By Marc S. Sanders
On a rewatch of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar it is no wonder he eventually went on to adapt Homer’s The Odyssey into a fully realized film. The classic sci-fi picture, which draws inspiration from Stanely Kubrick’s work while likely springboarding off of Arthur C Clarke’s and Isaac Asimov’s ideas, is an ambitious undertaking. It’s not Star Wars with lasers and aliens, but it is slightly Star Trek with missions bent on discovery. Its fiction is rooted in true science and that’s precisely why it should be taken seriously; never taken for granted.
Like The Odyssey, the story from Nolan with his writing partner and brother Jonathan, sets out on a far off journey that will take travelers decades into the future of a fictional future with an uncertainty of survival or a return back to Earth. Loved ones back home remain in wait and worry. The Nolans had to be thinking of Homer’s poetic opus while undertaking Interstellar. The parallels are just so clear, welcoming fresh perspectives for both films.
Matthew McConaughey is Cooper, a former astronaut, now corn crop farmer and widower. He is raising his son Tom (Timothée Chalamet) and daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy) who is choosing to follow in her father’s footsteps of accurate science and astronomy. His father-in-law (John Lithgow) is tending to the family at the home and likely by default because Cooper was never meant to be a homemaker. He was meant to soar among the stars.
The children’s school serves to prep them for farming and deny even the simplest theories of science, especially when Murph opts to write reports that back up such conjecture. Cooper is on her side. Yet, the school faculty deny any of the historic Apollo missions of the twentieth century and college is not a primary goal for students. Preparation for farm life is what’s needed. Wild legends that propagandize technological competitions in races to space with the Soviet Union lend no use or value to surviving on an Earth stricken with food shortages. Farming is what the world has to focus on.
Interstellar reveals that an interruption in Earth’s gravity is causing punishing sandstorms, more familiarly reminiscent of the dustbowl era from the 1930s. Technology is not cooperative, nor is it tolerable for the government. Even military service is no longer needed. Therefore, farming has become the most necessary industry to rely upon. The world these characters occupy is plagued with an extreme shortage of food while nitrogen is expected to replace the availability of oxygen. If the people of Earth don’t starve, they’ll suffocate. For example, as the film begins the last crops of okra have run out for the entire planet Earth. Wheat is also in short supply. Corn is becoming the standard on a planet that gets globally bombarded with punishing sandstorms.
Through odd circumstances, Cooper and Murph meet up with the last remaining folks at a classified NASA facility, operating from a clandestine nowhere locale, led by leading science expert Professor Brand (Michael Caine) with assistance from his daughter, Amelia (Anne Hathaway). They urge Cooper to pilot a ship into deep space, past Saturn, beyond the reaches of a black hole, and into another galaxy to locate a new planet that the remaining survivors of Earth can inhabit. That’s Plan A.
Should all else fail, Plan B is prepared with embryos to cargo thereby establishing new generations of mankind to indefinitely prolong the human race. Specific destinations include attempting to catch up with NASA explorers who left many years before but never returned or provided updates on their progress. Those astronauts only had the means to search individually and separate from one another. Cooper and Amelia would attempt to rendezvous with those that left before and surmise if they discovered anything that can be habitable. This mission serves the need to leave Earth, not to save it.
Murph resents her dad’s commitment to this new mission, but he sees no other choice. Personally, Cooper has always been a pilot and astronaut. Farming is not in his blood. He, Amelia, along with two other crew members, Romilly and Doyle (David Gyasi, Wes Bentley), will age slower than those they leave behind on Earth. Cooper is hoping to at least return by the time Murph’s age matches up to his.
Accompanying the crew are two robots that possess the personalities of accurate science, with a bit of programable sarcasm mixed in. Clearly the design of TARS and CASE (Bill Irwin, Josh Stewart) are drawn from Kubrick’s monolith image, but the stand-up rectangles can sectionally move to allow leg and arm use for utility operations. Very clever fictional engineering work going on here. Irwin is especially impressive as TARS as he put his skills with mime work and body flexibility to work. He’s actually on set, encased in a box, functionally performing as TARS.
Christopher Nolan is filmmaker who knows how to make the exposition of his pictures magnetically curious. First off, he works best when assembles his stories with a circular narration. Little details are disclosed and then left behind to reveal information about another subject and then another. Nothing may appear connected. However, often his movies will later go back to what’s only been hinted out and uncover an important purpose. Books falling off a shelf in the upstairs bedroom do not say much until you realize that there’s a message there. Dust particles descending in an organized pattern lend to an environment but may also serve a clue. On a first watch, and maybe even on the second and third view, it’s at least a welcome challenge to decipher the time period of the story and why even some of the most minute details serve so importantly. Christopher Nolan prefers to work with some brainy stuff.
Interstellar never feels like a chore even when you try to comprehend the complex debates among its characters. Hathaway and McConaughey haggle over which planet to visit next. Their resources far into this new galaxy will not enable them to visit both locations. So, how important and powerful is love, bent on a personal desire, when the future of mankind is at stake? Should romanticism tip the scale of the crew’s decision? The travels through space offer unusual challenges that hardly mimic anything I’ve ever seen on a Star Trek episode.
