Anne's dazzling space saga will make a big bang: Film critic BRIAN VINER gives his verdict on Inters

Given that her latest film is a space thriller, a starry turnout for the LA premiere was inevitable. None, however, outshone Interstellar’s leading lady, Anne Hathaway, who dazzled in a midnight blue gown. Here our film critic BRIAN VINER gives his verdict.

One of the many quirks of the Academy Awards is that the Oscar for Best Picture has never been bestowed on a science-fiction film. Even the late Lord Attenborough felt that ET should have pipped his own Gandhi in 1983. And before that, Stanley Kubrick’s ground-breaking 2001: A Space Odyssey wasn’t even nominated. Nor, earlier this year, did Gravity land the big prize.

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So what chance Interstellar at the annual back-slapping extravaganza next February? Whatever happens, it seems likely to make a big bang at the box office when it is released next week. For British director Christopher Nolan has made a remarkable film; intelligent, thought-provoking, at times dazzling to look at, extremely long (almost three hours), and relentlessly starry in more ways than one.

Matthew McConaughey (Best Actor at this year’s Academy Awards, for Dallas Buyers Club) plays Cooper, a former astronaut who is persuaded to undertake one more voyage, easily the most important in the entire history of space exploration.

Food supplies are rapidly running out here on Earth and Cooper is tasked by an elderly Nasa scientist, Professor Brand (Michael Caine, mercifully allowed to keep his own South London accent), with finding a new home for humankind. ‘We’re not meant to save the world, we’re meant to leave it,’ says Brand.

So Cooper must strike out beyond our own solar system, through something called a ‘wormhole’, an inter-galactic short cut, what terrestrial taxi drivers know as a back-double.

It is a uniquely perilous mission, though he at least gets the company of Brand’s comely astrophysicist daughter (Anne Hathaway). Which means another gorgeous space-suited double-act following in the vapour trail of Gravity’s George Clooney and Sandra Bullock; Nasa might not pick astronauts for their looks, but Hollywood unfailingly does.

Indeed, Matt Damon pops up as another of the rocket-fuelled explorers. Unsubtly, his name is Mann. As in, ‘one small step for…’.

That relationship to which Neil Armstrong so famously referred when he landed on the moon, between man and mankind, lies at the heart of Interstellar. To find a habitable new planet, Cooper must leave his son and more particularly his daughter behind.

This is Murph, played as a child by Mackenzie Foy and as an adult by Jessica Chastain (it’s a very long mission, as well as a very long film), and she is torn between resenting her father and recognising herself as a chip off the old block.

Intriguingly, Nolan’s picture is not just an intense exploration of monolithic themes, notably the very future of our species, but also of the parochial, especially the love between a father and his child. There is an extraordinarily moving scene in which Cooper, for whom less time has elapsed in space than back on Earth, has to catch up via video-link with 23 years of his children’s lives.

In some ways this film asks more of McConaughey as an actor than did even Dallas Buyers Club, for which he turned to skin and bone to play an Aids victim. And he responds magnificently, although, such is that Texas drawl, not always coherently.

But the main triumph belongs to Nolan, who co-wrote as well as directed. He showed with Inception (2010) that he could make an intellectually-stimulating sci-fi film, and has done so again, although I felt at times during Interstellar that he might have boldly gone for a stimulus too far.

There were moments when I wished I’d brushed up beforehand on my quantum physics. And other moments when I simply wished I’d emptied my bladder.

So, should it be a Best Picture contender? Unquestionably, yes. But in the end it might just be defeated by its own cosmic ambition.

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