Christopher Nolan's space-travel epic Interstellar finally reveals something of its plot (the Earth has depleted its natural resources. "time to die," a replicant might say but Michael Caine aint having it and suggests space travel instead.
In the first non-teaser trailer we get quick glimpses of the biggest names in the cast and spend lots of time with Matthew McConaughey, a former engineer with two kids, one named after Murphy's Law (but I don't quite remember Murphy's Law this way, do you?)
trailer breakdown after the jump
YES
• Matthew McConaughey's been on a roll lately
• Anne Hathaway!!! (and the HathaHaters can continue blowing me). One of the best new movie stars the 21st century has yet produced. Perhaps a reteaming with Nolan is a very smart move since even the haters liked her in those daringly filled Catwoman heels?
• Please tell me Jessica Chastain has more than just a cameo, however fetching she looks in said possible cameo with scorched earth backdrop. She's a big yes, too
• Space travel is, at this point, an underused subgenre of sci-fi, since most movies with aliens are now about us being attacked rather than us going anywhere
• The visuals look handsomely executed (not that we'd expect less from Nolan and team)
NO
• I just realized while watching it a second time for screencapping that there's no mom which means we have another 'sad guy with dead wife/girlfriend' cliche going in. Nooooooo! If I were Mrs. Nolan, I'd be super worried about my husband's fixation on this.
• I'm not sure I've ever shared this before but: I do not get Michael Caine. Never have. Don't even like him in Hannah and Her Sisters. Still it's cute that Nolan loves him. All auteurs should have character actor mascots: that supporting face they just can't think of making a movie without.
• The movie world would be an infinitely better place if all trailers and promotional materials were only allowed to use footage from the first half of their movie. It looks like what's happening here. (Leave some sense of discovery for the movie theater!) But then I remembered Nolan's insatiable love of exposition and how long it takes him to get to anything (seriously I can't with Inception... how do people have the patience for it's "let me tell you about 'inception'" redundancy?) and maybe this is like the whole movie and we just hear about space travel for 2 hours with a little thrown in at the end to mark the place where sequels go?
• Bracing myself for the Nolan fanboy army, who are surely already writing their odes to this film. Good god they're insufferable whenever one of his movies comes out. I know that's not Chris Nolan's fault but other than Scorsese I can't think of any contemporary director with that much Renton-like bug eating mind control over their slavish fanbase.
MAYBE SO
• "I am not one of your fannssss"... allow me to quote Mommie Dearest by way of admitting that I'm not a Nolan fan in case you're new. Which is not to say I don't think he's untalented. I liked a few of his pictures well enough (Memento, Batman Begins, and The Prestige mostly. The Dark Knight is only awesome insofar as Heath Ledger is awesome) I've just never seen him make a "Great" one. Still, I suspect that his recognizable brand of heavy-handed portent and infinite genre grandeur might be a lot easier to take when its married to something more epic like what we appear to be seeing here. That sense of scale felt a little oversized when it was about that rich billionaire in a Batsuit (tough life) or the corporate espionage guy with can't get over his dead wife grief.
Are you a Yes No or Maybe So? It looks like I'm a "no" through sheer word count but that's only because the "no"s require explanation. I'm actually a yes because a) sci-fi b) cast c) curiousity to see how this is interpreted politically since people often take very right wing messages from his movies and yet it seems to be of the "we destroyed our world" liberal environmentalist bent... at least as kickoff point. All that plus d) in the wake of Gravity it's going to be amusing to see filmmakers try to top its technological grandeur