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With his combination of technical innovation and blockbuster scale, Christopher Nolan’s movies have often drawn comparison to the works of Stephen Spielberg. The viscerally powerful Dunkirk could be described as his Saving Private Ryan moment, but it was his previous hit Interstellar that arguably saw Nolan achieving peak Spielberg.
Contrary to criticism that Nolan films tend to be all plot mechanics and no soul, Interstellar anchors its time and space-straddling movie in a father-daughter relationship that grounds the movie in ways that his earlier hits never quite achieved. Matthew McConaughey’s widowed NASA pilot must cross galaxies to save humanity from extinction, but for all the Sci-fi garble about singularities and quantum data, it’s – spoiler alert – love that ultimately saves the day, albeit love in the form of time-straddling morse code sent through an intergalactic wormhole.
Nolan’s tendency for high-concept waffle obscured the emotional beats in previous films like Memento and Inception, but in Interstellar the two elements are inextricably linked. Your enjoyment of this may well depend on your tolerance for Spielbergian levels of sentiment, but the familial element at least gives the viewer something to hang onto when the science talks gets a bit too dense.
Outside of the Batman Franchise, Nolan doesn’t really do sequels, but like most of his movies Interstellar does end on an ambiguous note, with McConaughey abandoning his now aged daughter to reconnect with Anne Hathaway, alone with 5,000 embryos on a remote desert planet on the other side of the galaxy. What happened next? That’s where we come in…
Harry’s Pitch | Interstellar 2: Nolan 64
Joe’s Pitch | Interstellar 2: Introspection
John’s Pitch | Interstellar: A Star Wars Story
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We’d also like to hear your sequel ideas for this film, or any other movie we’ve covered in this podcast. You can leave a comment below this blog post, or contact us via Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. The best ideas will get a shout-out on a future episode.