrast, Plan B involves launching the Endurance spacecraft carrying 5,000 frozen human embryos to settle on a habitable planet and commence repopulation from there. Then other humans will follow.

Cooper is one of the only pilots left on Earth who can complete a mission like Plan B, so he decides to lead the charge, leaving his family behind. Also going are Dr. Amelia Brand (Prof. Brand's daughter), Dr. Doyle, and Romilly. Before leaving, Cooper gives an upset Murph his watch to track the time for when he returns. She’s so sad she won’t even say goodbye.

What happens on the water planet?

The wormhole takes the crew to Miller's planet. Due to Gargantua's proximity, time is severely dilated. Every hour on the planet equals seven Earth years. Romilly remains aboard Endurance to research Gargantua, while Cooper, Doyle, and Brand descend in a landing craft to investigate the water planet for one hour. The group finds Miller's shipwreck just before a giant wave kills Doyle.

Cooper and Brand barely survive, and their delayed departure results in them reaching Endurance 23 years later in Earth time, though only a few hours for them.

What happens to Cooper’s family?

It’s a brutal blow to start the mission. Back aboard, Cooper is forced to watch videos to catch up on what’s happened in the 23 years he left earth. Seeing his kids grow, his father-in-law die, and even getting some grandkids. His son has become a farmer like his father-in-law. His daughter now works at NASA like him. They're both doing their best to figure out what life is like without a dad.

Cooper and his crew are forced to soldier on. The crew travels to Mann's planet, where they revive him from cryostasis.

Meanwhile, now a NASA scientist herself, Murph has transmitted a message claiming Cooper and Brand knew that Plan A was never viable because it required tech and data from inside the black hole. Cooper intends to return to Earth to be with his daughter, while Brand and Romilly will remain on Mann's planet for permanent habitation. But in a big twist, Mann reveals that he sent falsified data to be rescued—the planet is not fit for human life. He attempts to kill Cooper and then steals a lander and heads for Endurance. Romilly is killed by a booby trap. Brand and Cooper pursue Mann in another lander.

What happens in the docking scene?

Mann is killed during a failed docking operation, severely damaging the ship Endurance.

Mann and Cooper manage to board, but now don’t have enough fuel to reach Edmunds' planet—which is their last hope for finding a place for humanity to relocate. They do some complex math and decide to attempt a slingshot maneuver so close to Gargantua that time dilation adds another 51 years to the already long journey.

The Ending of Interstellar

Cooper and the robot TARS actually jettison from the rocket to shed weight and then propel Endurance so it can reach Edmunds' planet. In turn, Cooper and TARS land inside a massive four-dimensional space called a tesseract.

As he drifts inside, Cooper sees through the bookcases of Murph's old bedroom and weakly interacts with its gravity, realizing he was Murph's "ghost." He sent the coordinates.

The Interstellar bookshelf scene

Cooper theorizes that the tesseract was constructed by humans from the far future who have access to infinite time and space.

He thinks Cooper realizes he and TARS were brought there to relay information to Murph that is critical to the survival of humankind. Cooper uses gravitational waves to encode NASA's coordinates in the dust patterns in Murph's room before manipulating the second hand of Murph's wristwatch using Morse code to transmit all the data that TARS collected from within Gargantua so that Plan A can work.

On Earth, the adult Murph realizes the "ghost" is her father and deciphers the message to solve for Plan A.

The Interstellar ending scene

The tesseract spits Cooper out, and he wakes up on a futuristic space habitat orbiting Saturn, where he reunites with an elderly Murph—who is on her deathbed. Using the quantum data Cooper sent, the younger Murph solved the gravitational theory for Plan A, enabling humanity's exodus from Earth and transformation into a spacefaring civilization.

Murph urges Cooper to return to Brand to have the rest of his life. Her life is now complete. Cooper and TARS take a spacecraft to fly to Edmunds' planet, where Brand prepares a base for Plan B.

Interstellar movie breakdown

Interstellar movie timeline infographic.

To actually understand all the timelines and to explain the movie Interstellar , I thought it might help to see the visuals.

This infographic is the work of Frametale , an entertainment marketing agency with offices in Los Angeles and Istanbul, led by creative director Dogan Can Gundogdu. They have work that's appeared in lots of different films, commercials, and television shows. It explains the time dilation at the center of the story.

The Interstellar meaning and movie explanation

Set in a future where a failing Earth puts humanity on the brink of extinction, it sees a team of NASA scientists, engineers, and pilots attempt to find a new habitable planet via interstellar travel . Of course, the trip has a lot of bumps along the way. And we see humanity suffer as they try to become a multi-planetary species.

At its core, this is a movie about humanity's sacrifices to survive. It's about how pioneers are willing to lay down their own lives so that an entire species might go on.

At the center of this is one family, the Coopers, who dedicate their lives to space travel so that others might live.

What happened to Earth in Interstellar ?

Our pollutants made the earth unstable for human life, so everyone leaves to travel to another planet.

Does Brand die in interstellar ?

The older Dr. Brand does die during the pursuit of Plan A. The younger Dr. Brand is able to get to the Plan B planet and is waiting there for Cooper at the end of the movie.

How long was Cooper in space in Interstellar ?

While we don't know the exact amount of time, you can guess by Murph's age that he's spent almost 100 years looking for planets, but to him, it may have only been a matter of weeks.

The theme of Interstellar and the movie's meaning

For me, I think the themes of this movie lie in the story of family and survival. We're all one humankind, and despite our differences, the ability to survive and move on should trump anything we have against each other.

We need to see past the problems and unite for the much bigger and much more important causes. When it comes to family, love can transcend generations and keep us united although far apart. Sometimes you have to sacrifice to make sure the best happens for you and your offspring.

Summarizing the Interstellar movie, explained

Hopefully, by reading all of these parts, you've gotten your biggest questions about the movie answered. It's a deep journey into humanity and our quest to live amongst the stars. While the journey might be confusing with all the time jumps and multiple planets and plans, I think it just requires rewatching and concentration.

Roger Ebert once called film the ultimate empathy machine . It's a window into all kinds of humanity. A way to see more of the world and to confront what makes us human.

