Employing interviews with seniors looking back à la "Reds," Nolan gives us tales of life as it once was while tipping us off that it has continued, but his actual storytelling leaves us to fill in blanks.
It contains more echoes than we’re accustomed to from Nolan: I caught whiffs of E.T., Alien, Contact, Moon, (obviously) 2001, and (surprisingly) Reds, but those are just the most transparent ones.
(One of Nolan’s more eccentric flourishes involves intercutting the early scenes with interviews with Dust Bowl survivors, who function like the talking heads in Warren Beatty’s Reds .)
(Some of this scene-setting is accomplished via pseudo-documentary interviews with the elderly residents of some more distant future reflecting on their hardscrabble childhoods, which Nolan films like the “witness” segments from Warren Beatty’s “Reds.”)