There were plenty of good science fiction efforts to follow 1968’s 2001, but it took the eminently successful Christopher Nolan to inspire major studio backing for a Space Odyssey Redux that can approach Stanley Kubrick on the intellectual-conceptual plane. Nolan had broken through with Memento, and he put the Hollywood franchisers in his pocket with his Batman reboot trilogy. That clout allowed his mind-bending Inception to fly. It also became a successs, even as much of its audience surely could not understand what it was all about.
Christopher Nolan has always been able to convince the movie world that his massive movie entertainments were important. Before moving on to the equally challenging / rewarding Dunkirk, Tenet and Oppenheimer, the filmmaker applied himself to a project his writer-producer brother Jonathan had begun work on seven years before. Interstellar pushed big Sci-fi ambitions, at a time when the industry’s idea of a space movie was just another addition to the Star Trek or Alien franchises.
Mixing a Sci-fi ‘Sense of Wonder’ with harsh scientific realities has always been a difficult row for a filmmaker to hoe. The scale of deep space is so intimidating, and the rapid degradation of our planet too much of a &%$#@ tragedy. Robert Zemeckis’s Contact (1997) began promisingly, only to fall apart with a sentimentally trite ending. The Nolans’ Interstellar does go a little ‘Etheral Cereal’ on us, but it never insults our intelligence.
Filmed in Canada and Iceland, Christopher Nolan’s space epic begins with a good sketch of America maybe 30 years from now. The double whammy of environmental calamity (massive dust storms) and agricultural apocalypse (crop blights) has re-ordered society. The only science tolerated is that which helps to sustain a population threatened by starvation. Space exploration was officially abandoned 8 or 9 years before, and its legacy has been buried by historical revisionism: the new government line denies that anybody ever did anything as useless as travel to the moon.
Ex NASA pilot & engineer Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) now struggles to grow crops. It’s good that his son Tom (Timothée Chalamet) wants to be a farmer, because the school authorities have severely limited access to higher education. Cooper’s young teen daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy) shows an aptitude for science, and has been noticing strange ‘anomalies’ around the farmhouse. When Cooper studies them with her, they find what they think might be a code … spelling out location coordinates not too far away.
The coordinates take Cooper to a ‘stealth’ NASA, operating in a secret underground complex. Cooper’s old professor John Brand and his daughter Amelia (Michael Caine & Anne Hathaway) predict that ALL crops will fail in just a few years. But they are working on an as-yet theoretical effort to save the human race with a When Worlds Collide– like exodus to a new world. No planet in our solar system will suffice, but ten years before, NASA’s ‘Lazarus’ program sent a number of probes through a wormhole / interdimensional porthole near our planet Saturn. Some of those probe pilots have sent back partial communications; one or more of the newly-found planets may be habitable.
The weird anomalies remain unexplained but NASA enlists the experienced Cooper to pilot the spacecraft Endurance. He, Amelia, plus Doyle and Romilly (Wes Bentley & David Gyasi) will go see which probe has found the best planet for an interstellar migration. Cooper knows that he must go, but his choice so angers his daughter Murph that she refuses to talk to him.
The perilous voyage confronts Cooper, Amelia and two other astronauts with mind-bending problems. The first planet to visit is situated so near the wormhole that every hour the shuttlecraft spends there is equal to 7 years back on Endurance, and on Earth. The planet proves unsuitable, and a takeoff delay sets the mission back by over 20 years. At the next planet, the voyagers find its probe pilot Dr. Mann (Matt Damon) waiting for them. But Mann hasn’t told them the whole truth . . .
A ‘2001 Redux’ for a new century?
Interstellar is a work of breathtaking ambition — a deep-think Odyssey that requires its audience to engage with a great deal of technical detail. The visuals consistently excite, from the agrarian opening to a succession of dynamic scenes in alien environments. Some scenes are patterned after Kubrick’s 2001. An astronaut goes through a ‘Stargate’- like wormhole, located at Kubrick’s original choice of planets, Saturn. A struggle for control of the mission plays out in a spacecraft airlock. And an astronaut plunged into a Black Hole finds himself in a strange other-dimensional limbo. The main difference between Kubrick and Nolan is that Interstellar opts for a much warmer human destiny.
That may be a turn-off for fans that prefer their futuristic stories forbiddingly cold and unforgiving. But Interstellar doesn’t use its Sci-fi trappings as a gimmick, to re-tell a stale old story with the latest CGI bells and whistles.
This is the anniversary of Nolan’s epic, which in ten years has attracted plenty of criticism and analysis. We’ll only try to bring up some points that particularly stuck out on this go-round.
• The show’s Earthbound first act puts us in a vast farming region. We still identify with agrarian roots that few of us have personally experienced. Cooper’s father-in-law (John Lithgow) accepts the space voyage, but Murph’s rejection keeps Cooper connected to home, even when he’s displaced to the other side of the universe.
• As we echoed in old reviews of When Worlds Collide, the Big Move across the universe can’t bring very many people along. We see big bio banks of human genetic material being prepared. The whole effort is pure sacrifice for the NASA folk, very few of whom will ever board ships in person. The movie makes us ponder whether humans have an innate sense of loyalty to ‘the species.’ Few of us are willing to sacrifice to benefit others, let alone a next generation that might not include our personal progeny.
