It's difficult this late in the game to design A.I. for a movie that doesn't appear either derivative or just plain boring. Kudos, then, to the design staff of Interstellar for cooking up something that not only looks striking (TARS turning into a spinning wheel to better navigate through the water of Miller's planet is a must-rewind moment for when the film arrives on home video), but that also registers as practical. This, of course, chimes with Nolan's insistence on always keeping his films' designs firmly in the world of the realistic, but perhaps the single greatest achievement concerning the robots of Interstellar is how much we're able to connect with them. If there's one chief problem with Interstellar, it's that some of the characters are sorely under-developed. Robots TARS and CASE, meanwhile, have more personality than most of the humans in the film. While TARS is a sarcastic, garrulous and ever-so-slightly sadistic droid, counterpart CASE is a more reticent and downbeat machine, and both are lent expert vocal work by Bill Irwin and Josh Stewart. When we lose the robots late in the game to the black hole, it's a Wilson-in-Castaway moment: suddenly, there's an unexpected feeling of loss for someTHING as opposed to someONE.
Lover of film, writer of words, pretentious beyond belief. Thinks Scorsese and Kubrick are the kings of cinema, but PT Anderson and David Fincher are the dashing young princes. Follow Brogan on twitter if you can take shameless self-promotion: @BroganMorris1
