Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar is one serious
mixed bag of a film, as spectacular as it is flawed. It delivers the most
breathtaking, gorgeous visuals you’ve ever seen in a movie, things that you
can’t help but gawk at, slack jawed and bug eyed. Along with that, a large
portion of the story is so trite and hokey that that it takes much of the shine
off of the rest. Big and epic and ambitious in every way, not everything lands
like it needs to, and there are incredible highs mixed with moments that leave
you completely flat.
Clocking in at a mammoth 169 minutes, Nolan’s longest film
date—and he’s not exactly known for his quick
hitters—Interstellar is purportedly his most personal film,
a kind of love letter to his young daughter. While that’s a noble aim, and you have
to applaud a filmmaker, or any artist for that matter, for stepping outside of
his comfort zone, this attempt to simultaneously tell a story on such a massive
scale and such an intimate level, holds the movie back
The first act is primarily concerned with world building and
developing the relationship between Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) and his
ten-year-old daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy). Cooper has a teenage son who has
little to nothing to do with the story and only really exists as a plot device
later in the film, so you can basically ignore his existence. A script by Nolan
and his brother Jonathan sets the stage, creating a near future world where
crops are failing—wheat is gone, okra is on the chopping block, and all farmers
can grow with any reliability is corn—and the planet is becoming a giant
dustbowl.
They accomplish this visually with looming sand storms, as
well as through small hints, mentioning food riots, hinting at hard times in
the recent past, and painting a society that needs farmers more than engineers.
In all of this there are a handful of nice touches, like how the New York
Yankees are basically a high school baseball team, and though you’re never sure
what happened, you get enough to know that the world has changed. Better now
than it was, there’s no military, and things are relatively peaceful, but they
blame for the disastrous near collapse of civilization on rampant technology,
like MRI machines that could have saved Coop’s wife, or wasteful spending on things
like space exploration—it’s now taught in schools that the moon landing was
fake. Cooper used to be a test pilot for NASA, so he’s touchy about missing out
on his dream.
All of the groundwork is solid, though it is a ton of
information dumped on you in a short period, but what follows stretches
credulity and you start to notice cracks in the foundation. When a “ghost”
sends Murph a message by basically drawing a picture on the floor in dust, it
turns out to be coordinates that lead Coop to a secret facility where he
encounters his old mentor, Professor Brand (Michael Caine). He informs them the
world is dying and that they’re mounting a mission to search for a new planet
to settle, and wouldn’t you know it, Cooper was the best pilot they ever had and
they could sure use him on the stick for this mission.
To accomplish their goal, the explorers travel through a
wormhole that magically appeared near Saturn, placed there by some benevolent
force no one quite understands. The nature of this divine kindness gives you
pause. Who or what is this, and why do they, presumably the same forces that
sent Murph and Cooper that coded message, want to help us? It’s intended as
this grand mystery in the 2001 vein, where the reveal provides
answers to all of the questions that have haunted humanity since the beginning.
But after being introduced it only pops up at convenient moments when it
appears the story has painted itself into the corner and needs a way out.
Instead of this deep, meaningful element, it serves as a simple plot device and
feels suspiciously like lazy writing that’s run out of ideas.
Cooper, of course, leaps on this opportunity, it’s the
chance to live out his dream after all, but he’s conflicted because he has to
leave Murph behind. Again, his son doesn’t even factor into this decision. But
he blasts off anyway after a full IMAX frame close up of him driving and
crying. Along for the ride are Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway), Doyle (Wes
Bentley), Romily (David Gyasi), and a couple of sassy robots, TARS (Bill Irwin)
and CASE (Josh Stewart). You don’t really need to pay much attention to any of
them, because only Amelia really has much to do or say, and you form the most
substantial emotional bond with TARS.