• Given the ambition on view, we don’t roll our eyes at some of the Sci-fi implausibles. This future government is outwardly repressive but inwardly inspired, with its generous support of the NASA plan. Considering that America seems to be in a state of crisis, how do the scientists stock and power a clandestine facility on such a grand scale? Can factories still supply all the high-tech tools and instruments needed … in secret?
• Contemporaneous clues suggest that this is only a few years into the future. But those robots TARS and CASE are so advanced, they seem to come from the 22nd or 23rd century. The incredibly versatile robots are so welcome that we don’t care if they’re not strictly believable.
• The movie endorses a Faith in Science that our retrograde culture has been dismantling for decades. Prof. Brand’s master survival plan requires that he and the adult Murph (Jessica Chastain), now an astrophysicist in her own right, work out a gravitation problem for which no solution is anywhere in sight. It’s a Leap of Faith and a scientific Hail Mary … if we throw a ball in the dark, will somebody be there to catch it?
• Michael Caine’s Dr. Brand mainsplains how a wormhole can becomes a Cosmic Short Cut by folding a piece of paper — the same ‘folding space’ simile we remember from David Lynch’s version of Dune. Since Cooper is well educated in space engineering, Dr. Brand’s demo is really for the audience. Is it an in-joke? The folding paper bit makes us think of a 1955 movie in which Donald Curtis looses a party balloon at a board meeting of admirals, as a visual aid to explain octopus propulsion.
Wonderful Sci-fi set piece episodes.
The strongest scene in the picture is the punishing downtime spent on the water planet, where time dilation stretches each hour into an awful seven years. Hans Zimmer’s music score adds suspense with a subtle tick-tock motif. We’re thinking that they should have sent that terrific robot out alone — it wouldn’t have wasted any time. The robot’s retrieval of Amelia, striding through the rising water as if it wore Seven League Boots, reminds us of the marvelous robot rescue in the Soviet Planeta Bur.
We learn of an even bigger time displacement later on. Every mistake can become an unforgiving Cold Equation. Cooper despairs at the unliklihood of fulfilling his promise to return to Murph. The movie’s saving grace is that this personal, emotional throughline complements the core Sci-fi story, instead of trivializing it.
A different interpersonal situation awaits on the planet where Matt Damon’s Dr. Mann has been waiting years for a relief ship. Cooper and Amelia touch down, only to be confronted by a very human, very understandable conflict. It’s amusing that Damon would the very next year play another stranded spaceman, one waiting on Mars for a rescue that also may not be possible.
We’re all quantum mechanic theoreticians on this bus.
When we saw Interstellar theatrically, we resisted the last-act story resolution, that brought in elements to rationalize what seemed to be supernatural phenomena. Cooper is told that time slows down and speeds up, but that it never goes backwards. Drifting within a Black Hole, Cooper encounters a ‘limbo environment’ very different from the posh prison that confines Dave Poole in 2001: A Space Odyssey. (spoiler) → Coop instead finds himself in an endless memory grid, in a corner that dissects Murph’s bedroom-library back home into millions of time-memory bits.
The ‘library limbo’ experience 1) resolves the mysterious ‘anomalies.’ 2) gives Cooper the ability to communicate vital information to Murph. And 3) proves that unknown, sympathetic aliens have intervened to help him, to help the humans from beyond the stars. Cooper doesn’t receive all the secrets of the universe, but getting a helping hand from an other-dimensional alien intelligence is quite a compliment for humanity. *
Interstellar keeps its conflict in motion with a central psychic father-daughter connection, but one far more satisfying than that seen in Contact.
The show delivers a lot — all those heady concepts — without becoming a confusing mess. Outer space vistas are no longer spectacular in themselves, but Christopher Nolan maintains a high level of excitement by intercutting parallel events in different locations spread across the universe. The visuals are indeed powerful. We do wonder how much of the audience just soaked up the sensational images, and let the rest go.
Nolan’s “A” level of filmmaking can afford several top stars. McConaughey is an excellent ‘Right Stuff’ problem solver, an ideal engineer-astronaut. The other main players elicit our interest and sympathies — Anne Hathaway’s Amelia, Michael Caine’s weary professor, Casey Affleck’s grown son Tom. The resentful Murph Cooper is ably played by a full three actresses, Mackenzie Foy, Jessica Chastain, and Ellen Burstyn. David Gyasi’s memorable astronaut is the one who must age 23 years in isolation, while Amelia and Cooper have only been gone three hours. Matt Damon makes the most of the thankless role of Dr. Mann, whose behavior is entirely understandable.
Despite all of the space hardware on view, the filmmakers don’t let the production design run away with the movie. We learn what things do and how parts of spaceships connect only when needed. That underground NASA installation is an appropriately thin sketch. The monster dust storms over the corn fields ‘mirror’ the enormous waves on the water planet. The designs do not dominate the storytelling. The wormhole sequence and the interior of the Black Hole are rendered in minimal terms, through Cooper’s subjective POV. Remember the scores of elaborate alien-scapes for the ‘V’Ger’ in Star Trek: The Motion Picture? What a bore they became.
Interstellar is not the Pure Cinema landmark that is Stanley Kubrick’s space masterpiece, but it is easily one of the most accomplished — and complex — Sci-fi films ever made. Our first viewing was difficult, but a second made me a believer.
