Interstellar on Arte: a melodrama hidden beneath a great space odyssey (review)

Kubrickian? Spielbergian? Kaufmanian? Zemeckisian? No, no, none of that. It’s hard to imagine a more Nolanian film than Interstellar.

Interstellar, Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi masterpiece, is rebroadcast this Sunday evening on Arte. Here is the review of Première published when it was released in 2014:

Model space shuttles covered in a layer of dust. The first image of Interstellar summarizes the aesthetic project of the new Christopher Nolan : take in everything with your eyes. The infinitely large and the infinitely small, yesterday and tomorrow, the confines of the cosmos and the arid soils of the Midwest, the eternal stories of America and the great ecological problems of our time, the paralyzing coldness of Kubrick’s cinema and the cuddly effusions of Spielberg’s.

During a very beautiful first half hour of exhibition, this titanic ambition is embodied in an ultra-seductive retro-futuristic universe, where a farmer-astronaut (Matthew McConaugheyextremely cool, as usual’) looks towards the stars in the middle of his cornfield. Humanity is heading towards its doom, and the space cowboy will soon have to travel to other galaxies to find asylum for his fellow human beings….