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Anyone bemoaning the dearth of original scripts in a movie marketplace dominated
by adaptations, remakes, and sequels should in theory be thrilled by Nolan’s
Interstellar, a sprawling metaphysical science-fiction epic that’s nothing if
not original. Interstellar does engage in its share of homage's and borrowings
from film history. We open on a car chase through a cornfield that’s a drone-era
update of the climactic chase in North by Northwest. The plot, about a group of
astronauts sent into space to investigate a mysterious anomaly, explicitly
recalls that of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The use of special effects to communicate
radical perceptual shifts comes courtesy of The Matrix. But for better or worse,
Interstellar stubbornly remains its own whacked-out, inimitable self: a
century-spanning family soap opera that’s simultaneously a cowboy space opera.
Oh, and a serious philosophical treatise on both human mortality and the concept
of time. And possibly, also a dystopian environmental parable of some kind or
other?
There might be a few more genres that would comfortably fit into the roomy
169-minute running time of Interstellar, a movie I snickered at more than once
but never stopped staring at in wonder. This isn’t Nolan’s best film by any
stretch, but it abounds in the qualities that are among his strengths: evoking a
sense of visual awe, crafting balletically sleek large-scale action sequences
(remember the somersaulting semi in
the Dark Knight?),
and casting actors (especially male ones) who deliver fierce and memorable
performances, even in roles that are less than fully fleshed out. Unfortunately,
Interstellar also showcases some of Nolan’s persistent weaknesses: dialogue
(written by Nolan and his brother and frequent writing partner Jonathan) that
lays out the film’s big ideas and themes with the like a new employee at a
whiteboard. Female characters who spend most of their screen time, however much
they’re given, as either helpmates or victims. And a tendency toward
intellectual and auditory bombast: Here, it’s Michael Caine bellowing quite a
bit of Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” as a spacecraft
launches deafeningly into the stratosphere, Hans Zimmer’s booming music
jockeying for a place in the mix.
The exact nature of the futuristic dystopia Cooper and his kids inhabit takes a
while to establish itself, and in fact never fully emerges into relief. We’re
given no explanatory date-stamps or backstory-furnishing voiceovers, and the
world Cooper, his children, and his gentle father (John Lithgow) live in looks
externally fairly similar to our own—there are cars and computers, functioning
schools and governments, even organized games of what appears to be the final
remnants of major-league baseball. But gradually we learn that some time ago the
earth’s soil stopped supporting any crop but corn and okra—and the last extant
okra field is about to die out. Dust storms, kicked up by the erosion of topsoil
due to worldwide blight, periodically ravage the land. The human population is
on a mathematically chartable course toward extinction; as another character
grimly observes to Cooper at one point, their children’s generation is likely to
be the last to survive.
Cooper, who was once a crack spaceship pilot, gets recruited (or, depending how
you look at it, coerced) into a top-secret exploratory mission organized by what
remains of NASA—an institution that’s had to go underground in an era in which,
for some reason, official ideology insists that the moon landing was faked.
After an accumulation of seemingly supernatural coincidences that would be too
spoilery to reveal, Cooper agrees to take the job, though it will mean leaving
his children behind on a rapidly failing planet. He’s assured by NASA chief Dr.
Brand (Michael Caine) that somewhere near Saturn, scientists have located a
disturbance in space-time; it may be the human race’s only hope of skipping
through a wormhole and locating a habitable planet in an otherwise impossibly
distant galaxy.
Get used to hearing about that wormhole, because it becomes the Piccadilly
Circus of Interstellar, the intergalactic traffic hub around which the film’s
various plotlines whip in intersecting circles. After agonizingly tearing
himself away from his family, Cooper sets out for Saturn, aware that because the
effect of relativity on the passage of time, he may not find his way back
through the wormhole to Earth before his children’s life spans are long over, if
he survives the trip at all. “Time is a resource, like oxygen or food,” he
explains to his crew, pressing on them the importance of quickly gathering data
on the three possible planets they’re investigating as replacement Earths.
Meanwhile, back on the regular earth, Tom and Murph grow into adults played by
Casey Affleck and Jessica Chastain. For many years, the siblings maintain the
hope that their father will return, but eventually Tom’s video messages—which
take years to be relayed remotely to Cooper in deep space and to which he can’t
respond—trickle to a despairing halt. As for Murph, she can’t forgive her dad
for abandoning his own children, even if it’s to serve the human race.
Cooper’s fellow crew on the Endurance consists of planetary scientist Amelia
Brand (Anne Hathaway), astrophysicist Romilly (David Gyasi), and co-pilot Doyle
(Wes Bentley). There’s also a pair of affable monolith-shaped robots, CASE and
TARS—both hydraulic puppets operated by the actor and clown Bill Irwin. What
happens on the ship is far less dramatically interesting than it ought to be,
given the mind-bending experiences these four humans and two machines go through
together. Still, the movie’s middle third is visually and technically
breathtaking, with two back-to-back planetary exploration sequences of
staggering beauty and scale. One world has water—overwhelming amounts of it,
periodically rising up in tidal waves the size of mountains. Another is all
jagged, frigidly cold rock faces, with one surprising sign of life.
McConaughey makes for a rakish existential hero, weighing his duty to humanity
against his devotion to his kids while taking time to assure his crewmates in
that Robert Mitchum drawl of his that he has the piloting chops to “swing around
that neutron star and decelerate.” The rest of the cast, including the vastly
overqualified Chastain in a one-note role as the resentful wronged daughter,
swings around the neutron star that is McConaughey himself—no one gives a bad
performance, but the cast never coalesces into an ensemble.
The protracted last act of Interstellar (which contains at least three discrete
moments that could easily have been endings but aren’t) ties the outer-space
plot up with the meanwhile-back-at-the-ranch one via a development that’s at
once metaphysical and sort-of-seemingly scientific. (The theoretical physicist
Kip Thorne was a consultant.) How you feel about the movie may hang on your
reaction to this scene—about which I’ll say only that, like the end of 2001: A
Space Odyssey, it takes place in a space that seems to exist in between the
familiar world we know and some strange alternate dimension. But the sense of
visual and spatial wonder this scene evoked in me lingered long after,
accompanied by a begrudging respect for the Nolans’ sheer commitment to their
own peculiar brand of visionary hokum.
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