It's hard to find a better example of this sentiment than Nolan's Interstellar . It's a movie about the sacrifices we make to ensure humanity continues to survive, even as the lead character watches his own children die from afar. And somehow, humanity gets better for it, and his grandchildren get to live.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

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What Is an Anthology Series? Definition and Examples from Film and TV

Are you a fan of anthology tv series can you define them and give examples .

I watch so many TV shows that I can get a little burnt out after a while. Sometimes when you binge or watch multiple seasons with the same characters, you might feel this way too. Well, the anthology series might be your new favorite thing.

They're sort of the best of TV and movies mixed into one thing. It's various plots and characters that take you on new adventures.

But what is an anthology series? And what are some examples of them in TV?

Today we're going to define anthology TV shows and go over a few from Netflix, FX, and all sorts of other channels.

Make sense? Let's get started.

What Is an Anthology Series?

Anthology series cover all sorts of media, from radio to novels to short films to TV shows and so on. The world loves diversity in characters, storylines, and situations. These series open up different seasons and even episodes to change.

Anthology Series Definition

An anthology series is a radio, television, video game, or a film series that presents a different story and a different set of characters. They make these switches in each episode, season, segment, or short, as determined by the creators.

Why Do Writers and Directors Like Anthology Series?

As I mentioned in the opener, as a viewer, I like the contestant switch of characters , situations, and stories. Well, writers and directors like that too. Anthology series allow creatives to play with different genres , characters, and situations while maintaining a clear title.

Series can be sold by genre or by characters or even by place. They have a ton of elbow room for people to play with different ideas. They keep them from getting too stagnant or overstaying their welcome.

What Are the Best Anthology Series?

There are so many excellent series out there. Some of my favorites are American Horror Story, Love, Death, and Robots, and most of True Detective . The ability to change stories and characters has always been interesting to me.

TV shows like The Twilight Zone are sold on the idea that they can change weekly. They explore different big ideas. They can scare you, make you laugh, and even be a place where you can take a small idea and twist it into something larger.

Horror anthologies, TV shows like Tales from the Crypt , do their best to scare people week in and out. where a traditional horror TV show might lose its luster after you get used to the scares, anthologies let you terrify people every week with something different.

I think it's hard just arbitrarily to pick the best. So instead, here are some examples from lots of different genres.

Adult Animation Anthology Series

• The Boys Presents: Diabolical (2022)
• Cake (2019–present)
• Cartoon Sushi (1997–98)
• Greatest Party Story Ever (2016)
• Jokebook (1982)
• Like, Share, Die (2015)
• Liquid Television (1991–1994)
• Love, Death & Robots (2019–present)
• Off the Air (2011–present)
• Party Legends (2016–17)
• Robot Chicken (2005–present)
• Spicy City (1997)
• Sunday Pants (2005–06)
• Children and Family
• ABC Afterschool Special (1972–1997)
• ABC Weekend Special (1977–1997)
• CBS Afternoon Playhouse (1978–1983)
• CBS Children's Film Festival (1967–1978)
• CBS Children's Mystery Theatre (1980–1982)
• CBS Schoolbreak Special (1984–1996)
• CBS Storybreak (1985–1987)
• Disneyland (1954–1958)
• Dramarama (1983–1989)
• Faerie Tale Theatre (1982–1987)
• The Fox Cubhouse (1994–1996) (contains Johnson and Friends, Jim Henson's Animal Show, Rimba's Island, Magic Adventures of Mumfie and Budgie the Little Helicopter)
• It's Itsy Bitsy Time (1999) (contains Budgie the Little Helicopter, 64 Zoo Lane, The Animal Shelf, Tom and Vicky, and Charley and Mimmo)
• Jackanory (UK, 1972–1985)
• Lift Off (1992–1995)
• NBC Children's Theatre (1963–1973)
• Noddy (1998–2000)
• Off to See the Wizard (1967–68)
• Once Upon a Classic (1976–1980)
• Shining Time Station (1989–1993)
• Shirley Temple's Storybook (1958–1961)
• Special Treat, also known as NBC Special Treat (1975–1986)
• Tall Tales and Legends (1985–1987)
• Walt Disney Presents (1958–1961)
• Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color (1961–1969)
• The Wonderful World of Disney (1969–2009)
• WonderWorks (1984)
• The Wubbulous World of Dr. Seuss (1996–98)

Comedy Anthology Series

• The Comic Strip Presents... (1982–2015)
• Carol and Company (1990–91)
• Cilla's Comedy Six (UK, 1975)
• Cilla's World of Comedy (UK, 1976)
• Comedy Lab (1998–)
• Comedy Playhouse (UK, 1961–2014)
• Dear Uge (2016–)
• Dr. Terrible's House of Horrible (2001)
• The Eddie Cantor Comedy Theatre (1955)
• El Chapulín Colorado (1973–1979)
• Ripping Yarns (UK, 1978–79)
• George Burns Comedy Week (1985)
• Good Heavens (1976)
• The Guest Book (2017–2018)
• High Maintenance (2012–2015, 2016–present)
• Human Remains (2000)
• Inside No. 9 (2014–)
• Oboler Comedy Theater (1949)
• Love, American Style (1969–1974)
• Miracle Workers (2019–present)
• Murder Most Horrid (UK, 1991–1999)
• The Ronnie Barker Playhouse (UK, 1968)
• Seven of One (UK, 1973)
• Six Dates with Barker (UK, 1971)
• Undressed (1999–2002)

Crime Anthology Series

• Adventure Theater (1956)
• American Crime (2015–2017)
• American Crime Story (2016–)
• Agatha Christie's Marple (UK, 2005–2014)
• Agatha Christie's Poirot (UK, 1989–2014)
• The Big Story (1949–1958)
• The Black Robe, also known as Police Night Court (1949–1950)
• Crime Patrol (2003–)
• Fargo (2014–)
• FBI: The Untold Stories (1991–1993)
• Gang Busters (1952, 1954–55)
• Lawbreakers (1963–64)
• The Man Behind the Badge (1953–1955)
• Official Detective (1957–58)
• Police Call (1955)
• Police Story (1952)
• Police Story (1973–1978)
• Tatort (1970–)
• The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (UK, 1971–1973)
• They Stand Accused (1949–1952, 1954)
• True Detective (2014–2019)
• Underbelly (2008–)
• The Walter Winchell File (1957–58)
• The Whistler (1954–55)
• The Sinner (2017–2021)
• Educational
• Inside/Out (1972–73)
• Omnibus (US, 1952–1961)

