Trailer Trashin’: Christopher Nolan Launches Into Space with Interstellar
Hello again, dear readers. There are only two weeks left in August, and the summer movie season has started winding down. With that in mind, it’s time to start looking ahead to what’s coming out in the fall and winter. And this week’s Trailer Trashin’ examines what looks like a very promising November release – Christopher Nolan’s upcoming sci-fi film Interstellar.
Premise: When a wormhole – which theoretically can connect widely-separated regions of space – is discovered, explorers and scientists unite to embark on a voyage through it, transcending the limits of human space travel. Among the travelers is Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a widowed engineer who decides to leave behind his two children to join the voyage with the goal of saving humanity.
My take: It’s strange to think that it’s been almost ten years since Batman Begins (2005) came out, and British filmmaker Christopher Nolan went from a respected director largely known only to film buffs to one of the most revered figures in movie geekdom. After finishing his Dark Knight trilogy and serving as a producer on the Superman reboot Man of Steel (2013), Nolan has moved on from comic books to other projects. Back in April, he was an executive producer on Transcendence, which is still the worst movie I’ve seen this year. But Nolan is also directing the upcoming science-fiction film Interstellar, due out this November. This is the third trailer we’ve had for Interstellar, and it looks like it could be something special.
There are a lot of notable names in the cast, but we don’t know a lot for sure about many of the characters. The most prominent here is McConaughey as Cooper, an engineer and widower who must make the agonizing decision to leave his children behind and join this mission to save humanity. McCounaughey has delivered a string of great performances over the last several years – including Killer Joe (2011), Mud (2012), The Wolf of Wall Street (2012), Dallas Buyers Club (2013), and the HBO series True Detective – and I hope that hot streak will continue here. Anne Hathaway, who previously worked with Nolan on The Dark Knight Rises (2012), plays Brand, one of Cooper’s fellow astronauts. I thought Hathaway’s Selina Kyle was the best part of that film, and I hope her second collaboration with Nolan will produce similarly good results. When it comes to Cooper’s two kids – his daughter Murphy and son Tom – things are a bit complicated. It’s all-but-confirmed that, because the space voyage takes so long, we are going to see the kids at multiple points in their lives over a long period of time. We know that Mackenzie Foy and Timothée Chalamet play, respectively, Murphy and Tom as kids, and it’s believed that Jessica Chastain and Casey Affleck are playing them as adults. In this trailer, we also briefly see Wes Bentley as another of the astronauts on the voyage, Michael Caine as a scientist, and Topher Grace as a character we can’t really glean much information about.
The imagery on display here is very impressive. We can clearly see how the Earth is slowly going to hell, with the planet being ravaged by dust storms and wildfires. Nolan has said that Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) was a big influence on him, and what we see of the starfields and the wormhole are definitely a tip of the hat to that sci-fi classic. The planet the astronauts land on, which was largely filmed on location in Iceland, looks both beautiful and treacherous, with its heaving seas and endless fields of rock. And the brief glimpses of an odd-looking spaceship and that geometric metal thing rolling across the surface of the lake indicate that the astronauts clearly find something alien out there in the cosmos.
As I’ve discussed before in this column, original big-budget science-fiction is one of the rarest kinds of films to see these days. With studio brass being more reluctant than ever to greenlight a big project that isn’t based on preexisting material, it takes someone with serious clout to get a film like that made. But Christopher Nolan is one such person, and it looks like he might have made something special here. When early November rolls around, you can bet that I’ll be checking out Interstellar at my local theater.
ANTICIPATION: Mankind was born on Earth – it was never meant to watch movies set only there.
Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Bill Irwin, Ellen Burstyn, Michael Caine, Casey Affleck, Topher Grace, John Lithgow, David Gyasi, Wes Bentley, Mackenzie Foy, Timothée Chalamet, David Oyelowo, Matt Damon, Elyes Gabel, Lean Cairns, William Devane, and Collette Wolfe
Director: Christopher Nolan
Writers: Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan
Timothy Monforton
