Christopher Nolan’s big space epic tries to fly too close to the sun and fails to live up to expectations.
USA
3*
Director:
Christopher Nolan
Screenwriters:
Jonathan Nolan
Christopher Nolan
Director of Photography:
Hoyte van Hoytema
Running time: 170 minutes
Interstellar takes us farther than we’ve ever been before, but it doesn’t take the medium of film quite as far as this production’s marketing department would like to have us believe. Director Christopher Nolan breaks through the final frontier – not space, but time – and delivers a product that has a couple of moments of genius but is bloated and saddled with too much dialogue, not to mention a family drama right out of a freshman course on Steven Spielberg.
The film opens with an image we don’t yet understand: a close-up of a row of dusty book spines. This is followed by interviews with a few elderly individuals reminiscing about their childhood on farms, and then we get to see one of them: a cornfield stretching as far as the eye can see. Perhaps this is a sly wink at Superman’s early years on the Kent family farm in Smallville (an indication that great things lie ahead), but there are no firm geographical markers. That doesn’t matter, anyway, because the film has its sights set much farther afield than the United States.
Primarily a science-fiction film preoccupied with stars, planets, worm and black holes, Interstellar is built on the very credible premise that, one day in the near future, the Earth runs dry, for reasons not explicitly stated, and mankind has to start looking elsewhere for its continued survival. With the help of his scientifically curious daughter, Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), an engineer who is making a living as a farmer, locates the headquarters of NASA, which ceased operations a long time ago because the country no longer saw the need to invest in science and space exploration.
The agency asks him to go into space and find a suitable planet whither humanity can be transported or where he could restart civilisation with a few hundred fertilised eggs. He gamely takes up the challenge and is accompanied on the journey by Dr. Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway), the daughter of his former science teacher, while his own daughter throws a hissy fit because she cannot see the bigger picture and believes her father is abandoning her.
Compare this girl’s tantrums with the quiet determination of the budding scientist in Robert Zemeckis’s 1997 hit Contact, which incidentally also starred McConaughey, and it quickly becomes clear how little experience Nolan has directing children. The dialogue, in general, is also either overly explanatory or superfluous. In one scene, Cooper is told that the last thing people see before they die is their children’s faces, because it gives them a reason to hold on to life, and Nolan wastes no time in getting to us that point: Within five minutes, we have the scene we visualised just moments earlier, and the director doesn’t realise it would have been infinitely more powerful without the setup.
In one of its most effective tactics to speak to our emotions, Interstellar creates a time bomb: The exploration of space has to occur within a specific amount of time, lest Cooper never sees his children again because they would have aged too much. Here, at least, Nolan deploys the different time worlds of his film to great effect by adding a very human dimension to which the viewer can relate. However, why only one of Cooper’s children, and not both, is prioritised will leave many a viewer puzzled, especially when the daughter, Murphy, only has one bag of emotions.
What has been a major topic of discussion has been the film’s imagery, in particular the way in which a black hole is rendered, and Nolan and director of photography Hoyte van Hoytema certainly deserve kudos for their work in this regard. More than one-third of the film was shot on IMAX cameras, and when displayed on an IMAX screen, the size of the frame changes between widescreen (2.40:1) and IMAX’s full-screen (1.43:1) aspect ratios.
Following the example of his imaginative 2010 film Inception, Nolan continues to make visible his fascination with spherical images, as we see here in the wormhole scene and another interesting construction towards the end of the film. However, Nolan’s vision of space is melancholic, and we get nothing that can be compared to the beauty of a 2001: A Space Odyssey Stargate sequence.
On the contrary, the planets the crew finds are desolate, uninhabitable, inhospitable wastelands of nothingness, and it would be up to mankind to make these places home. That is a surprisingly arrogant perspective, but one to which the film constantly returns. If there is any beauty in space, we cannot see it, because Nolan keeps hitting us over the head with talk of man’s indomitable spirit to survive and to explore and to thrive wherever he goes or whatever he faces. This is all mighty close to humanist propaganda.
Furthermore, the story makes some enormous, unexplained jumps across narrative chasms. When Murphy spots tiny dunes on the floorboards in her room after a sandstorm, her father goes to work and finds the sequence corresponds to numbers in code. He somehow immediately realises the numbers refer to latitude and longitude coordinates, and he sets off to the mysterious location. How he makes this deduction, and with such certainty, especially after he had rejected Murphy’s apparently airy-fairy belief that there is a ghost in her room, is completely ignored by the screenplay.
Hans Zimmer’s score relies heavily on the sounds made by the organ, and at times the music is visceral and moving as it conveys a spiritual dimension equal to the grandeur and the mystery of the night sky. However, the silence that was so useful to Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity is often missing from or spoiled by Interstellar, and at one point Nolan makes the unforgivable mistake of invasively adding some of McConaughey’s dialogue to an otherwise deadly silent shot of the outside of his module floating in outer space.
A particularly annoying aspect of the heavy talk that permeates the film is on full display in a scene in which Dr. Brand gushes about the need for love, as a way of exonerating herself and explaining her selfish decision to pursue a less scientific approach to the mission, which may very well lead to the deaths of her entire crew. This scene is absolutely cringeworthy, even though Nolan is using it to anticipate and perhaps even justify Cooper’s own behaviour in the last act.
Interstellar is no Gravity, and it doesn’t come close to 2001: A Space Odyssey. The opening interviews remove all suspense from the story by implying it all ends well, and the soppy, uninvolving family angle damages our ability to empathise fully with all the main characters. This may very well be a novel perspective on our place in the universe and our shared ability to survive no matter what, but just because Nolan can literally bend light to suit his needs does not mean his work is done.