“Interstellar” Directed by Christopher Nolan

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Director:

Christopher Nolan (“Memento”, the Dark Knight trilogy, “Inception”)

Main Cast:

Matthew McConaughey (“Dazed and Confused”, “The Lincoln Lawyer”, Best Actor Oscar® for “Dallas Buyers Club”)

Ann Hathaway (“Ella Enchanted”, “Brokeback Mountain”, Best Supporting Actress Oscar® for “Les Misérables”)

Jessica Chastain (“Take Shelter”, “The Tree of Life”, “The Help”)

Running Time:   169 Minutes

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I have a love-hate relationship with Christopher Nolan’s movies.  I find the writing (possibly too) smart and the technicals tight-to-impressive-to-groundbreaking but I always leave his films feeling oppressed and relieved to emerge into the real world.  The tone of his films is ominous and his storytelling and visual styles pound his points into your head.  To get more background on Nolan before I saw “Interstellar“, I recently watched the two Nolan movies I hadn’t seen before, his first and third films (bookending 2000’s “Memento”), 1998’s “Following” and 2002’s “Insomnia.”  Maybe I missed something but the sleep condition has less to do with the latter’s story than the title suggests.  “Following” is compelling and has the feel of a director’s first film: It’s shot in gritty black and white and has no recognizable actors, like Darren Aronofsky’s 1998 “Pi.”  It also has a Nolan trademark, a non-linear storyline.  “Insomnia”, set in Alaska during summer ─ when the sun doesn’t set for months ─ stars Robin Williams and Al Pacino as a murderer and the cop pursuing him.  Pacino as a cop is nothing new but it’s a treat to see Williams cast against type and subdued.  (I have to admit my ADD kicked in when I saw “Memento” and my head hurt trying to follow it.  I know I should watch it again but it’s so intimidating I keep putting it off.)

Dust from the storms. Dry, drier, driest.

“Interstellar” is set in the not-too-distant and foreseeable future.  Climate change, drought, famine, the world prioritizing making money over all else, and a lack of emphasis on the importance of farming has resulted in a bleak and hopeless future for mankind.  One by one, crops are wiped out by plague.  Not individual crops, entire crop SPECIES.  The frequent flash dust (right) storms are an extreme version of the 1930’s Dust Bowl in North America’s prairies.  Like I said, bleak.

Cooper, Brand and the mission’s craft

Cooper (Matthew McConaughey, left, with Michael Caine), an engineer and NASA pilot turned corn (the next crop to be wiped out) farmer, comes across a highly secret location he discovers is NASA, which no one knows still exists.  It’s explained by the NASA officials, headed by Professor Brand (the reliable Michael Caine, who has a monopoly on mentor characters in Nolan’s movies), that mankind’s only hope for survival is to explore planets on the other side of a space-time portal to find one habitable for Earth’s population.  Cooper finds out NASA has already sent out missions through the portal, although the ability of the missions to communicate is limited to sporadic beeps.  It’s arranged Cooper will head a similar mission whose crew includes Professor Brand’s daughter (Anne Hathaway, in a haircut too similar to Sandra Bullock’s in “Gravity” to not notice), Doyle (Wes Bentley), and Romilly (David Gyassi).

It won’t make sense to divulge any more of the story because it’s so dense with intense scenes, fascinating concepts, and amazing visuals.  One thing you have to acknowledge Nolan for; he likes exercising the minds of his audience.

The movie is clearly Nolan’s most ambitious (which is saying something) and it’s high-end pornography for avid/rabid science fiction fans.  It introduces a nonstop barrage of concepts (the portal is not a hole but a sphere, right) and we’re really kept on our toes because of them.  Taking on a subject like the space-time continuum allowed the writers (Nolan and his brother Jonathan) a wide range of possibilities and opportunities to create and they take full advantage.  Setting the story at a time when mankind’s number will soon be up gives it the ultimate urgency.

Unlike Nolan’s other films and in a welcome change, a warm, human element is strongly emphasized.  We are given insight into Cooper’s family (left), in terms of their own personalities as well as their relationships with each other.  To bring us up to date with how current living conditions evolved, background is offered in the way of interview responses of elderly people.  The interviewees comment on the emotional aftermath as much as they share factual events.  For the first time in a Nolan movie, we really care about the well-being of the characters and it sets up the rest of the movie perfectly.  Another welcome aspect to a Nolan film is a sense of humor, which comes in the form of the mission’s robot/computer TARS (voiced by Bill Irwin), whose design is one of the many unique concepts the film offers.  In another break from previous Nolan, Hans Zimmer’s music score effectively serves its purpose without being overbearing and haunting you for hours after you leave the theatre.

The mission’s crew minus Doyle (Wes Bentley)

All the acting is good but it’s secondary to the story, the breakneck pace and, most of all, the amazing concepts we are introduced to and the way those concepts are fleshed out.   For instance, one hour on the other side of the portal is the equivalent of seven years on Earth and the range of time relativity between areas on the other side  is wide open.  The depiction of what Cooper finds when he’s in the portal sphere without a craft is absolutely jarring and your brain races in its vain attempt to fully process what you’re looking at visually, conceptually, and in terms of plausibility.

