“We used to look up in the sky and wonder about our place in the stars. Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.”-Interstellar

Chris Nolan makes awe inspiring movies. Every time. He doesn’t waste your time or steal your money with his cinematic features. He takes you on a ride that is guaranteed to fill your mind with rapturous movie love glee and get your thinking about how movies should be made. The third(and most likely final) trailer for his latest, Interstellar, is built the way all previews should be built. It offers a tease of the plot, great imagery, powerful dialogue playing over it and an instant need to watch it again and again.

Don’t spend too much time thinking about the plot. It’s 2001: Space Odyssey meets Apollo 13 meets The Abyss. The idea is that earth has become a dangerous place to live and climate control is destroying it. In a way, our planet is dying and a professor/scientist(Michael Caine) devises a plan for a group of scientists(Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway among others) to perform an exercise called “interstellar” in order to “save” it. It involves time travel and perhaps finding another planet that humans can survive on. Remember, there is a lot more going on and many characters in play. The plot is just the first bite of the steak on this delicious looking experience.

That’s what Nolan does every time. He creates a one of a kind experience. Something to watch again and again. Something to tell your kids about when they are ready to explore great films. Nolan’s films always involve plots that require a little leap of belief. A format that denies limitations in the depths of storytelling. He opens a pandora’s box in your soul with his trailers. Remember The Dark Knight trailer? The Inception tease? They had you at hello! That’s Nolan.

This is McConaughey at his best. His dramatic scenes in the trailer with Mackenzie Joy, playing his daughter in the film, are amazing. The line where McConaughey tells Hathaway after she asks him, “Couldn’t you have told her you were going to save the world?” is priceless and speaks for any good parent.

“No. When you have become a parent, one thing becomes pretty clear and that’s that you want your children to feel safe.”

That is the backbone of every Nolan production and story. Family and how it binds people to each other and makes them do dangerous things to protect the sanctity of it. Every film of his has something to do with the depths one will go to in order to get back to his family or protect others.  His stories are about troubled men and how their sacrifice sits close to mankind’s reward.

Dylan Thomas’ writings are read, Jessica Chastain and Casey Affleck show up, and tons of astronaut activity occurs as well. Add it up and these 2 minutes and 33 seconds will just about store itself away in your cerebellum.

 

Nolan makes movies that are easy on the eyes and blow your mind.

Interstellar comes out on November 7th. That gives you a little over three months to salivate over this trailer.

Leave it to Christopher Nolan to blow our minds with a 140 second reel about crops, engineers, outer space, time travel, wormholes and Matthew McConaughey running through all of it. Nolan isn’t a pioneer of film but he is a renegade every time he touches it and promises us something great with every release. In a day and age where so many filmmakers phone in a production for the dollar and need to keep working, a film addict must appreciate creators like Nolan. He doesn’t waste our time and serves up fresh engaging and quietly amazing cinema every time. Isn’t that great to have around?

Nolan was the only director in Hollywood who could make Inception so good. He was the only director who could turn Batman into a movie that many felt was snubbed for an Best Picture nomination. He put Batman and Wolverine(Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman) into a movie about magic(The Prestige) and made an award worthy film. In short, Christopher Nolan doesn’t own a Best Picture or Director nomination but in a matter of 12 years has created a fine partnership with Warner Brothers.

Interstellar centers itself around McConaughey’s Cooper, an engineer who has an obsession with Indian surveillance drones and loves his two kids, one of them called Murphy(which is a moniker here for Murphy’s Law) a little more than his urge to go back into space discovery. When a scientist(Michael Caine, a Nolan regular) wants to place him in a special mission that involves time travel, Cooper must weigh the risks against his family if he decides to venture into the unknown. Think Inception meets The Abyss meets 2001: Space Odyssey. You will catch short glimpses of Anne Hathaway, Casey Affleck and Jessica Chastain as the trailer closes.

If you are confused by the trailer at first glance, that’s not a bad thing. Nolan wants to throw you for a loop and watch you click it again as you slowly get up off the floor. He doesn’t want to bore you so he plays with your mind. He will have your interest with this one because it concerns real questions and sprinkles in movie juice to go with it.

His brother Jonathan wrote the script with him, and their idea here isn’t as complex as some would think. Is there more to us than simply life and death? Does the human race have abilities that stretch outside of our world? Where does our destiny truly lie? These kind of questions are being put on the table here for us to start thinking about. Nolan wants us to open the book and get invested.

Great films make moviegoers go into their own outer space and let us time travel for a couple hours. With Interstellar, Nolan is producing that kind of phenomenon here. While we won’t know the result until the November 7th release date, this trailer gives us plenty of chew on in the mean time. 

Watch it(a few times) and let me know what you think.