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The movie “Interstellar,” directed by Christopher Nolan, is franticly busy and deafeningly loud. It follows astronauts who venture to the furthest reaches of the galaxy in search of a new home to replace humanity’s destroyed home-world. Scenes that might not normally be exciting are given a boost in excitement by the thunderous soundtrack. For almost three hours, people shovel exposition at one another, and some of these characters have no personality at all—they serve as mouthpieces for technical jargon and philosophical discussion. Despite the director’s advocacy for film photography, the film’s 35mm and 65mm textures lack a sense of composition that would equal their tactile beauty. In Nolan’s films, the camera rarely tells the tale. It usually serves to illustrate the narrative, and there were times when I thought I was seeing the most costly NBC pilot ever made in this one.
However, “Interstellar” is still an outstanding, occasionally astounding film that completely overcame me, making my typical criticisms of Nolan’s work vanish. To let readers know that Nolan is still acting in the same manner as always, I’ve crammed the first paragraph of my review with these criticisms (which could be applied to every Nolan film following “Batman Begins”; he is who he is). Depending on how you feel about Nolan’s aesthetic, you might find such characteristics endearing or annoying.
In any event, this movie has a powerful and genuine quality. I don’t recall seeing so many important characters sob openly in close-up, voices breaking, tears flowing down their cheeks in a science fiction movie that was pushed to a director’s fans as multiplex-“awesome.” Cooper, a widowed astronaut played by Matthew McConaughey, and Amelia Brand, a colleague played by Anne Hathaway, frequently break down in tears throughout the film. This is understandable considering that they, like the rest of the Endurance crew, are cut off from everything that makes them who they are: their families, their histories, their cultures, and even the planet itself. Other characters, such as Amelia’s father, a Michael Caine-played astrophysicist, and a space explorer who is trapped up on a dangerous artic world also show loneliness and doubt in a way that is unusual for this director. For gods’ sake, the main family in the movie, Cooper, is grounded after NASA is dismantled and they live on a corn field, just like the kind Iowans in “Field of Dreams” (a film whose daddy-issues-laden story syncs up nicely with the narrative of “Interstellar”). There is something amusingly cheeky about the idea of corn as sustenance, especially in a survival story where the future of humanity is at stake. Granted, they are growing the crop to feed the human race, which is passing the time of its final days on a planet so ecologically devastated that at first you mistake it for the American Dust Bowl around 1930. (In a documentary originally seen in the film’s opening scene, Ellen Burstyn plays one of several witnesses; in typical Christopher Nolan fashion, this documentary serves as a setup for at least two twists.)
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Modern sci-fi settings are used to illustrate Hallmark card homilies about what matters most in life and how people should live. What social benefit does it have that “We love persons who have died”? Accidentally evolving is the first step. After a while, it becomes apparent—or should become apparent—that Nolan and his brother Jonathan Nolan, who also co-wrote the screenplay, aren’t attempting to top the breathtaking rationality of “2001.”” The science fiction elements of the film are merely a cover for a spiritual/emotional dream about fundamental human desires (for home, for family, for continuity of bloodline and culture), as well as for a kind of horror movie that treats the star travelers’ separation from their earthbound loved ones as spectacular metaphors for what happens when the people we cherish are taken from us by death, illness, or insurmountable distance. After spending years by themselves in an interplanetary wasteland, another astronaut remarks, “Pray you never learn exactly how pleasant it may be to see another face.”
Interstellar Quiz
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“Interstellar” has a mystical undercurrent, one that is particularly strong for a director whose storytelling has the right-brained sensibility of an engineer, logician, or accountant, even while it never fully commits to the idea of a non-rational, uncanny world. In this movie, a ghost leaves messages for the living in dust. Characters struggle to understand far-off radio transmissions as if they were antiquated writings written in an extinct language and stare through bloodshot eyes at video transmissions made by aliens on the other side of the cosmos many years earlier. In “Interstellar,” a family is tormented by memories of a deceased mother and then an absent father; a woman is haunted by the memory of a missing father; another woman is separated from her own father (and mentor); and a third woman is driven to reunite with a lover who is so far away from her that he may as well be dead.