Casey Affleck and Jessica Chastain (left) play adult versions of Cooper’s children (Tom and Murphy, respectively) and Matt Damon is Dr. Mann, the only person from the previous missions to have successfully set up camp.  All are convincing in intense roles.  Chastain, great in everything I’ve seen her in, gets the most to work with in terms of range and screen time and her character is the core of the film’s human element.  You have to admire how Damon takes on the supporting role of a character who may not exactly represent the best in humankind, although anyone would be tested under the same conditions.  Oscar® winner (for Martin Scorsese’s 1974 “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore”) Ellen Burstyn is a welcome presence as the elderly Murphy.  As much as I like Hathaway, I couldn’t completely buy into her as someone who would be on such an extreme mission.  Her character comes across as more emotionally and physically fragile than someone I’d want to be as my team member under those circumstances.  John Lithgow as Cooper’s father Donald is on and off screen so quickly by the end of the movie I forgot he was in it.

“Interstellar” runs almost three hours but it doesn’t feel like it.  Appropriately, real-life time had no meaning as I watched the film.  As the film got going, I already anticipated the DVD release, partly because I liked the movie and partly because I need subtitles for the dialogue I couldn’t understand. Especially during the initial meeting Cooper has with NASA, it was as though they were speaking a different language or trying to keep a secret from the audience.   Or Caine and McConaughey (right) were having a contest to see who could groan their lines the least intelligibly.

“Interstellar” throws so many new concepts at us, it’s hard for us to try to fully process them and assess their validity, although I couldn’t help trying.  That isn’t a bad thing.  I can suspend disbelief without ignoring my nature to try to figure out how the concepts are viable.  I read a headline citing the film’s plot holes.  A film this ambitious should be given a pass from such criticisms.  Looking for holes in the story works against the point of the film.  It’s like brainstorming in a marketing meeting; throw out as many ideas as possible without shooting any down.  I guess the best summary is to say “Interstellar” continues where Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 landmark “2001:  A Space Odyssey” leaves off, although to say the two films converge might be more accurate.  I previously commented that Arthur C. Clark and Kubrick would have been proud of “Gravity” but the comment is much more apt for “Interstellar.”

All that said, and attributable to the ambition of the storyline and relentless bombardment of new concepts, this is Nolan’s least cohesive film.  It’s overwhelming in its ambition and there’s too much to process in terms of plot points, concepts, and visuals, just like the end of “2001” (right).  Once the mission starts and like the crew itself, we’re never given a moment to feel grounded (NPI) because so much of it is new.  I don’t mean that in a critical way at all.  Sacrificing structural perfection is an easy trade-off for such a thought-provoking, mind-expanding, and visceral filmgoing experience.

Despite citing its lack of cohesion, “Interstellar” is the Christopher Nolan film I like the most (I didn’t have a favorite before).  I’ve put no thought into its Oscar chances.  All of that takes a back seat to the fact the Nolan brothers rolled the dice and wrote and directed (Christopher also has a producer credit) a movie that is exceptionally stimulating to look at, think about, marvel at, and let challenge our notions of time/space and mankind’s future.

DPW

November 16, 2014

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The timing of the release of “Interstellar” is appropriate because:

– In comes relatively soon after the airing of the TV series Cosmos:  A Space/Time Odyssey.  Between the two productions, I can imagine people being inspired to become astro-physicists or going into related fields.

– It happened the same week the Rosetta mission landed the Philae probe on a comet travelling 40,000 miles an hour 310 million miles from earth.  Simultaneously incomprehensible and amazing to me.   (The recent Virgin Galactic and NASA space station supply rocket accidents, especially coming within days of each other ─ and the film’s release  ─ show the dangers and instability of travel outside our atmosphere.  Anyone second-guessing space travel because of those accidents is justified.  Relative to the accidents, the film’s release date is ironic.)

-I just watched Richard Kelly’s 2001 “Donnie Darko”, whose lead character takes an interest in time travel, which greatly impacts the film’s ending.

Nolan’s IMDB profile cites Disney’s 1978 “The Black Hole” as one of his ten favorite movies.  Now that I’ve seen “Interstellar”, I’m going to give “The Black Hole” another viewing .  I’ve seen it twice and both times I was embarrassed for everyone involved in its making ─ especially since it came out after “Star Wars” ─ and stopped watching before the halfway point.  Clearly, it was an inspiration for “Interstellar” and for that reason alone deserves a fair and complete viewing.

As for the idea of going to other planets once we’ve depleted Earth’s resources, we don’t even fully understand the ocean bottom, much less are able to sustain human life there for long periods.  And it’s an ecosystem on our own planet.  Don’t get me wrong, I find things like photos of the Mars surface and the probe landing on a comet fascinating and appreciate the corresponding technology, but I can’t imagine a time when any significant population of humans can confidently live off our planet.  I’d love to be proven wrong and hope I’m around to see it.  There’s still no way I’d go myself.

Added November 26, 2014:

I watched “The Black Hole” all the way through.  My opinion of it hasn’t changed.   I didn’t see it as anything other than an average-to-bad 1950’s sci-fi movie, which isn’t good for a 1979 release.

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