Historical Anthology Series

• Captain Newfoundland from the Tip of Atlantis/Captain Atlantis Late Night (Canada, 1972–present)
• The Great Adventure (1963–64)
• Our American Heritage (1959–1961)
• Profiles in Courage (1964–65)
• Saga of Western Man (1963–1969)
• You are There (1953–1957)

Medical Anthology Series

• The Doctor, also known as The Visitor (1952–53)
• Medic (1954–1956)
• Medical Story (1975–76)

Military Anthology Series

• Flight (1958–59)
• Men of Annapolis (1957–58)
• Navy Log (1955–1958)
• The Silent Service (1957–1959)
• The West Point Story aka West Point (1956–57)
• Mystery and suspense
• Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955–1965)
• Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1985–89)
• Behind Closed Doors (1958 TV series) (1958–59)
• The Best in Mystery (1954)
• The Boris Karloff Mystery Playhouse (1949)
• Byline, also known as Adventures in Mystery and News Gal (1951)
• The Chevy Mystery Show (1960)
• The Clock (1949–1952)
• Danger (1950–1955)
• Dark of Night (1952–1954)
• Darkroom (1981–82)
• Dow Hour of Great Mysteries (1960)
• The Edgar Wallace Mystery Theatre (US TV version of British theatrical second features, 1960–1965)
• Escape (1950)
• Escape (1973)
• Espionage (1963–64)
• Eye Witness (1953)
• Fallen Angels (1993–1995)
• George Sanders Mystery Theater (1957)
• Hands of Mystery, also known as Hands of Destiny, Hands of Murder (1949–1952)
• The Hitchhiker (1983–1987)
• I Spy (1955–1957)
• Inner Sanctum (1954)
• Invitation Playhouse: Mind Over Murder (1952)
• Kraft Mystery Theatre (Summer 1961, 1962, 1963)
• Kraft Suspense Theatre (1963–1965)
• Mr. Arsenic (1952)
• Murder in Mind (2001–2003)
• Murder Most Horrid (UK, 1991–99)
• Mystery! (1980–)
• Panic! (1957–58)
• Philip Morris Playhouse (1953–54)
• Rebound, also known as Counterpoint (1952–53)
• Scene of the Crime (1991–92)
• Stage 13 (1950)
• Sure as Fate (1950–51)
• Suspense (1949–1954)
• Suspicion (1957–58)
• Target (1958)
• Twisted Tales (1996–97)
• Two Twisted (2006) (Sequel to Twisted Tales)
• The Vise (1955 TV series) (1955–57)
• Volume One (1949)
• The Web (1950–1954)
• The Web, syndication title Undercurrent (1957)
• Your Play Time (1953–1955)

Science Fiction and Horror Anthology Series

• Alcoa Presents: One Step Beyond
• Amazing Stories (original series)
• Amazing Stories (reboot)
• American Horror Story
• American Horror Stories
• Are You Afraid of the Dark?
• Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction
• Black Mirror
• Castle Rock
• Channel Zero
• Deadtime Stories
• Dimension 404
• Electric Dreams (2017 TV series)
• Fantasy Island
• Fear and Fancy
• Fear Itself
• The Fearing Mind
• Freddy's Nightmares – A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Series
• Friday the 13th: The Series
• Ghost Stories
• Ghost Story
• Great Ghost Tales
• The Haunting
• Historias para no dormir
• Infinity Train
• Inside No 9
• Into the Dark
• Journey to the Unknown
• Lee Martin's The Midnight Hour
• Love, Death & Robots
• Masters of Horror
• Masters of Science Fiction
• Métal Hurlant Chronicles
• Mystery and Imagination
• Night Gallery
• Night Visions
• The Nightmare Room
• Nightmare Cafe
• Nightmares & Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King
• Out of the Unknown
• Out of This World
• The Outer Limits
• Perversions of Science
• Play for Tomorrow
• Quinn Martin's Tales of the Unexpected
• The Ray Bradbury Theater
• R.L. Stine's The Haunting Hour
• Science Fiction Theatre
• Strange Stories
• Tales from the Darkside
• Tales from the Crypt
• Tales of Mystery
• Tales of Mystery and Imagination
• Tales of the Unexpected
• Tales of Tomorrow
• The Twilight Zone (original series)
• The Twilight Zone (first reboot)
• The Twilight Zone (second reboot)
• The Twilight Zone (third reboot)
• The Unexpected
• Urban Gothic
• Welcome to Paradox
• What If...?
• Star Wars: Visions

What Are Keys to Writing An Anthology Series?

Writing an anthology series presents a unique set of challenges and opportunities compared to traditional serialized storytelling. Here are some key considerations and steps to keep in mind when developing an anthology series:

• Identify a unifying theme or concept that ties together each installment. Whether it's a genre (e.g., horror as in "The Twilight Zone") or a more abstract theme (e.g., technology's impact on society as in "Black Mirror"), having a strong central theme will give your anthology coherence.
• Given that each episode or installment will be its own unique story, it's a chance to bring in different writers, directors, and actors for each. This diversity can provide a richness of perspectives, styles, and voices.
• Despite varying stories and possibly varying creators, maintain a consistent tone throughout. This could be achieved through similar pacing, mood, visual aesthetics, or musical choices.
• Since each story will be relatively short, characters need to be quickly and effectively established. Dive into the heart of the characters' motivations and conflicts to immediately draw the audience in.
• Each installment should be satisfying on its own. While some anthologies might have subtle connections or Easter eggs between episodes, each episode should have a clear beginning, middle, and end.
• One of the joys of an anthology series is the opportunity to experiment. Consider varying the structure, setting, time period, or narrative style from one episode to the next.
• Many successful anthology series resonate because they tap into current societal fears, hopes, or dilemmas. Think about the larger themes or questions you want to explore and how they relate to the world today.
• Given the standalone nature of each installment, it's important to provide resolutions that feel both unexpected and earned.

