Mortals! You Defy The Gods! [Review: Interstellar]

Heroic archetype Cooper (Matthew McConnaughey) leaves behind his family and pilots a ring-shaped starship through a wormhole created by mysterious, godlike entities. His voyage takes him across an unfamiliar galaxy, accompanied by a crew who spend most of their time in stasis and a robot with a disturbed sense of humour. Yes! As you have probably guessed, Chris Nolan's new film Interstellar is pretty much a re-make of Ulysses 31.

Interstellar is space opera with a 21st century feel. The first act takes place on a bleak, near-future Earth where the farming ecosystem is slowly failing. The interstellar mission of the middle act is never a voyage to seek out new life and new civilizations but a desperate last chance to avert the death of humanity, and the story remains personal at all times, helped by some soul-wracking performances by McConnaughey and Anne Hathaway.

There are one or two silly scenes - the father-promises-daughter-he-will-return-home subplot (although it's there for a good reason), and the scenes where the Endurance crew brainstorm complex maneuvers and solve physics problems too quickly - it might be totally justified but it sounds like plot-hole technobabble.

On the other hand this is a compelling vision of the future, with so many elements that do make sense, including the technology. No Ulysses 31 remake would be complete without NoNo, but TARS and CASE are worthy additions to the canon of science-fiction robot companions, with their original physical design and programmable levels of honesty, sensitivity and humour. As you would expect from yet another Chris Nolan / Lee Smith collaboration, the cinematography, effects and editing are superb.

Daydream Believer [Review: Inception]

Inception is good, hard speculative fiction in the sense of gedanken-experiment. It revolves around a single, simple concept - shared dreaming - and the plot of the film introduces and explores the practical, philosophical and moral questions thrown up by this concept.

While the idea is straightforward, the plot is not: as the climax approaches, the heist-movie team of nöonauts* are travelling through different dreams simultaneously while trying to pull off their audacious and precisely timed plan. Director Christopher Nolan and editor Lee Smith, who also worked together on The Prestige, have once again delivered a complex plot that remains easy to follow - a number of cinematic devices, including the different colour themes and styles for each layer of reality, help with this. However where The Prestige is perfectly edited, Inception is close to perfect but slightly too long, and as a result a few scenes gain a comic edge that may not have been intended.

Casting is great whether you are a fan of Mr. DiCaprio or not - like many heist movies this is very much an ensemble piece. I was particularly pleased to see Ellen Page, the star of Juno, in a major role - an arrogant and talented architecture student and far from your typical action heroine.

Previous films such as The Cell, The Matrix, eXistenZ have explored similar ideas to Inception - travelling either into the minds of other people or into cyberspace. A common idea is that when you die, or are killed in such a state, you also die in real life. There's no obvious reason for this so I was pleased to see that Inception takes a different and more intelligent tack. Here, if you die in your sleep, you just wake up - however it turns out there are other, more plausible ways for dreaming to be dangerous.

*The term nöonaut for a dream traveller is not used in Inception but in Black Brillion and Matt Hughes' other novels and short stories of The Times Before The End Times, in which characters explore the collective unconscious and do battle with archetypal foes.