Interstellar, 2014.
Directed by Christoper Nolan.
Starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Bill Irwin, Ellen Burstyn, and Michael Caine.
SYNOPSIS:
Interstellar is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, which is nice but also scary, given how much closer we are to the future world it depicts. Paramount has commemorated the event with an excellent 4K Ultra HD anniversary edition that includes some physical swag and a new bonus feature in addition to the wealth of legacy content that’s been ported over from the earlier disc. Highly recommended.
A decade ago, the future envisioned by Christopher Nolan’s excellent outer space epic Interstellar felt like it was beyond the horizon somewhere. Now, I feel like its vision of the future is staring us in the face.
In my view, it’s the best vision of the not-too-distant future to grace the silver screen in a long time. Maybe the best one since 2001: A Space Odyssey. Yes, Stanley Kubrick’s classic got a lot wrong in retrospect, but at the time, it was a reasonable view of where life might find the human race in the year 2001.
I don’t think Interstellar ever specifies the year of its setting, but it’s obviously some time in the next 20-30 years. Humanity is in the ropes thanks to climate change, with crop blights and dust storms wreaking havoc on farms like the one run by Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) and his kids, “Murph,” his daughter, and Tom, his son.
John Lithgow plays Donald, Cooper’s aging father-in-law, while Michael Caine takes on the role of Professor John Brand, a NASA scientist who knew Cooper when he was a test pilot. Through a serious of seeming coincidences, Cooper meets up with Brand again and is recruited to lead a mission to see which of three previously discovered planets could be a new world for humanity.
I’ve glossed over a lot of first- and second-act specifics in the previous paragraph, but part of Interstellar’s joy is watching the story unfold and then understanding how the various mysteries it introduces play critical roles in act three. So if you haven’t seen this one before, I recommend doing so as soon as you can and coming back to this review.
The planets that Cooper’s team will visit are near a black hole, which exerts enough of a gravitational pull that time will slow dramatically for them, especially when they’re on the surface of the first planet. That phenomenon means that decades pass on Earth during a mission that only takes a few hours, and Mackenzie Foy and Timothee Chalamet as the young Murph and Tom, respectively, are replaced by Jessica Chastain and Casey Affleck.
Anne Hathaway’s character Amelia Brand, the professor’s daughter, is also part of the mission, which meets multiple setbacks, particularly when the team encounters the only known survivor of the so-called Lazarus missions, Dr. Mann (Matt Damon). While much of Interstellar’s storyline is bleak, it does end on a hopeful note for the human race. Perhaps we may avoid the extinction that clearly seems headed our way.
This movie has been issued on 4K Ultra HD before, but Paramount has taken advantage of its tenth anniversary to release a new edition that serves up a new bonus feature, in addition to a ton of legacy extras, and some physical swag in the form of patches from the movie’s various missions. You also get a booklet containing storyboards and five mini-posters, along with a code for a digital copy.
This set consists of three discs, 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray platters with the movie, and a second Blu-ray that contains the bonus features. The case is in the shape of a book that’s about as tall as a typical 4K Ultra HD case but as wide as two of them. As a result, it may be awkward to shelve with your collection (and I have a feeling I’m going to tear the cardboard sleeves the discs are in at some point), but it’s a nice set that certainly pays homage to a great movie.
The new bonus feature is called The Future is Now: A Look Back at Interstellar and, yes, it definitely colored how I approached this review. Nolan and some of his colleagues look back on the movie, and fans including Peter Jackson and Denis Villeneuve chime in with their thoughts too.
The movie’s scientific underpinnings get a re-examination in The Future is Now, with the verdict that some of the more theoretical ideas it poses are now closer to to reality. But if you’re unsure of the film’s scientific bona fides, be sure to watch the 50-minute The Science of Interstellar documentary, which is narrated by McConaughey and digs deep into the ways in which the story reflects actual science. Personally, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to fully wrap my brain around the idea that time is relative.
The rest of the extras are also of the legacy variety, consisting of 14 featurettes that range in length from a few minutes to over 13 minutes. Watched one after another, they offer a pretty complete view of the making of the movie. Given the scope of the already-available extras, it makes sense that Paramount really only needed to give us an update on the science with this new edition.
And, yes, the theatrical trailers round out the movie platters. This set is one hell of a meal.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Brad Cook
