Matthew McConaughey and Christopher Nolan made their Comic-Con debut to introduce Interstellar.
The teaser for Interstellar weaves real world moments of human achievement into a fictional story of space exploration. It’s this all-too-real premise — pushed even further with an extended teaser shown at Comic-Con that also featured footage of Kenndy, Elon Musk, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson talking about space exploration — grounds the story in reality and makes it particularly compelling. There’s a sense of loss here before the story has even begun: we used to travel to the moon, but now we’re terribly earth-bound. When asked why he was working on Interstellar, Nolan has an equally nostalgic answer: when he was young, it was every child’s ambition to become an astronaut. Continued exploration of space felt inevitable.
Since we aren’t doing that kind of thing in real life, why not imagine it on the big screen? The world of Interstellar shows the earth becoming inhospitable to humans and the struggle to find a new home in space (thus the title). McConaughey plays Cooper, a pilot participating in a new space program. Details from there are scarce, however — though the Comic-Con trailer showed lots of footage of characters in space suits (both inside their craft and exploring unknown worlds), little explanation was offered to where they are or how they’d gotten there… and unfortunately for us, neither Nolan nor McConaughey seemed keen on spoiling the surprise.
For those eager to catch the flick — of which comparisons are sure to be made to Contact, which also starred McConaughey, though in a very different role — there’s not long to wait. Tou’ll be able to catch Interstellar in theaters on November 7th.