Remember, the beauty of an anthology series is its flexibility. By keeping these guidelines in mind but also allowing for creative freedom and experimentation, you can create a compelling and memorable series that captures the imagination of your audience.

Summing Up "What Is An Anthology Series?"

Now that you know what an anthology series is, you can go create your own. Enjoy the freedom of writing new characters and worlds with each season or episode.

Before you go, let us know what your favorite anthology series is in the comments!

What Are the Best Mystery Movies of All Time?

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Interstellar (United States/United Kingdom, 2014)

Christopher Nolan has never shied away from a challenge and the one he has taken on with Interstellar may be his most prodigious thus far - bigger than delivering an end-to-start chronology in Memento , more impressive than the mind-bending contortions of Inception , and more daunting than re-imagining Batman into the most unique superhero franchise of the 21st century. Interstellar is 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. It's an amazing achievement that deserves to be seen on the biggest screen with the best sound system possible. Nolan has crafted Interstellar as a movie theater experience. Watching it at home, no matter how good the sound system is, won't match. This is one time when the IMAX surcharge is worth it.

Interstellar is science fiction . It's not space opera. It's not futuristic fantasy. It's what the term "science fiction" was coined to represent. It presents a viable future in which space travel, while possible, is dangerous and uncertain. Starships aren't zipping from planet to planet. Space craft aren't firing lasers, phasers, or photon torpedoes. Travel across long distances uses the dangerous and unpredictable method of entering a wormhole, not engaging Warp One or making the jump to hyperspace. Time dilation comes into effect in the presence of a black hole and there's even a little bit about the relationship between quantum mechanics and relativity. This isn't Star Wars , Star Trek , or Guardians of the Galaxy , and anyone who approaches it with such expectations will be disappointed. It's more along the lines of recent movies like Contact (which also starred Matthew McConaughey) and Gravity in that it acknowledges science rather than ignoring the rules of reality as we understand them.

It will be difficult to find a review of Interstellar that doesn't reference 2001: A Space Odyssey and there's a valid reason for that. Nolan at times uses Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece as a template, especially during moments of grandeur. Hans Zimmer's score is no less crucial to Interstellar than "Also Sprach Zarathustra" was to 2001 . Yet, this is no mere copy of Kubrick's film; in fact, it goes far afield. There's heroism, a la The Right Stuff . It's also a warmer, more emotional experience - less stately and abstruse. In fact, found at the core of this big budget adventure is the most relatable thing imaginable: the feelings of love and trust that bind father and daughter. It's almost a fusion of Kubrick and Spielberg.

Interstellar opens at an unspecified future date in America's farm belt. Although the film is careful not to identify a year, it's probably around 2050. The world has fallen victim to famine caused by overpopulation and a blight that is killing crops and creating massive dust storms. With nitrogen on the rise in the atmosphere, total asphyxiation is the inevitable endgame. Earth as a bastion of humanity is doomed. Former NASA engineer and test pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) owns acres of corn that he farms along with his family: son Tom, daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy), and father-in-law Donald (John Lithgow). Drawn by almost supernatural means to a chain-link fence around a super-secret location, Cooper finds himself face-to-face with what remains of his former employer: an underground think-tank dedicated to saving the human race. Led by Professor Brand (Michael Caine), NASA has developed two plans. The first involves creating a massive space vehicle to transport as many humans as possible into outer space. The second involves using frozen embryos to colonize a distant world. There are problems with Plan A - namely, overcoming gravity to launch the massive space ship - but Brand is convinced he can solve the necessary equations that will make this possible.

Cooper learns that a wormhole has appeared in space near Saturn, presumably placed there by (alien) entities of great intelligence intent upon giving humanity a path of survival. Ten years ago, astronauts were sent through to scout the dozen potentially habitable planets on the other side. Now another craft must make the journey to determine humankind's final destination. Mindful that his children's future is at stake, Cooper agrees to pilot the craft. He is accompanied by a small crew of four: Brand's daughter, Amelia (Anne Hathaway); scientists Doyle (Wes Bentley) and Romilly (David Gyasi); and the sardonic robot TARS (Bill Irwin), who recalls HAL 9000. Murph is resentful of her father for abandoning her - an anger she nurses into adulthood, when (now played by Jessica Chastain), she becomes Brand's second-in-charge working for the same entity that took her father away from her.

Like Contact , Interstellar displays an uncanny knack for making complex physics accessible to laymen (partial credit to Executive Producer and CalTech physicist Kip Thorne). Yes, there are times when the dialogue is dense but it never becomes impenetrable (although there are some odd passages, such as one in which Cooper and Amelia discuss the meaning of "love"). Does the movie occasionally fudge? Of course, but it sticks closer to Einstein's laws than most space-faring movies and when it speculates, it does so in a believable manner.

The movie remains Earthbound for its first 45 minutes, establishing a dire scenario for the planet and depicting the day-to-day struggles of those who survive in this blasted, inhospitable future. Most importantly, however, this part of the film establishes the closeness of the relationship between Cooper and Murph and introduces the mystery of "them" - the mysterious "ghosts" who will play a part on the periphery for the rest of the movie. In the end, Cooper must embrace the philosophy that "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." He promises to Murph that he will return, knowing he may not be able to keep that promise.

Once in space, the white knuckle moments begin. Limiting the use of CGI, Nolan relies on practical effects to craft a movie that feels more like a real journey than a video game. There are some tremendous action set pieces and the narrative is wonderfully unpredictable. The movie takes some chances with its endgame, which resolves a lot of plot points but at times seems rushed. Interstellar is at its most complex during its final 20 minutes and even those who pay rapt attention may leave the theater with some unanswered questions.

The film is nearly three hours but there's enough story here for something a lot longer. In condensing it, Nolan has made something 169 minutes in length that breezes by faster than many productions half its length. He accomplishes this by establishing a blistering pace during Interstellar 's meatier sections, including expert cross-cutting between Earth and space during a powerful "fire and ice" sequence.

