The end of the world and the meaning of love and whatever Interstellar's point of departure is the most clichéd one you can start off a sci-fi movie with nowadays: apocalypse now, the earth winding down. It looks like Christopher Nolan, the director, spent most of his $165 million production budget on the interstellar travel part of his expensive new space opera. The depiction of messed up life down on earth, the planet's debacle requiring a search beyond the solar system and even beyond the galaxy, consists mostly just of dusty cornfields. There are some new touches here, and some grand visuals and dramas of surprise and betrayal and revelation in space, along with some pretty frantic cross-cutting back and forth between
Gravity- or
2001-like sequences of grand space travel and some sub-Spielbergian (actually Shuyamalanian) midwestern farm scenes of plangent family drama. You may stay pretty excited for two hours: but two hours
and forty-nine minutes? More doubtful, since so much of the action is tangled and barely comprehensible.
Interstellar is grand, a must-see for sci-fi fans. But still, considering the very nearly equal dramatic and plot interest of little films about space travel like Duncan Jones's 2009
Moon and Sebastián Cordero's 2013
Europa Report, this new epic is another proof, if one were needed, that you can't spend your way to sci-fi profundity.
What's a bit different is how Christopher and his brother Jonathan, co-authors of the screenplay, bite harder than usual into the key space-travel issue of
time. Like, it's going to take a really long
time to go anywhere really far away in space. And if you actually succeed in traveling outside the galaxy via a black hole time warp, your relatives are going to be way older than you are by the time you get back, if you ever do. And given that fact, you have to consider whether you've traveling out there to save the species, leaving your family behind and never really expecting to see them again. And then you may have to lie about this to reassure your kids before you go. And you may be really conflicted about what you're doing. The instinct,
Interstellar points out, is to save one's nearest and dearest, not the human race itself.
The new movie deserves credit for delving into these issues (which are not unfamiliar to sci-fi fiction readers). But there's some question whether they make for good action film material, or just for confusion. Reconciling a treatment of them with an elaborate (and expensive) movie about space-travel
action is a source of almost irreconcilable plot entanglement that the Nolans seek to resolve by giving us an unusually long movie. Maybe we're supposed to lose track of what this problem was, but it doesn't really work. Things just seem more and more tangled.
In fact the Nolans have some trouble with details. Unlike other filmmakers who've dealt with space travel, they neglect certain aspects completely. Nobody on the spacecraft piloted by Matthew McConaughey eats or goes to the bathroom. Anne Hathaway's short haircut never grows out. Wes Bentley's beard never needs trimming. There's a black crew member (David Gyasi) who needs lots of Dramamine; but unlike, say, the
Aliens films, the personalities aren't very colorful. Nor, helpful though he may be, is the utilitarian robot Tars, voiced by Bill Irwin, in any way distinctive or amusing. He just seems one of the guys, only embedded in metal. As for the music, it's nice that when the crew first enters deep space there is absolute silence (as there is in space). But then Hans Zimmer’s booming score takes over, grabbing our attention, as annoyingly and inappropriately as the music in Iñárritu's
Gravity. And that matter of time catches up with the filmmakers when they deal with earthbound matters. Cooper's daughter, Murph, grows from a little girl (Mackenzie Foy) into Jessica Chastain, and then Ellen Burstin, but the figures seem to be fudged a bit, and that dustbowl earth, decades later, seems to be the same dustbowl. I know Nolan is fond of Michael Caine, a consummate thespian who'll probably be acting to the day he dies, but you have to wonder about casting him, since to begin with he's (in real life) 81, and his character has to age several decades. (He switches to a wheelchair, but hardly looks a day older.)
Is the dilemma humanity faces resolved? Maybe, but exactly how I'd be at a loss to tell you. The Nolans do have a kind of key to the universe, nonetheless, something they throw out toward the end, though it's more a matter of philosophy than of plot resolution, that touches on ideas Dante enunciated in the mid-sixteenth century. The 33rd Canto of the
Paradiso refers to "L'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle," "love which moves the sun and the other stars." That's what Christopher Nolan and his cowriter brother Jonathan point to at the end of
Interstellar. That line is the culmination of Dante's voyage toward God.
Interstellar tells us this too: that love binds together the universe.
But of course the Nolans don't have Dante's orderly tripartite vision of the world below and beyond. Their voyage is a pretty confusing mishmash of desperate searching, not for enlightenment, but for human survival. And there's that big conflict between noble aims and human instincts, which seems to lead to a lot of lying, deception and recrimination. All this makes for some excitement, some beauty, and some surprise plot revelations. It also all takes a bit longer than most of us have patience for -- much like Dante's
Divine Comedy itself, perhaps, but, needless to say, without the sublime poetry and enormous cultural significance of the Italian poet's great masterpiece.
The
physical resolution requires a lot of stretching of the imagination. The plot chews up and spits up Matt Damon, whom Anne Hathaway's in love with, mistakenly, it turns out. But it can't dispense with McConaughey, as Cooper (what a classic American cowboy name!), the protagonist and every boy's hero, though there's no real reason why he should survive his dive into a time-space-gravity warp (don't ask). He does though, by being folded into a CGI mashup borrowed from
Inception. The movies tells us you can't go back in time, at least so far as we mortals know, and then it turns out you sort of can -- one of various ways the Nolan brothers fudge the details. Stories are more heroic when their protagonists can't cheat reality. But it has been an exciting ride -- at times.
Interstellar, 169 mins., premiered in Los Angeles and London in October 2014. It opened theatrically in France, the US, and elsewhere 5 November. It has fared well if not spectacularly with critics -- AlloCiné press rating 3.8; Metacritic rating 73%.
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