Back on earth, the children grow into adults played by Casey Affleck and Jessica Chastain, both very good at being disagreeable siblings living on a world that is quickly deteriorating while mounting dirt exposure affects the family’s health. Affleck’s portrayal of Tom is focused on upholding crop supplies to defy worldwide starvation. Chastain’s portrayal of Murph works with Caine’s character, continuing his research that is expected to resolve the last variables of seeking a new planet to relocate the residents of Earth. Contrary to Tom, Murph is working ahead of an inevitable loss by applying her knowledge of science to pioneer a more sensible solution.
A side story dating back to Murph’s youth revolves around a “ghost” who resides behind the bookshelf upstairs. Out of nowhere, one book after another will topple off a shelf. (A nice detail by Nolan is to have Stephen King’s dystopian novel The Stand propped up.) Are Murph and Cooper really willing to accept supernatural phenomena over what can only realistically occur? I mean we are talking about the hard truths of science here. Tom is happy to tease his little sister with the weirdness of a ghost living behind that bookshelf.
Interstellar never allows anything to be easy. Jonathan and Christopher Nolan’s script works harder at offering the unsolvable than what can lead to rescue and resolution. Science of any kind never makes anything easy. Even humanity can unexpectedly betray its best intentions. Things go awry in space and on Earth causing more setbacks and distance apart and therefore presenting less likelihood of success. Yet, what’s effective is that Christopher Nolan treats his picture like a documentary. Peppered through the first forty minutes of the film are elderly people offering up interview recollections of what it’s been like to live with meteorological dirt storms that intrude upon their homes and outer environments. They have to turn their dishes upside down to keep them as clean as possible. They need to wear masks and goggles. Seven years after this movie came out, ideas like this hardly seem exaggerated. The elderly folks who are being interviewed were real folks who experienced those dirt storms from the early twentieth century and participated in some of Ken Burns’ documentaries. Christopher Nolan operates on science fiction that is anything but far-fetched.
On paper, all of this would likely be the most exciting issue of Popular Science magazine ever published. Sadly, it would never be read and rest on the coffee table in the lobby of our dentist or primary care physician. Thankfully, Nolan finds a way to thrill us through scenarios. Like 2001: A Space Odyssey (there’s that word, again), the Nolans offer first person, interior window perspectives of looking out over the wing of the space crafts. You hardly ever get an idea of the whole dimensions of the model ships with only a select few omniscient, external views. They want you to live within the confines of the space crafts. Outer exhausts are emitted but when Nolan cuts in footage from the outside, the fumes are not accompanied by sound effects. The same goes with various collisions or explosions in space. Planet Earth may be depicted as an unlivable dust bowl, but the constructs of outer space remain unchanged. Sound never exists in the vacuum of space. So please have a seat Mr. Spock.
Though I wish his signature whispered twang was a little more enunciated, Matthew McConaughey is touching throughout the entire three-hour film. Nolan captures an exceptional moment of sadness as he is able to catch up with video feeds submitted by Tom and Murph. Try to fathom visiting a planet for the equivalent of three hours, measured on Earth, but when you return to the ship, over twenty-three years have gone by. People back home have passed away. Babies have been born. Children have embarked on careers. You might respond like Cooper does and become a mess of tears and homesickness. It’s a one take sensational moment, beyond compare. An absolute highlight of the actor’s career.
Anne Hathaway is not the central character here, but she works well as a continuous counterpoint to the hypotheticals proposed by Cooper. As a contrast to Cooper the pilot, Amelia operates on exact science and though she’ll reside in an enclosed tin can of a spaceship with three men, she does not want to entertain the luxury of becoming friends. They might have endless amounts of time, journeying to Saturn and then on to another galaxy light years away, but there’s a lot of new science to uncover.
Following Batman Begins, the director took his team back to Iceland which serves as destinations into the far reaches of outer space. Nolan’s cameras sweep on and on and overhead to tell us there’s much to look for in these places left mostly untraveled.
Possibilities beyond imagination are treated like realistic outcomes, including ideas like communications traveling back in time by means of gravitational pulls. Things like this I completely buy but could never explain how it connects or operates.
The Nolans accomplish what so many other pictures neglect or fail to factor including engineering, biology, astrophysics and necessary needs of survival accompanied by the philosophical natures of love. It might sound romantic, but it’s been a long while since humanity grew out of the slime of the earth. Love had something to do with us still breathing this air and allowing us to go see the director’s Batman movies.
Christopher Nolan challenges us to find entertainment and wonder while he speaks on higher plains of intelligence than other standard summer blockbusters. He’s at the other end of a wide spectrum where he’d never consider nuking an asteroid in space to save the Earth. Something less glamorous and more overwhelming would take us out in his universe. It would require his heroes to make bigger sacrifices than what another filmmaker might propose for Bruce Willis. Nolan is the storyteller who is adamant that we can do better by use of scientific awareness and realistic possibilities.
Who knows? Incessant dust clouds might overcome the planet, accelerating its demise and forcing some of us to do things that a man like Cooper would declare “necessary.” When the glaciers finally melt away, I would not be surprised if the scientists at the time reference what Christopher Nolan considered in one of his pictures.
Nothing here feels so otherworldly or foolhardy, anymore.
Interstellar may be that sci-fi flick that’ll become required textbook studying for our children’s children’s children who live beyond the black holes of space and time.
2 UNPAID MOVIE CRITICS!!!! 