Visually, Interstellar looks great. Nolan understands all the facets of special effects technology (except, perhaps, old age makeup) and uses them to their best. Hans Zimmer delivers an operatic score that, although occasionally drowning out dialogue (more a mixing issue than a scoring one), adds to the overall experience. Sound is important to Interstellar - when the rocket lifts off around the 45-minute mark, the bass shakes the entire theater.

It has been a tremendous year for McConaughey. From Dallas Buyers Club to True Detective to Interstellar , he has won a Golden Globe and an Oscar and been nominated for an Emmy. Interstellar will give him another opportunity for Academy recognition: he's the glue that holds everything together. He's the human factor in a vast universe. His love for his daughter and his pain when he acknowledges her despair invests this movie with a warmth and feeling that no previous Nolan movie can boast. The supporting cast, which includes Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, and Michael Caine, is strong, but McConaughey represents the heart and soul of Interstellar .

For those who appreciate the Mobius strip approach Nolan is known for, Interstellar offers a little of that. There are some twists and non-chronological jumps, although not so many that the story becomes confusing or unintelligible. Time dilation (the slowing down of time for those in close proximity to a dense gravitational source) isn't just a convenient plot device; it's an integral element of the narrative. Like nearly everything else in Interstellar , it is used effectively.

For anyone with a hunger for real science fiction rather than the crowd-pleasing, watered-down version Hollywood typically offers (and that I often enjoy immensely), Interstellar is a satisfying entrée. I'd rank this alongside Memento and The Dark Knight as the best Nolan has done, and it's an immediate contender for one of 2014's best. The film deserves the label of an "experience" and the bigger the venue, the more immersive it will be. As event movies go, this is one of the most unique and mesmerizing.

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• Star Wars: A New Hope (1977)
• Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
• Aliens (1986)
• Howard the Duck (1986)
• After Earth (2013)
• Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (1983)
• Shrek (2001)
• Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)
• Civil Action, A (1998)
• Confessions of a Shopaholic (2009)
• Good Man in Africa, A (1994)
• Orange County (2002)
• Cider House Rules, The (1999)
• Sleuth (1969)
• Mona Lisa (1969)
• Bewitched (2005)
• Blame it on Rio (1984)
• Miss Congeniality (2000)
• Saving Private Ryan (1998)
• Courage Under Fire (1996)
• Departed, The (2006)
• Suburbicon (2017)
• Promised Land (2012)
• Great Wall, The (2017)

Movie reviews, Oscar predictions, and more!

Interstellar Movie Review — Christopher Nolan’s most epic, but human movie yet

Interstellar  is a visual masterpiece that has a human touch that propels it to greatness. it is perhaps one of the best space movies ever made..

Christopher Nolan isn’t one known to be taciturn when it comes to his movies. Even his smaller movies like Momento have grand structures bolstering their simple plots. However, Interstellar is easily is first brush with the epic — unless you consider the full Dark Knight trilogy as one. On paper, it should not work. A sweeping narrative covering different times and worlds would be eaten up by audiences. That’s why Gravity found so much success financially and at the Oscars. But Nolan does something completely different with Interstellar . He introduces science in a way that isn’t watered down or ignored. His film, according to astrophysicists, is completely plausible. Though that fact makes the movie a hard one to digest for viewers, the end result is an incredible study of human nature and our desire to survive.

Food is running out. The world is becoming overpopulated. The Yankees look nothing more than a high school baseball team. A crop blight is threatening the very existence of the human race. Nolan drops into this terrifyingly realistic future plagued with dust storms and the risk of the world simply ending within grasp. With this, the nation turns its attention to farmers and away from the sciences and engineers to save the world.

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However, Joseph Cooper ( Matthew McConaughey ) who was once a pilot for NASA, maintains his faith in STEM. After a dust storm, a mysterious gravitational disturbance leads him back to the formerly disbanded agency. He discovers that NASA, led by Dr. Brand (Nolan regular Michael Caine ) and his daughter Dr. Amelia Brand ( Anne Hathaway ) have discovered a wormhole. “One system with three potential worlds,” as Amelia puts. it. Something, or someone, has given the human race a chance to live by presenting them with potential new planets to call home.

Cooper is given the seemingly possible decision to leave his children forever, potentially, or save the humanity from extinction. Choosing the latter, he embarks into an incredible mission on the ship Endurance. He, along with Amelia, Dr. Doyle ( Wes Bently ), and Dr. Romilly ( David Gyasi ) set off to assess the three worlds to choose where to start a new civilization.

Back on earth, Murphy Cooper ( Jessica Chastain ), who grows up while her father is gone, begins to help Dr. Brand determine the formula to get humans off of earth in a mass exodus.

While wormholes and other worlds seem like the work of science fiction, the science is very real. Though throughout the movie it sometimes gets a little confusing, with a little thinking you can piece it together. Essentially, it’s the Neil DeGrasse Tyson of movies. The science is explained in a non-condescending way.

One of the most surprising elements of Interstellar is not the story or the science, but the sentimentality. It’s shockingly emotional and often heartbreaking. In fact, parts of it gutted me. Whether it’s surprising because of the director or the premise is anybody’s guess. However, the grasp it has on humanity is both refreshing and welcome. Especially in the science fiction genre, a human factor is usually missing. But Nolan and the screenplay exhibit human nature for all its beauty and destruction.

We have an innate desire to survive. That’s why the people on earth in Interstellar begin to lose faith in the dream to leave the planet. They are thinking of how they can solve the problems on Earth. The very idea of the movie is thinking of a way to save our race. However, the movie explores the selfish motivations we also innately have. The way it is explored is surprising and devastating.

But it’s not just the screenplay and direction that exudes that. The ensemble was tasked with accessing emotions that humans would actually feel in these situations. Overall, the entire cast is phenomenal. However, there are three standouts for me. The first is Matthew McConaughey . I think it’s very unfortunate that he won his Oscar for Dallas Buyers Club. Not to take away from that performance. His performance in Interstellar is an incredible meditation on one of the hardest questions for humans: how much will you sacrifice for the greater good. There is no better way to show this than when he is watching messages from his kids as the years go by. This is the best performance of his career.

