Interstellar is the kind of movie I like best: one in which I’m not really sure whether or not I actually liked it, or not. At the very least, it makes for some interesting writing!
In the simplest possible terms, Interstellar tells the tale of a group of astronauts searching for a new home planet for the human race. A natural disaster known at The Blight slowly kills all the crops on Earth, and corn remains the last holdout. Public opinion says that humanity should focus on the Earth rather than the stars, but Cooper doesn’t think so. Rather, in this post-apocalypse where humanity dies slowly and reverts back to its agrarian roots, he refuses to believe we will go down like this. Inadvertently, he happens upon the seemingly defunct headquarters of NASA, and they ask him to fly in an expedition to space through a wormhole – put in place by Aliens, or a Higher Intelligence, or God know what. They know that possible habitable planets lie on the other side, but this is a one way trip. Cooper thus leaves his family to, in a sense, pursue his life’s work.
Honestly, that synopsis really does not help, at all, in understanding the premise of Interstellar. Like all of Christopher Nolan’s films, it shares a love for excessive exposition. However, due to the scientific focus (and research) behind the film, these concepts remain necessary to understand the film. And yet, unless you happen to be a theoretical astrophysicist like, say, Kip Thorne, you’ll definitely get lost at some of the explanations. That, I think, presents the first problem with Interstellar – an audience needs to be able to understand what, exactly, is happening. The logistics need to make some sort of coherence in my mind, especially in a film that deals with far out concepts like black holes, tessaracts, and manipulation of space-time, or even the use of time or gravity as physical dimensions. Just thinking about explaining it wracks my brain, and I have been thinking rather intently on how things work, but it doesn’t come together. As Isaac Asimov said,
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
In a narrative sense, Interstellar travels the stars, but it provides no grounding points for its mechanisms.
On the other hand, Interstellar works far better, and far stranger, as a philosophical rumination on man’s place in the stars. The universe depicted herein is cold, dark, distant, and hostile. Separation from humanity leads people to the breaking point; no one in Interstellar ever succeeds in isolation. And yet, evolutionary impulses alone don’t seem to dictate the inner workings of Nolan’s universe, to my surprise. Rather, the mystical undercurrent in the entire film crops up again and again. It focuses upon an ineffable force that everyone knows about in biological terms, but can’t quite explain: Love. Love binds people across time and space, across distant times and different generations, even in the bleakness of far off space. It is what motivates every character in the film to some degree, and those connections somehow transcend all possible odds. For Nolan, it’s an emotional heart-breaker of a film.
That, I think, turns Interstellar into a very strange, very intense film experience. It proceeds through highs and lows, long bouts of trying to understand singularities while also watching Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, and Michael Caine cry a whole lot. The booming, epic dirge-playing organ of Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack conveys the omimous journey of humanity into the unknown, but often drowns out the actual, IMPORTANT dialogue I need to understand what’s happening. Nolan wants us to both feel and think, to really understand what he’s trying to say, but its methods cross paths but never coalesce. This especially goes with the relativity of time; our brains just can’t understand how a daughter can be older than a father, and the film, while scientifically accurate, dips right into the uncanny valley too many times.
We could say that I had the exact same problem with the show LOST. J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof set great expectations, and proudly stated that they would “explain everything”. What was the explanation? Magic. Unfortunately, magic only works as a narrative trope if, in fact, you establish its existence and the rules of its workings in a narrative. Otherwise, the audience may as well look for the deus ex machina when it arrives. My analytical side hates being blindsided by this answer, but my spiritual side says that it works. An author needs to clearly convey the side in which he or she functions, or else you end up with angry, angry people who wanted answers (because you gave them that expectation).
Interstellar has one such moment which is, in fact, consistent in one way but completely paradoxical in the sense of linear, perceivable time. In one sense, it’s a plot hole, something that can’t make logical sense because you can’t go back in time from the future to change the past without creating a logical time loop. On the other hand, we technically don’t know what would happen if you entered a black hole, so the director can really do whatever he wants. Again, cross purposes mean you want to understand what’s happening, but can’t, and the emotional drive pushes most audience members along.
So did I like it? Yeah, I did. I felt engaged throughout, and the film effectively conveys its themes in the film. Interstellar represents science fiction at its most realistic and adventurous, daring to test the comprehensibility of the universe to human minds and also saying something of value. What that something is might differ based on your own spiritual inclinations, but there is something there. Unfortunately, I don’t think cinema works well when you actually need to read up on the science behind events in a film, and that remains Interstellar’s greatest weakness. And yet, I feel like it works on some level, and I can’t quite put my finger on why.
Still, wouldn’t you rather see something ambitious like Interstellar, and not just a remake of a childhood favorite, or a long-dead franchise, or digging up the grave of one more thing you loved in the past? Depends on the mood, I suppose.
