What happens to humanity when the earth runs out of resources and the food supply dwindles to dust?
It’s the question that fuels Christopher Nolan’s latest predetermined blockbuster; if Prometheus asked where we came from, Interstellar wonders just as boldly where we are going.
Matthew McConaughey stars as Cooper, a corn farmer who was a peerless test pilot for NASA before the space program became a dirty secret recast by the government as a hoax – nothing but propaganda to bankrupt the Soviets back in the 20th century.
With crops failing everywhere – though Interstellar shows little of Earth beyond the farmstead and its rural surroundings – Coop busies himself as a doting father, bequeathing his deliberate, scientific outlook to his son Tom and to his daughter Murphy, who is seemingly dogged by a poltergeist that tips books off her shelves and draws patterns on the floor of her bedroom.
|
Interstellar Directed by Christopher Nolan. |
When the patterns, eventually interpreted, lead to a secret installation housing NASA’s persevering leftovers, now an underground initiative led by Professor Brand (Michael Caine), Coop is re-enlisted for a last-ditch quest to save humanity by travelling through a wormhole to look for survivors of previous missions sent to potentially habitable worlds in another galaxy.
Accompanying him are Brand’s daughter, Amelia (Anne Hathaway), a couple more scientists you know are expendable because they aren’t played by A-listers, and two less-than-anthropomorphic robots called TARS and CASE, whose voice work will leave you yearning for a JARVIS or a HAL 9000.
Lots of expository talk among the spacefarers conveys the fundamentals of relativity and time dilation – harking back to Inception’s treatment of dreams-within-dreams – which allows “Murph” and Tom to grow up into Jessica Chastain and Casey Affleck while their dad touches down among, or beyond, the constellations of their night sky.
More driven by theoretical physics than characters, Interstellar is ultimately as frustrating and overlong – at 169 minutes – as it is polished and technically well-executed.
McConaughey and Chastain turn in the film’s best performances, assisted by the fact that their characters are the only self-consistent ones (not counting John Lithgow in a minor part).
Hathaway grows into her role, but the character’s credibility is sabotaged by a speech about love that shreds simple logic in an attempt by the story to transcend science.
There is scientific (or even, for storytelling purposes, pseudo-scientific) rigour, and then there is metaphysical fluff informed by spirituality and sublime love. In Interstellar, Nolan wants to have it both ways.
In general, whenever the film ought to skim over something and leap forward, it pauses entirely to give the nearest character an explanatory monologue, frequently – and tediously – culminating in yet another recitation of Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night.”
All told, Interstellar emphasizes Nolan’s strengths as a filmmaker but also his weaknesses. Technical prowess and stark beauty are at the fore, along with the director’s trademark clockwork precision; but emotional engagement is basically limited to how much you like the actors.
As with much of Nolan’s oeuvre, the writing – though intermittently clever – cannot quite figure out how to make you care about the characters, even with the survival of the human race at stake. Tidbits of humour fall flat throughout.
The evident dedication to craft – to direction and editing – disguises the fact that this is a bloated and self-indulgent story which frequently fails to make sense even on its own terms, though to unpack its contradictions without spoiling the plot would be as difficult as anything undertaken by the characters.
Fortunately, the unflinching mathematics governing life or death in space tend to speak for themselves, providing intermittent chills unmatched by the dialogue, characters or effects.
Only Hans Zimmer’s score comes close. Heavy on wailing pipe-organ chords and soaring arpeggios, it is a work of art in its own right – even more so than the composer’s contribution to Inception – though musically it is indebted to the Koyaanisqatsi score by Philip Glass (heard more recently in Watchmen) and conceptually it can’t escape the shadow of Tree of Life, which likewise set scenes of cosmic splendour to a thundering choir.
Visually, the space scenes never truly impress or enthrall, especially on the heels of Gravity and Prometheus; their being touted as groundbreakingly realistic, thanks to the work of theoretical physicists consulted by the visual effects team, only underscores the feeling that this is a homework assignment instead of a tour de force.
For a movie all about pushing the boundaries of technology and exploration, Interstellar offers startlingly little in the way of breaking new ground, whether in terms of storytelling or special effects. Certainly there is nothing here to rival Gravity in 3D as an immersive or just plain exhilarating experience.
A casualty of its own bombast, Interstellar may wear its influences on its space-suited sleeve, but it can’t match the enthralling solemnity of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris nor the mythic grandeur of 2001: A Space Odyssey.