Check Out:  “Arrival” Movie Review: One of the Best Sci-Fi Movies of the Decade

The other two performances that stood out were the two actresses that portrayed Murph. Mackenzie Foy breaks any stigma surrounding child actors with a really naturalistic and heartbreaking performance. She has these knowing gazes that foreshadow the scientific curiosity that follows her throughout her life. Jessica Chastain is an incredible presence as the older Murph. She carries over the knowing gazes, but adds the emotional baggage of years of abandonment by Coop. It is easily one of her most memorable performances.

Masterpiece isn’t a word I take lightly. I’ve said it in probably two reviews on this blog ( Boyhood and Moonlight   – the former I’m less inclined to continue using that phrase). However, I’d call Interstellar a masterpiece of filmmaking. It’s as grand as it is introspective and as grounded as it is existential. By the end of the nearly three-hour running time — it goes by in a flash — you feel as if you’ve experienced something that is so rarely captured on film. If not for the plot or performances, watch it for the stunning visuals that haven’t been seen on the silver screen since perhaps 2001: A Space Odyssey. I think a decade from now we’re going to look back and wonder how we fell asleep to such a grand and sweeping epic. 

★★★★★ out of 5

Get  Interstellar  on DVD, Blu-Ray, or Digital on Amazon or stream for free with Amazon Prime!

Karl Delossantos

Hey, I'm Karl, founder and film critic at Smash Cut. I started Smash Cut in 2014 to share my love of movies and give a perspective I haven't yet seen represented. I'm also an editor at The New York Times, a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, and a member of the Online Film Critics Society.

• Karl Delossantos https://smashcutreviews.com/author/karldelogmail-com/ 12 Years A Slave Movie Review — A Beautiful, Unflinching Film
• Karl Delossantos https://smashcutreviews.com/author/karldelogmail-com/ 2014 Oscar Nominations: Snubs and Surprises
• Karl Delossantos https://smashcutreviews.com/author/karldelogmail-com/ 2014 Oscar Predictions: Best Picture (Updated 2/16)
• Karl Delossantos https://smashcutreviews.com/author/karldelogmail-com/ 2014 Oscar Predictions: Best Director (Is Alfonso Cuarón a Lock to Win?)

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Interstellar Film Review in 300 Words

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Star Trek: Discovery season 5 review - "A spectacular but uneven final voyage"

GamesRadar+ Verdict

A spectacular but uneven final voyage for a spectacular but uneven TV show. With plenty of big ideas and some cute callbacks to classic Trek of the past, it's much more fun than the ultra-serious season 4, but it still can't match the spirit of adventure of Strange New Worlds and Picard's big finale.

Why you can trust GamesRadar+ Our experts review games, movies and tech over countless hours, so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about our reviews policy.

Warning - spoilers for the Star Trek: Discovery series finale follow. If you haven't seen the episode, look away now!

Talk about ambitious. Star Trek: Discovery’s fifth and final season spans the whole breadth of the Star Trek timeline (give or take), all the way from the distant future of the 32nd century back to the origins of humanity (and pretty much every other sentient species in the galaxy) billions of years ago.

Over the course of its 10 episodes, it does its best to tick off as many familiar Trek tropes as possible – the Mirror Universe, virtual reality simulations, wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff – as Captain Burnham and her crew lead us on a whistle-stop tour through key moments in the franchise’s history. And yet, for all its striking ideas and several genuinely thrilling episodes, Discovery’s swan-song can’t help playing it safe.

A treasure hunt

The season’s McGuffin is a bizarre contradiction, an unashamed slice of fan service that also has the potential to alter the Alpha Quadrant as we know it. Back in 1993, The Next Generation episode 'The Chase' provided a cute in-universe explanation for the fact that Klingons, Cardassians, Vulcans, and the vast majority of the galactic population look like humans with prosthetics stuck to their faces. It revealed that an ancient civilisation had seeded the primordial oceans of hundreds of worlds, shaping their evolution and ensuring that their genetic code lived on. But if it ever turned up again, this life-giving “Progenitor” technology could be twisted to become the ultimate doomsday weapon, much like the Genesis torpedo in classic Trek movie The Wrath of Khan.

With Discovery dispatched on a top-secret, race-against-time mission to ensure Starfleet tracks down the tech before anyone else, it develops into the perfect hook for a serialised Star Trek arc. Yes, there’s something inherently ludicrous about pursuing a treasure trail left behind by Federation scientists 800 years earlier (Raiders of the Lost DNA?), but – after an undeniably slow start – this framework allows the writers to add extra urgency to a range of traditional, effectively standalone stories. In this final season, the obligatory Prime Directive story, 'Whistlespeak', carries extra weight because the fate of an entire galaxy depends on whether or not Burnham announces her true space-faring identity to a pre-warp race.

The season is also packed with sci-fi invention, from a Doctor Who-esque library that’s home to all the knowledge in the universe to a journey into multi-dimensional space that plays out like a cross between 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s planet factories. That everything looks eye-poppingly spectacular is almost a given in an era where TV visuals regularly match their movie counterparts, but that doesn’t mean the VFX team don’t deserve a huge round of applause.

A sidelined crew

For all the leaps forward made by season 5, however, it turns out that the problems of the 32nd century never really went away. It remains a big disappointment, for example, that the Discovery crew have never encountered a worthy adversary in the distant future. Admittedly, despite displaying plenty of underdog ingenuity, interstellar Bonnie and Clyde duo L’ak and Moll were never likely to be the biggest bads on the game board. But bringing back the Breen, ruthless accomplices of the Dominion in the final season of Deep Space Nine, doesn’t fit the bill either.

With a general air of mystery (an incomprehensible language, gelatinous anatomy) and armor pinched wholesale from Princess Leia’s Boushh disguise in Return of the Jedi – their updated look in Discovery shouldn’t concern copyright lawyers quite so much – the Breen worked because we knew so little about them. But by giving us a glimpse behind the mask, that mystique evaporates as quickly as Boba Fett’s did in his self-titled TV show. Even with all that firepower behind the Imperium, the revelation that L’ak is the first Breen face we’ve ever seen on screen is more likely to generate a “huh?” than a “wow”.

