Just tagline the movie poster ‘The real Outer Space is Inner Space’ and save us the extraneous third hour.
In isolation, there are some stunning moments in Interstellar – perhaps none moreso than when Coop (Matthew McConaughey) hands his fellow astronaut Romilly (David Gyasi) his mp3 player with sounds of Earth to comfort him. It’s the setup for a siple yet devastating juxtaposition of sight and sound: the visual of their ship, a tiny dot making its celestial way past Saturn, with the very terrestrial audio of crickets and a thunderstorm. It’s a moment unique to the setup of Interstellar – and while potentially iconic, it’s unfortunately not emblematic.
Interstellar presents a mix of hard sci-fi, the harrowing, the sentimental, and the silly – and these storytelling modes don’t always play nicely with each other.
As the leader of a crew of astronauts on an expedition to save all of humanity, at the risk of never returning home to his kids, McConaughey’s amazing performance is the single undeniable constant amid a collection of volatile variables in Interstellar. As is common among Christopher Nolan films, the concept of time is played with, in a range of novel and occasionally stunning ways. There is also a spectrum of spectacle in Interstellar – some examples more effective than others.
In the finale set piece, the fifth dimension scene is more dreamlike (or nightmarish) than anything in Nolan’s other movie that was actually about dreams, Inception (2010), from the imagery and setting, to Cooper screaming and not being heard, and desperately pounding away at the bookshelves with, at least initially, little impact. As a moment, the concept is as alien as the urgency and impotence are palpable. As a culmination of the movie that has come before it, it’s both a frustrating suspension-of-disbelief end of the story’s purportedly scientific long and winding road, and the most frustratingly whiz-bang-with-depreciating-substance set piece of the film.
Nolan’s first attempt at sympathetic (or even vaguely human) characters.
It’s a more character-driven version of the director’s trademark late-in-the-final-act high concept twist, which is supposed to function as the story’s emotional payoff, but asks more of the viewer emotionally and intellectually than its setup has earned. In Interstellar, the ‘twist’ boils down to the same cop-out conceit that seems to serve as the ‘resolution’ in other recent sci-fi movies (Danny Boyle‘s Sunshine, I’m looking at you): after more than two hours of telling us how unfathomably huge the universe is, the film concludes that HUMANS ARE STILL THE CENTRE OF EVERYTHING (I mean really, just tagline the movie poster ‘The Real Outer Space Is Inner Space’ and save us three hours).
Of course, this film looks and sounds typically Nolamazing – and some geniunely entertaining space travel sequences are worth watching, if you shave 45 mins off the start and end the film (each, not altogether), or if you simply don’t care about story or people in general. (And that sequence on the water planet is genuinely thrilling.) Much of the character-driven nature of the movie is carried by Matthew McConaughey’s charisma, and the fantastic casting of Mackenzie Foy and his young daughter, Murph.
The Core of Nolanism: That One Line (Which Means Nothing)
But, as is typical with each of Christopher Nolan’s films (even the ones I’ve personally enjoyed most), Interstellar is so preoccupied with its concepts and imagery that it forgets to actually resolve anything with its characters, their world(s), or any of the other various plates it’s spinning. And worst of all, Nolan usually does this for the sake of a supposedly poetic line and/or visual coda that not only ignores all the events that led up to it, but also means nothing in itself. In The Dark Knight (2008), it was “Not the hero Gotham wants, but the hero it needs”, which means nothing; here, it’s the daughter vs fellow astronaut ending.
There’s something deeply irresponsible and callously unempathetic in the act of a storyteller with such grand resources deciding that, in order to tell an emotional human story, they need to use an oppressively grim, catastrophic existential threat to all humanity as an off-screen prop.
Beyond its technical craft, Interstellar offers no actual joy, and no grand ideas or even small moments which aren’t also relentlessly bleak.