I can’t think of a Nolan movie that ladles on misery and valorizes gut feeling (faith) the way this one does; not from start to finish, at least. The only exceptions might be the final act of “Memento” and the pit sequence in “The Dark Knight Rises,” a knife-twisting hour that was all about suffering and transcendence. The most moving scenes focus less on moving the plot along than they do on making us think about what the characters’ actions imply to them and to us. The lift-off sequence, which begins with a countdown over pictures of Cooper abandoning his family, is the best of them. Caine reads portions from Dylan Thomas’ villanelle “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night” as the narration proceeds in outer space, including: “Old age should burn and rave at end of day; Rage, rage against the passing of the light.” (If it wasn’t previously clear, this scene confirms Nolan as the most obsessed with death and control significant American director, alongside Wes Anderson.)
The film’s widescreen panoramas include some of the biggest and most intricate spacecraft miniatures ever made, as well as space sequences portrayed in scientifically exact silence, ala “2001,” as well as severe interplanetary scenery photographed in harsh Earth locations. Despite its high-tech splendor, “Interstellar” undeniably has an old-movie vibe. It isn’t hesitant to change modes or even lurch between them. Sometimes, the film’s one-stop storytelling brings to mind the tough-tender spirit of a John Ford picture or a Steven Spielberg movie created in the Ford picture’s style: a movie that would prefer to attempt to be eight or nine things than just one. Sharp comedic banter (primarily between Cooper and the ship’s robot, TARS, which is created in Minecraft-style, pixel-like boxes and voiced by Bill Irwin) replaces brutal outer space combat sequences in which astronauts stumble in zero gravity and walk through hostile environments. Long explanation sequences using dry erase boards and without them, breathtaking views that are more like mental landscapes, and heartbreaking separations and reunifications that could just as well be performed silently, in tinted black-and-white, and scored on a saloon piano are all included. (Spielberg began work on “Interstellar” in 2006 but left to work on other projects.)
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McConaughey is the ideal leading man for this kind of movie since he is such a passionate performer who gives his all to every line and scene he is given. Cooper proudly claims to be an engineer, as well as an astronaut, farmer, and farmer; but, he has the soul of a silly poet, and as he looks out at the expanse of space, he grinned like a young child preparing to ride a brand-new roller coaster. It has some of the compassion of the porch swing scene in “To Kill a Mockingbird” when Cooper bids his daughter Murph, who is played by McKenzie Foy as a young girl, goodnight. The sequence is shot very closely and lighted in warm, comforting tones. When Murph becomes Jessica Chastain, a vital member of Caine’s NASA team and a surrogate for the daughter that the senior Brand never had, “We frequently reflect on the goodbye scene and how Murph and Cooper’s agony motivates everything they attempt to accomplish. At the same time, we realize that similar emotions motivate the other characters and, in fact, the rest of the species. (One receives the impression that Nolan made this movie out of a strong personal need; the story is around a man who feels “called” to a specific career and must spend a lot of time away from his family.)
According to the laws of relativity, the astronauts experience time differently depending on where Endurance is, thus when they land on a potential livable world, a few minutes there are equivalent to weeks or months back on the ship. On Earth, meanwhile, everyone is growing older and losing hope. Even mundane housekeeping discussions take on a new significance in these situations. One must pause before deciding what to do next since, while one is debating, people nearby are aging, going through loneliness-related sadness, withering away, or even passing away. Time is everything in this movie more than in any other Nolan movie (and that’s saying a lot). Early in the movie, Brand admits to Cooper, “I’m an old scientist.” “Time terrifies me.” We all have a fear of time. Every facet of life, from the global to the familial, is governed by a ticking clock. Every action taken by every character is a defiance motivated by the desire to not be treated kindly.
For more personality quizzes check this: How Will I Die Quiz.