But even more frustrating is the show’s ongoing inability to get the best out of its crew. Of all the Treks, Discovery features the least balanced ensemble, so over-reliant on the borderline superheroics of Michael Burnham (is there any puzzle she can’t solve?) that it’s still a struggle to name half of the bridge officers.

Sidelining familiar faces Detmer and Owosekun for the second half of the season is a weird choice (they’re nominally flying the Mirror Universe Enterprise back to base), while even names higher up the cast list feel short-changed. Saru – a former captain of the Discovery, don’t forget – arguably gets his best moment off-screen, when it’s revealed that his Mirror Universe counterpart instigated a rebellion. And it almost seems unfair that the season’s most satisfying arc should belong to the ship’s wonderfully prickly new first officer, Rayner (Battlestar Galactica’s Callum Keith Rennie), one of the few characters who doesn’t sound like they’ve swallowed a book of motivational quotes.

An implausibly neat bow

At the end of a season that – once again – sees every visible member of the crew defy impossible odds to make it to the end in one piece, the inevitable flash-forward coda ties things up in an implausibly neat bow. Book, in particular, appears to have been kept on board simply to prolong his on/off romance with Michael, and there’s something a little too contrived about their grown-up, Starfleet captain son turning up to introduce his new ship: the USS Discovery-A (especially after Picard’s son, Jack, did the exact same thing with the Enterprise-G in the Star Trek: Picard finale ).

Still, long-term fans will get a kick out of the revelation that the incongruous, suit-and-tie-wearing Dr Kovich (played by legendary director David Cronenberg) is actually Crewman Daniels, the time agent from Star Trek: Enterprise. They’ll also enjoy the nod to Discovery computer Zora’s upcoming meeting with a man named Craft in the even further future of Short Trek episode 'Calypso'.

But, like the two 32nd century-set seasons that preceded it, Discovery’s fun but uneven final voyage struggles to live up to the brave, twist-heavy storytelling that was a hypo-spray in the arm for a veteran franchise when the show launched in 2017. Discovery always did its best to boldly go where no one had gone before, but when it comes to exploring strange new worlds, there’s no question others did it better.

Star Trek: Discovery season 5 is available on Paramount Plus in the US and the UK.

For more, check out our guide to the  best Star Trek episodes  that every Trekkie should watch right now.

Richard is a freelancer journalist and editor, and was once a physicist. Rich is the former editor of SFX Magazine, but has since gone freelance, writing for websites and publications including GamesRadar+, SFX, Total Film, and more. He also co-hosts the podcast, Robby the Robot's Waiting, which is focused on sci-fi and fantasy. 

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The 10 movies everyone's streaming on Amazon Prime this week

Posted: May 31, 2024 | Last updated: June 1, 2024

Most popular movies on Prime this week

These days, there are more than 2.3 million different titles across streaming platforms, so it's safe to say it can be overwhelming to pick something new to watch. According to a 2023 survey from Nielsen , a fifth of audiences report being so inundated by the sheer quantity of streaming content out there, that when they go to pick something new to watch, they just give up and choose to do something else instead.

If you're in the same boat and often spend more time scrolling through your options than actually watching movies, we're here to help with a ranking of the most popular movies on Prime Video this week.

Since Amazon debuted it nearly two decades ago, Prime Video has developed a reputation for offering an especially well-stocked library of content. As it has continued to grow in popularity with audiences around the world, the platform has expanded its catalog to include a huge variety of Academy Award-winning dramas, classic comedies, nail-biting thrillers, and much more. Plus, Prime has a robust original content slate that includes everything from Oscar nominee "Argentina, 1985" to the horror remake "Goodnight Mommy," both released in 2022.

With many other streamers like AMC+, Paramount+, and Cinemax available as add-ons, Prime Video's offerings are vast and rotate frequently; there's almost always something new to check out (quite literally if you choose to watch through the platform's digital movie rental service).

To help you sort through the tens of thousands of films available to watch on Prime Video, Stacker has compiled a ranking of the 10 most popular movies on the platform this week, using data from Reelgood as of May 30, 2024. Information from IMDb has also been included for further insights.

Now, you can stop wasting your time scrolling through movies and get straight to streaming!

#10. The Notebook

- IMDb user rating: 7.8 (622K reviews) - Runtime: 123 minutes - Genres: Drama and Romance - Director: Nick Cassavetes - Cast: Rachel McAdams, Ryan Gosling, and Gena Rowlands - Release date: June 25, 2004

#9. How to Train Your Dragon

- IMDb user rating: 8.1 (803K reviews) - Runtime: 98 minutes - Genres: Action & Adventure and Animation - Director: Chris Sanders - Cast: Dean DeBlois, Jay Baruchel, and Gerard Butler - Release date: March 18, 2010

#8. Schindler's List

- IMDb user rating: 9 (1M reviews) - Runtime: 195 minutes - Genres: Drama and Biography - Director: Steven Spielberg - Cast: Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, and Ralph Fiennes - Release date: Dec. 15, 1993

#7. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

- IMDb user rating: 7.2 (227K reviews) - Runtime: 134 minutes - Genres: Action & Adventure and Comedy - Director: John Francis Daley - Cast: Jonathan M. Goldstein, Chris Pine, and Michelle Rodriguez - Release date: March 19, 2023

#6. Apocalypse Now

- IMDb user rating: 8.4 (712K reviews) - Runtime: 147 minutes - Genres: Drama and Mystery - Director: Francis Ford Coppola - Cast: Martin Sheen, Frederic Forrest, and Albert Hall - Release date: Aug. 15, 1979

#5. Sicario

- IMDb user rating: 7.7 (479K reviews) - Runtime: 121 minutes - Genres: Drama and Action & Adventure - Director: Denis Villeneuve - Cast: Emily Blunt, Benicio del Toro, and Josh Brolin - Release date: Sept. 17, 2015

#4. Coherence

- IMDb user rating: 7.2 (147K reviews) - Runtime: 89 minutes - Genres: Drama and Mystery - Director: James Ward Byrkit - Cast: Emily Baldoni, Maury Sterling, and Nicholas Brendon - Release date: Aug. 6, 2014

