About a year ago I was pleasantly surprised by the Sandra Bullock, George Clooney space adventure Gravity. I had seen the adverts, read and heard the reviews and was convinced that it couldn't possibly live up to the hype: I was wrong. This week I went to see Interstellar: the Christopher Nolan directed sic-fi space adventure, skeptical that this was just a Gravity knock-off, but walked in open to the prospect of being surprised, considering last year's turnabout.
All I can say is, this is no knockoff of last year's hit (at least not in its totality), but it certainly isn't worth the hype.
I must be up front: I'm not a big Christopher Nolan fan. He's certainly a great action director but, to paraphrase Orson Welles, he likes to come off like a big thinker, which really must be stopped. I thought 2010's Inception was a pretentious fraud: a fun popcorn movie masquerading as existential psycho drama. I liked the Dark Night, the middle movie of Nolan's Batman trilogy, but thought the other two, especially the finale, were depressingly nihilistic. What made the Dark Knight Rises even worse is that he stuck on a happy ending to the doom and apocalyptic gloom.
In the case of Interstellar all signs point to a transcendent reality helping our heroes along, explained away using "reason" in a manner that takes more faith to accept than it does to believe in God.
The plot is very complicated, but at the heart of it the earth, in some not so distant future, is experiencing droughts and blights that are one by one killing all the main agricultural food staples. Corn is the only thing left. After that goes, so goes humanity. Matthew McConaughey plays a former astronaut turned farmer mysteriously drawn, through his daughter, to a secret NASA base. To make a very long and convoluted story short, his mission is to enter into a black hole that mysteriously appeared next to Saturn, following other secret missions that went before. Once on the other side he and his crew are to scout potential planets these previous missions had identified as being potentially habitable, selecting the one that gives humanity the best chance to start over.
There are all sorts of games played with the time space continuum, so that people on earth age faster than those on other planets and solar systems. The science gets fuzzy, as well as the logic, which I wouldn't care about if it didn't make so much of a difference to how the story wraps up. If Inception's problem was that it treated the dream world with far too much concrete linear certainty, here it's that the natural world is treated with the disjointed logic of a dream, and this strategy works no better than the first.
Plus, it takes a long time, over two hours, to get where it's going. I have nothing against long movies, but Nolan, with co-writer (and brother) Jonathan set up a plot so complicated it demanded at least an extra half hour then it probably should have get it all untangled and the loose ends tied off. Even then, it all doesn't fit. Again, I have no problem suspending disbelief in films like this, but not when so much is riding on the science part of the fiction, to the exclusion of a non-scientific explanation for anything.
As I wrote earlier, a recurring point made throughout the story is that so many events seemed to be pre-planned by an unseen agent. The black hole seemed to be placed in just the right place at just the right time. McConaughey's daughter believes that they were given clues to the base's location by ghosts. The scientists talk of the previous missions being led to their destinations by "them," whoever "they" are. McConaughey refuses to believe any of this, stating that if a phenomenon is unexplainable it's just that science hasn't figured it out yet, but it will in time (a very common atheist/skeptic argument when faced with mysteries that defy human reason). There is no explicit rejection of God or the spiritual, but it is clearly implied by how the story wraps up.
I will have more to say about this point soon, because I think a treatment of Interstellar's metaphysics deserves a separate treatment. But I'll leave it at this: I loved the cast, including John Lithgow, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Michael Caine, and a slew of cameos and stunt casting that would be a spoiler to reveal. The special effects are jaw dropping for their realism (the budget was a reported 165 million dollars, and every penny of it is on the screen). Some have criticized Nolan for being emotionally detached, but I thought the human characters were drawn as well as one could expect from a sci-fi action adventure. I believed the relationship between McConaughey and his young daughter played effectively by 14 year old Mackenzie Foy, though this probably has more to do with the actors then the script.
I could say these same things about any of the other Christopher Nolan films I've seen: Good actors who elevate the material and mind blowing special effects. But what's missing, now as always, is a soul. For all the black holes and distant worlds, we are still in a closed universe that we are the center of. In short, Interstellar is nothing more than feel good nihilism.
But more on that next time.
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