Fresh off a presentation at last week’s Comic-Con, Paramount today unleashed on the internet its new trailer for Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. One of the most anticipated movies of the year, Interstellar stars Matthew McConaughey as a widower pilot who must leave his two children behind on Earth and embark on a mission in space that is meant to do nothing less than save mankind.
Details on Nolan’s epic sci-fi film have been hard to come by, though what we’ve been able to piece together from today’s trailer as well as previous teasers and trailers is this: Earth has run out of food, and a team of astronauts is sent on a mission to use a newly discovered wormhole in space in order to conquer interstellar travel, and presumably, find a new home for us insatiable humans. Nolan has assembled an interesting cast, most of which can be glimpsed in the trailer, including: previous Nolan collaborators Anne Hathaway (The Dark Knight Rises) and Michael Caine (Nolan’s entire Dark Knight trilogy), along with Jessica Chastain (Zero Dark Thirty), Wes Bentley (American Beauty), and Casey Affleck (Ain’t Them Bodies Saints). Other notable actors involved who didn’t make it into the trailer are John Lithgow (This Is 40), Ellen Burstyn (Requiem for a Dream), and Topher Grace (The Double).
You can do yourself a favor by watching the new trailer below and avoid having to use the film’s obnoxious official site. We won’t make you enter an access code or anything. Promise.
There’s no doubt this is a well put together trailer that makes the movie look enticing while still building mystery. Will McConaughey ever see his kids again? Does the wormhole mean they’re somehow traveling through time? Will Jessica Chastain ever make it out of that corn field? In a funny way, it comes off almost like a high-brow Armageddon, albeit with less explosions and fewer Aerosmith songs. Nolan is a wonderful storyteller, though one has to wonder if ‘saving mankind’ is really a story Nolan wanted to tell, or simply the product of feeling like he needs to keep topping himself. Judging from the trailer, the movie – excuse me, film – takes itself very seriously and leaves little room for levity. Having Michael Caine quoting the poet Dylan Thomas in voiceover – “rage against the dying of a light” – in an non-ironic way, is proof enough of that. It looks like there will be an awful lot of teary-eyed speeches and last goodbyes. We wouldn’t dare use the word here, but some might describe the trailer as a tad _______ (starts with a ‘p’ and rhymes with shmetentious).
Nolan has said that one of his biggest influences for Interstellar was Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Audiences can only hope that what Nolan has achieved here is closer to that masterpiece than say, The Fountain, another director-driven sci-fi film with similarly weighty ambitions. Paramount will release Interstellar in theaters on November 7th.
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