#3. Interstellar

- IMDb user rating: 8.7 (2M reviews) - Runtime: 169 minutes - Genres: Drama and Action & Adventure - Director: Christopher Nolan - Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, and Jessica Chastain - Release date: Nov. 5, 2014

#2. Top Gun: Maverick

- IMDb user rating: 8.2 (704K reviews) - Runtime: 130 minutes - Genres: Drama and Action & Adventure - Director: Joseph Kosinski - Cast: Tom Cruise, Miles Teller, and Jennifer Connelly - Release date: May 21, 2022

- IMDb user rating: 7 (99K reviews) - Runtime: 103 minutes - Genres: Drama and Horror - Director: Ti West - Cast: Mia Goth, David Corenswet, and Tandi Wright - Release date: Sept. 16, 2022

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Screen Rant

What you wish for review: the menu part 2 serves up grotesque twists & delicious character dynamics.

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• What You Wish For has a well-executed, grotesque premise that comments on the nature of the upper class.
• Nick Stahl and Tamsin Topolski, as well as the rest of the cast, portray incredibly tense group dynamics.
• What You Wish For is slightly open-ended, leaving some plot holes unanswered.

Nicholas Tomnay’s What You Wish For is a thriller from which one cannot look away, even if the overall moral of the story falls just short of flawless. The story follows Ryan (Nick Stahl), a down-on-his-luck chef who travels to South America to meet up with his former roommate Jack (Brian Groh) and escape threats due to his gambling debts. Jack, whom Ryan hasn’t seen in a decade, has everything Ryan could want. However, things take a dark turn when Jack dies and Ryan assumes Jack’s identity, only to discover an ugly truth about Jack’s successful career.

What You Wish For (2023)

What you wish for's cast delivers tense group dynamics.

What You Wish For launches us into the beautiful setting of an unspecified South American country, with staging and cinematography that perfectly captures the private residence as well as the city. The first 20 or so minutes is a vivid illustration of professional jealousy, with Ryan dropping some not-so-subtle hints that he is looking for a job and Jack voicing his own woes, which clearly enrages Ryan, even if he maintains a façade of politeness. The two men bring home solo traveler Alice (Penelope Mitchell) for a cooking competition that Ryan wins, but she sleeps with Jack.

The interactions between these three actors are fantastic and painfully relatable to anyone who has experienced similar envy.

The interactions between these three actors are fantastic and painfully relatable to anyone who has experienced similar envy. However, What You Wish For's tension does not ease up once Jack is out of the picture. Ryan comes back to the house to meet two more hospitality professionals who work for Jack’s mysterious employer: Poised hostess Imogen (Tamsin Topolski) and versatile security and muscle Maurice (Juan Carlos Messier). Ryan keeps pretending to be Jack as Imogen explains the dinner for five ultra-wealthy guests they are hosting — with a grotesque twist.

Ryan is by no means a likable protagonist, landing in a morally gray area of self-perseveration and a guilty conscience. Once the real cooking starts, he slips into the role of chef with an uncomfortable but obvious ease. What You Wish For keeps us hooked with the disturbing scenario, and Topolski’s performance is sharp as she badgers Ryan to “get [his] s**t together,” the threat of death and dismemberment looming.

What You Wish For Doesn’t Quite Land On Its Final Point

The similarities to Mark Mylod’s T he Menu are obvious, although What You Wish For can be praised for its premise, which emphasizes both the brutality of the rich and the mental strain and moral degradation of those who rise to work for them. The complete absence of guilt among the dinner guests and Imogen’s justifications are morbidly fascinating. With the slick setting and impeccable professionals (or those trying to appear so) as the backdrop of the twisted story, What You Wish For is an engaging psychological horror.

Not everyone will amass massive gambling debts and will want a successful career for themselves, a plot hole What You Wish For doesn’t exactly address.

However, What You Wish For is a little condescending, with a title that mocks career ambitions and a plot that comes full circle with Ryan expressing his jealousy of another man’s standard and exhausting job. Continuing my comparisons to The Menu , the previous movie ends with a purifying spectacle that suggests there is a way out of the toxic cycle, but not without costs. In contrast, What You Wish For posits that the cycle of working for an evil, self-righteous entity never stops.

What You Wish For is now playing in theaters and available on VOD.

Not everyone will amass massive gambling debts and will want a successful career for themselves, a plot hole What You Wish For doesn’t exactly address. The Menu implies that “Chef” could have been content managing a homey, modestly successful burger joint. What You Wish For concludes that the upper class is horrific and there is no way out for the people who work for them, for a much bleaker ending. However, this finale left me with many more questions, which may have been the point, but doesn’t result in the most satisfying movie.

What You Wish For follows Ryan, a struggling chef with severe gambling problems, who flees to an unnamed Latin American country to escape his debts. His friend Jack, a renowned chef, welcomes him into his luxurious home. Ryan envies Jack’s opulent lifestyle but soon finds out the dark secrets behind it. A twist of fate allows Ryan to assume Jack’s identity, uncovering the sinister means by which Jack has sustained his life of luxury.

• A morbidly fascinating premise with broader implications
• Cast members collectively have great, tense interactions
• Stunning setting and perfect pacing
• Slightly open-ended, with minor plot holes

• Cast & crew

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In a brand new hybrid (live action and animation) short film, the future of humanity hangs in the balance - imagine Eurovision 2989, now an interstellar dance competition with a myriad of al... Read all In a brand new hybrid (live action and animation) short film, the future of humanity hangs in the balance - imagine Eurovision 2989, now an interstellar dance competition with a myriad of alien groups and Earth's human band competing for a prize fund so gigantic it could save our... Read all In a brand new hybrid (live action and animation) short film, the future of humanity hangs in the balance - imagine Eurovision 2989, now an interstellar dance competition with a myriad of alien groups and Earth's human band competing for a prize fund so gigantic it could save our planet from extinction. There's just one problem - Earth is on a notorious losing streak,... Read all

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• May 12, 2024 (United Kingdom)
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