Christopher Nolan undoubtedly makes bigger, grander movies than nearly any other director does. Alas, scale isn’t the same thing as greatness. It’s not every filmmaker who would have a budget of $170 million dollars to make a three hour sci-fi space picture like Interstellar. Few would have been as ambitious to do what he did to the Batman franchise, for better or worse, either. Nolan doesn’t dream, he formulates. If he is the next Stanley Kubrick as some have claimed, then he at least has the late director’s strict auteur regime of complete adherence and attention to the filmmaker’s vision more than any of the characters. His movies can feel index-carded and methodically mapped out to the maximum degree, but worry not about headaches: he’s already done all the thinking for you.
Interstellar isn’t exactly a gimmicky puzzle-game like Inception or Memento. It’s somewhere between that and the operatic grandiosity of The Dark Knight trilogy. With it he clearly wants to say profound things about the connections between people (in this case, family members) along with the human race’s place in the universe. Nolan might seem to have all the credentials in place but he was not the right storyteller for this (he’s better suited to borderline reactionary philosophizing in superhero pics). What’s most surprising is how lifeless and dull it is. Even with the overwhelming self-seriousness of The Dark Knight (rightly regarded as being by far the best of the bunch), much of it was exhilarating. Interstellar, by contrast, is joylessly and interminably a complete bore.
Matthew McConaughey plays Coop, a former NASA pilot and engineer who now works as a farmer in a big house with his deceased wife’s father (played by John Lithgow as the loosest, liveliest thing in the whole movie) and two kids. The year is sometime in the near future and the adventure he used to know is gone: the country has demilitarized and stopped paying for space projects it can’t afford (scandalously, the textbooks state that the Apollo moon landings were a fake staged to bankrupt the Soviet Union). The world is being altered by a changing climate, scarcity is the norm, and his crops are under constant siege from dust storms. Tapping into sentiments shared by quite a few now, he yearns constantly for the glory of earlier days and an America that’s gone. “It’s like we’ve forgotten who we are: explorers, pioneers. We’re not caretakers,” he says.
Coop gets his chance at adventure once more when he follows the mysterious coordinates he and his precocious elementary-school age daughter intercept all the way to a secret NASA base. Led by a former professor (played by Michael Caine), a team of experts have covertly sent 12 astronauts through a mysterious wormhole off the planet Saturn that permits a shortcut to uncharted planets millions of miles away. To preserve the human race even as the world’s environment imperils it, another world will be selected and our species will begin somewhat anew by a process of fertilized eggs and surrogate mothers. Cooper will pilot the shuttle that will follow up on their work and complete the mission. He leaves over the fierce objections of his daughter, who doesn’t know anything about the project until later in life (when she’s played by Jessica Chastain). From the second he drives away and Nolan quickly cuts from the sad daughter’s avalanche of tears to the astronaut’s take-off, you know nothing will be the same.
Interstellar’s pacing is badly off: the first section on earth is at once hasty and laborious. The rhythm and timing is so peculiar that Coop’s visit to the secret NASA base has the strange, disjointed feel of a dream or hallucination. Later on, in scenes aboard the spacecraft where Coop and his crew (including Anne Hathaway as the professor’s daughter) debate the best strategies moving forward for minimizing wasted time and fuel, the movie quickly becomes turgid and airless. There is just no forward momentum to those conversations at all, and the predicament they find themselves in is tedious. It’s just not good storytelling. And some of it like a very scripted, university hall discussion of whether love is real or merely serves a social utility along with lines like “The human race will be adrift, desperate for a new rock to cling to. We will find that rock” should have been scrapped (is this really what Nolan thinks smart people sound like?).
The science, to put it mildly, seems suspect. In and of itself, that’s fine. Nolan eventually takes it to really nutty, bogus places that are less forgivable, let alone coherent (it will either work for you or won’t). Interstellar is a mess all around. Hoyte van Hoytema is director of photography this time out, taking over from the usual Nolan collaborator Wally Pfister (van Hoytema’s previous work includes Let the Right One In and Her). Once again the picture has an overly austere and colorless look as though a bright green or vivid red would detract from the seriousness of it. Most glaringly, Hans Zimmer’s score is is one of the most intrusive and overbearing I think I’ve ever heard. The organ-heavy music has a creepy tenor to it that seems to insinuate what’s happening onscreen is far more ominous than it otherwise appears (it often makes the dialogue sound intentionally banal). Zimmer has said in interviews he wants this score to hypnotize. If only. It’s a terrible and clunky distraction throughout, but one that amplifies the tonal oddness of the picture.
Frustratingly, Nolan barely finds any wonder or beauty even in the majesty of space. There’s one nice, quiet shot of the ship serenely spinning around, an infinitesimal speck next a massive planet but it’s just a moment, not even a scene, and it rapidly passes. Nolan is a literal minded director true and through: there’s no intuitive sense of sexuality or humor in any of his movies. There’s no poetry in his direction here either and it’s nothing like – despite his intentions – gazing up at the stars in awe. Interstellar does feels more like a personal statement than any of his previous work, however. In one memorable scene Coop tearfully watches several years of messages from his kids all at once (which happens after a misguided landing on a planet where, because of relativity, every hour amounts to seven years) and it is actually devastating in its feeling of enormous loss and time senselessly wasted.
Nolan’s movies haven’t been acclaimed for their emotional depth or range and aside from that scene this one is really no different. He gets caught up in the grand spectacle and pretentiousness of it and doesn’t afford enough space to the characters (his cast – including a star unmentioned in the trailers – works their hardest to overcome the obstacles, even if the truly talented Jessica Chastain trips a few times on the stilted dialogue). The emotions are muted by the talky and overly fussy cleverness. Nolan’s approach is just too convoluted and deliberate to touch the heart and too remote to leave much of an impact. It’s anybody’s guess as to where this will stand in the ranking of his work and whether his movies – all of which are like events when they’re released – will still be talked about years from now. Interstellar is the huge and ambitious work of a director who strives to be remembered, no question, but it commands attention for what it attempts, not what it accomplishes.
About Author
