Interstellar

Interstellactic Planetary

From the humble beginnings of The Following and Memento to the wildly popular ‘Batman trilogy’ and pet project Inception, director Christopher Nolan’s films could never be accused of lacking in ambition. However, with his latest hit being about the great unknown of infinite space, time travel and the very survival of the human race, has his vision finally exceeded his reach?

What makes us human?  Will humans one day discover another inhabitable planet? Will Matthew McConaughey ever act without that whistling Texan drawl? These are just some of the bazillion questions offered up by Nolan’s sci-fi extravaganza Interstellar – a film full of grand ideas and awe inspiring visuals, but which suffers from a rather weak conclusion and fumbles in the management of some of its complex concepts within the storytelling.

Though about two thirds of Interstellar is set in the big black, viewers have to wait a while before actually blasting off to the stars. To begin with, a lengthy sequence of mundane domesticity firmly rooted on terra firma introduces us to Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a retired NASA pilot living as a farmer on a dust-ridden, overpopulated Earth with his two young children Murph (Makenzie  Foy), Tom (Timotheé Chalamet) and their granddad Donald (John Lithgow). With most of the main crop foods extinct, the family subsists on the tenacious corn produced from their fields, but when these too start to fail the future begins to look truly bleak.

A strange set of events involving a ‘ghost’ knocking books from Murph’s bedroom bookshelf leads Cooper to a top secret NASA HQ, where he is asked to be part of a team instructed with finding a new inhabitable world out of three identified as possibilities in a distant galaxy. The only problem is, getting to the world requires travel through a wormhole and there is a good chance that, a) the team may never reach the planet, b) the planet may not actually be inhabitable and c) even if they do find a planet which supports life, the people back on earth may never get there if an equation that will enable the manipulation of gravity is never solved. Then there’s the more personally pressing issue that Cooper may never see his children again.

The opportunity for space travel is too big an itch not to scratch for Cooper however and after about ten minutes of deliberation and a teary goodbye to Murph he accepts. No time is wasted in finalising the plans for launch and Cooper, along with three other scientists begin their journey to the wormhole.

One major talking point is how Interstellar has attempted to intermingle this rather traditional plot with its themes of sacrifice and facing the unknown (you could even say it shares some of the DNA of Armageddon), with highly complex theories involving space-time and the workings of the universe. Great pains have gone into making sure the science behind the script stands up to scrutiny, which has resulted in scenes involving dialogue that wouldn’t look out of place in a Brian Cox lecture.

On the one hand it’s reassuring that scriptwriter (and brother to director) Jonah Nolan trusts his audience enough to understand such notions, but at times it can constitute to overkill, especially when you’ve heard a character talk about relativity for the nth time. Also some of the ideas are so outlandish and involve so much theoretical plot bending that some may have a hard time swallowing them. Several key moments in the film, including the ending, require the viewer to wholly commit to these theories in order for them to work – even at the expense of logic. It’s hard to explain without spoiling anything, but let’s just say you have either go along with things or run the risk of needing to head to the nearest escape pod.

Indeed in this manner, notwithstanding the overarching complexities, Interstellar may just be Nolan’s most innocent film yet. Despite numerous references throughout the film to Murphy’s Law; a philosophic principle which maintains that anything that can happen, will happen, there is no such thing as randomness in this Nolanverse. Everything is methodical and has meaning in Interstellar, a place in the scheme of the script – right down to the dust. The whole film seems like a set up in order to say something profound about the human experience with Nolan playing his cards very close to his chest throughout in order to facilitate that obligatory ‘penny drops’ moment towards the close. By the time it comes around it feels manufactured and flat. Even with all that scientific wordiness, if a formula could be written to show how deep Interstellar’s metaphorical scope goes, it would read something like gravity x E=MC2 x talking robot = love.

Interstellar is by no means totally devoid of emotion because of this however and features some fine acting by McConauhey.  It’s through Cooper’s long, long distance relationship with his family, and in particular his daughter, that we are tethered to the film. But again Cooper, a character cut from the same cloth as the Chuck Yeager’s of yesteryear – hopeful, driven and brave – is almost a cipher, more a cliché than a real person which prevents our total investment in his plight. It comes as little surprise that he saves the day on more than one occasion, using good old fashioned piloting skills to pull off impossible manoeuvres in deepest space.

One thing that makes up for these shortcomings in script is the cinematography. On the big screen Nolan magnificently captures the vastness and desolation of space, taking cues from Kubrick’s 2001 in offering a believable but still rather trippy interpretation of time travel. Nolan said his ultimate aim with Interstellar is to take viewers ‘on a ride’ and taking this statement from a purely visual perspective he succeeds. Combined with a menacing organ based score from Hans Zimmer the imagery is elevated from the merely enjoyable to the almost poetic. And all with minimal CGI and no 3D. Stick that in your ignition sequence Gravity.

Even with the aspects of plot that may divide opinion, Interstellar will still probably be a smash, ensuring the Nolan train – which has more likely morphed into some stupendous spacecraft – will continue to race on. But now he has taken us to the edge of the universe and back one wonders where he can go from here and if it may be wise to rein in his ideas and choose a subject a little closer to home next time. A documentary about the quite real hazard of falling books faced by librarians perhaps.