And it speaks volumes to that irresponsibility that, though the entire emotional tether of this overlong epic is, supposedly, the connection between father and daughter, when father finally, FINALLY, FI. NA. LLY. reaches daughter, after less than a minute she simply sends him off to find Anne Hathaway, with whom he’d shared zero affection or even connection throughout the whole adventure. The point, now laid bare, isn’t the human story, or grappling with any of the film’s philosophical questions, but cheap audience manipulation. And in what doesn’t seem like a meta or even self-aware way, in the story, characters even discuss the ethics of manipulating people while having no hope to offer them.
Top to bottom, this is cynicism, cosplaying as a math problem, that can only be solved by sentimentality.
The film’s most psychedelic visual sequence (the “fifth dimension” scene), which also doubles as its narrative moebius strip, and triples as the knot in its emotional tether (M. Night Shyamalan‘s Signs meets Danny Boyle’s Sunshine once again), is perhaps the most Nolancriminal act in the entire film (and that’s saying a lot, given the string of things like, say, the whole fist-fight-in-space episode). The logic of the scene itself is explained in one crucial line (that it wasn’t aliens but humans who, somehow, in the future, developed the mind-boggling technology to make this single activity possible). The implications of this notion are massive, perhaps bigger than space itself (which, as the movie by this point has already taken considerable time and energy to show us, is really big) – and yet it’s never revisited or even addressed afterward, which is short shrift considering that it’s also the single development that allowed one man to save the entire human race and keep his promise to his little girl. (Wow, did I actually just write that sentence? That’s Nolan for ye). It’s a Nolanism en par with the Talia ‘twist’ reveal in The Dark Knight Rises (2012):
one line of dialogue intended to check emotional, narrative and conceptual boxes all at once, yet ultimately failing to satisfy any of them, and merely raising more questions.
Nolan missed the day they taught “show, don’t tell” at film school – and then he copied someone’s notes badly, and got it the wrong way around. I don’t derive much enjoyment from peanut gallery-ing a movie but, verging ever as his films do on edgelord nihilism, Nolan purports to be an intelligent, intellectual film-maker, serving up pretense in dry, sober aesthetics, tailored suits, and unrelenting seriousness. He sets that bar, and it’s a lot to bear. So when he presents things which, when actually examined intellectually, ultimately lack anything beyond the appearance of intelligence or even any cohesive logic, when the goal and means of manipulation are laid bare, what other response is appropriate? We’re asked to engage with Nolan’s work on a cerebral level, and yet we’re met with obfuscation (important details obscured by odd editing, sound, and sequencing choices), as if that were the same as having our minds blown. We’re invited to play tennis; we get to the court, racquet-in-hand, only to find that the tennis balls are turning into basketballs, and then no balls at all. And did you notice how the court was never a court at all? The court is inside us all! Game. Set. Match. Nolan out.
I wasn’t as pissed off with Interstellar as I’d been led to believe I would be, but that could just be because I was led to believe I’d be more pissed off. Is that a black hole of logic? Must be Nolan rubbing off on us all. What a twist!
Further Viewing
“For all his emphasis on image, he’s often not a director who’s willing to rely only on visual storytelling. Instead, he often adds or uses exposition in addition to or instead of visual storytelling,” observes Thomas Flight of Nolan’s Exposition Problem. “Condensing this wild and incredible experience into something that can be quickly summarized through exposition just cheapens it”:
This Guy Edits breaks down – literally, on his own editing timeline – the deceptively complex cross-cutting of Interstellar‘s climax:
Meanwhile, Lessons from the Screenplay examines why Nolan‘s trademark cross-cutting works better in Inception than it does in Interstellar:
We look at other, powerful ways cross-cutting can be used for exciting and effective storytelling:
On the 10th anniversary of Interstellar, co-star Timothée Chalamet (“twelfth on the call sheet”) interviews Christopher Nolan (it’s worth the watch just to hear Nolan say “McConaissance“):
Steven Spielberg reveals he was originally attached to direct Interstellar. In this interview with Variety, Spielberg reveals that his version was “a first-contact mystery with a scientific payoff, not a closed time loop”:
Christopher Nolan is well known to be a fan of Stanley Kubrick. With Interstellar, Nolan may have been aiming for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), but he landed closer to Contact (1997):