Up to this point everything is decent, not mind-blowing but
solid. The melodrama is a bit thick, but it’s tolerable, and once you finally
get to the space portion of the program, that makes up for any problems that
came before. As their ship, the Endurance, soars through space, along the rings
of Saturn and through the wormhole, all you can do is gape at the screen. Every
image is sharp and stunning and truly awe inspiring. There’s a full hour of
IMAX footage, and it’s remarkable in the hands of a craftsman like Nolan
This is where Interstellar is the movie
you hoped for. It’s epic and profound, these are explorers in the greatest
tradition, sprinting full on into the unknown, not knowing if they’re coming
back or have any hope of succeeding, but they have to push forward. This is
moving, powerful stuff, the stakes are high, and if Nolan and company left it
at this, the movie would be an unqualified success. It would also probably be an
hour shorter with a much more even pace.
The biggest issue with Interstellar is
that at the same time the crew scours the nearby galaxy for a suitable home
world, a tired, stale family drama unfolds. Traveling as they do leads to time
differences, and while Coop stays the same age, Murph grows into Jessica
Chastain (his son grows up to be Casey Affleck, but again, he doesn’t matter).
Though she works on the project now, and knows full well what her father did,
and why, she’s still angry and pouty, awash in her daddy issues.
Every note of this rings false and hollow. Emotion and
personal relations have never been Nolan’s strong suit as a director, and
Interstellar is no exception. Clunky, manufactured
sentimentality barely runs Hallmark deep, and the bouncing back and forth
between deep space and the continually degrading situation on Earth plays hell
with the tempo and flow of the film, and they never strike a suitable balance
between the two.
Every time you bounce over to Earth you sink a little bit in
your seat. There’s never enough time spent there to get invested in what’s going
on, and these play like asides, like “meanwhile back on Earth…” diversions that
they get out of as quickly as possible and that lack any legitimate emotional
component. What happens on the other end of the universe is so spectacular, the
rest practically fades into nothingness. The film does space well, and should
have played to its strengths.
Interstellar practically screams at you
that it’s important and deep and that you need to take it so very seriously.
Cooper is full of homespun philosophical wisdom, but that, too, is of the
shallowest variety. Everything he says sounds like an empty tag line that could
appear on a poster, and in fact many of them are. He says things about how we
don’t look the stars anymore and just fumble around in the dirt, or how mankind
was born on Earth, but wasn’t mean to die here.
And as he says these things with utter conviction, like
they’re truths he’s known for years, you can’t help but think to yourself,
“wait a minute, didn’t he just find out about all of this?” No matter what he
learns—there’s a wormhole, our planet is kicking us off, there are some
mysterious, kind-hearted beings out there keeping an eye on us—he immediately
accepts it with no questions asked. It’s like why would Michael Caine possibly lie?
And all the pieces fall into place with an ease that’s hard to buy.
The acting is adequate—it isn’t a distraction, but there’s
not much of any depth going on. You get a lot of McConaughey staring and
silently weeping. None of the supporting players have much substance or texture,
though Foy, even though she’s mostly a precocious, borderline hysterical
daughter, is the highlight. There’s some stunt casting later on in the movie
that will be a hang up for some of you, and if you don’t hate Dylan Thomas’
poem “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” going into the theater, you may
very well on your way out, because it shows up often, shoehorned into moments
where it does not belong.
Hans Zimmer’s overbearing score is mismatched with much of
the movie, and that fact is never more apparent than when the story makes an
awkward, unearned tonal shift in the later acts. That organ-heavy,
intestine-rattling BWOMP that Nolan uses in so many of his films is in full
effect, and sounds like Andrew Lloyd Weber scoring a ‘70s era horror movie.
It’s like they couldn’t figure out how to make the necessary move with the
actual story, and decided to slap you across the face with the least subtle
music you’ve ever heard.
For all of its faults, and there are many, you should go see
Interstellar in the theater on the biggest screen you can
find. It’s a spectacle that you need to witness for yourself, and there are
parts that are truly amazing. But as immersed as you are at times, there are
others where you have zero connection or investment. You appreciate that Nolan
stepped outside of his comfort zone and tried to do something different,
something personal, but unfortunately, the things he doesn’t do well drag down
the things he does, and Interstellar never soars like it
needs to.
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