Interstellar: a science fiction epic worth seeing in theaters

Dec. 4, 2014 | G. Michael Dobbs
news@thereminder.com

By G. Michael Dobbs
news@thereminder.com

A great new movie in theaters and a “Blair Witch” style film that didn’t bore me are featured in this week’s film review column.

In theaters: Interstellar

I’m not a big Christopher Nolan fan. I often admire his films but I find them cold – not unlike those of Stanley Kubrick. He often seems obsessed with presenting mechanically intricate stories such as “The Prestige” or “Inception” without too much concern about having characters that can connect to an audience.

He is best known for his three “Batman” movies and – I know this will sound like heresy – his first one was good, his second was admirable, but his concluding film was just awful.

That’s why I waited a while to see his latest film “Interstellar.” I had to convince myself that investing three hours to watch his science fiction film would potentially be worth it. 

I’m happy to say that at the end of the film I was impressed. I found it a compelling science fiction film with characters for whom I cared.

Nolan drops his audience into a near future. We’re not quite sure what has happened but there has been a global catastrophe that has destroyed much of the planet’s ability to grow food. Matthew McConaughey is Cooper, a former astronaut turned farmer whose daughter Murph (played as a child by Mackenzie Foy and as an adult by Jessica Chastain) thinks a ghost is trying to communicate with her. What Cooper realizes is what his daughter is seeing is actually binary code for a set of coordinates.

He and Murph go there to discover that NASA still exists and is engaged in trying to find another world on which humans could live.

As head scientist, Professor Brand (Michael Caine) said evidence points to the fact that Earth is changing and man will not be able to live there.

Cooper is recruited to fly a mission through a wormhole apparently placed there by the entities who sent him the coordinates. The goal is for him and his crew to connect with astronauts who traveled years before through the wormhole and landed on potential substitute Earths.

Like any good science fiction, there is indeed a mix of science – much is made of how time operates under the Theory of Relativity – and fiction. What Nolan is able to achieve here is an epic story that is scaled down to human proportions.

We care about this crew, which includes Anne Hathaway, and their successes and failures are moving.

Both the visuals and the music cues are reminiscent of Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” but unlike that film the story and the characters actually make sense.

This is a movie for the big screen. Don’t wait to watch it on your TV set. See it now in a theater.
   
On DVD: Robin Williams Remembered

The PBS series “Pioneers of Television” is one of my favorites and this hour-long look at the career of the late comedian combines footage previously presented about his “Mork and Mindy” series with new sequences that include interviews with co-stars such as Pam Dawber and Jonathan Winters as well as fellow comics Whoopi Goldberg and Yakov Smirnoff.

The result is a video eulogy of an outstanding talent who was beloved by his co-workers but who spent his life fighting his personal demons.

It is both a celebration of his life and an insight into people who are fighting depression and addiction.

On DVD: The Hunted

Oh boy, if this film doesn’t wind up in the Red Box, I’d be surprised. Yet another re-working of “The Blair Witch Project,” this found footage horror movie at least will make you jump several times.

Writer, director and star Josh Stewart (whose voice appears in “Interstellar”), plays Jake, a guy who has a dream of having a bow hunting show on a sports cable network. He and his cameraman buddy Stevie (Ronnie Gene Blevins) head up to a piece of West Virginia woods just bought by a hunting guide to film a pilot and bag a big buck.

Stevie has three million cameras it seems that always capture the action and while the trip starts well, both men become increasingly unnerved by the human sounding screaming they hear near their camp.

The premise of “The Blair Witch Project” is the filmmakers in that movie knew nothing about the woods and the forest became an enemy. In this film, Jake is an expert woodsman and hunter. It is not the forest that unnerves him but his growing realization of what may be there.

The problem director Stewart has is in the last quarter of the film in which he apparently abandons the premise of found footage by having straight narrative camera shots accompanied by a musical score. The film would have been better if had been staged as a regular third person narrative.

Still it’s not a bad first directorial effort and it offers something a little bit new to a tired genre.

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