If Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar is nothing else, it is
ambitious – ambitious with a capital “A” – to the tune of $165 million, a
gamble so large that despite the director’s proven success at the international
box office, his home studio Warner Brothers brought in Paramount Pictures as a
partner to help shoulder the financial load.
Whether this was done due to the studio’s lack of confidence in the
project or is a rare sign of financial responsibility is anyone’s guess. However, the result is the most expensive
vanity project ever produced, a visually stunning film that ultimately
disintegrates before our eyes, undone by conflicting tones and a nonsensical
(dare I say ridiculous?) prolonged conclusion that bends theories of
relativity, time anomalies and extra-dimensional existence to the breaking
point in its quest to deliver a profound narrative.
It’s the near future and if the movies have taught us
anything, it’s that this mean our world is in peril. Plant species are dying off, the environment
is in revolt and there’s no hope in sight.
One time astronaut and reluctant farmer Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is
an anachronism and he knows it, a man whose exploits are in the distant past
and whose skill set has become obsolete. However, an odd set of circumstances
leads him to a secret division of NASA, led by Professor Brand (Michael Caine)
that’s building a spaceship that will take a crew to a black hole that has
suddenly appeared near Saturn. Seems
they’ve already sent 12 others there and through to other dimensions in an
effort to find a planet similar to our own where mankind can survive. Cooper eagerly accepts Brand’s offer to lead
a small crew, including the professor’s daughter Amelia (Anne Hathaway) as well
as astrophysicists Doyle (Wes Bentley) and Romilly (David Gyasi), to the
gateway so that they can go through and explore three different worlds from
which they are getting positive feedback from those who’ve gone before. Needless to say, this does not sit well with
Cooper’s daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy), who feels abandoned in the face of her
father’s sacrifice.
The journey of the Endurance and her crew plays out over the
film’s final two hours and if the movie has a strong suit, it’s the visuals
Nolan employs. Shot on location in
Canada and Iceland, there’s a realistic sense to these alien worlds that
grounds the movie’s sci-fi elements and when paired with the impressive visual
effects at play, the director delivers on his promise of presenting wondrous
other worlds, captured in pristine detail with 70mm film stock. This is a feature that more than justifies
the extra cost required to see the movie in the IMAX format.
Unfortunately, the script is not as impressive. At its core, this is a disaster movie and
end-of-the-world scenarios have been done to death to point of tedium. To be
sure, the emotional resonance of the story, underscored by strong performances
from McConaughey, Hathaway, Foy and Jessica Chastain as Cooper’s grown
daughter, are solid and prove quite moving at times. However, the third act is
a mess as a character, played by a major star, appears and soon reveals himself
as the villain of the piece, a character who, we soon realize is there in
service of the screenplay in order to create conflict and nothing more. The
drama and action that ensues is handled in a ham-fisted, clunky manner that had
me questioning if Nolan was indeed the man who made the Dark Knight trilogy.
When theoretical concepts serve as the anchor for your
story, this gives the filmmakers a great deal of latitude where narrative
structure is concerned. The Nolans know this and take advantage of it with the
scenario they concoct for the film’s climax, one that taxes the audience’s sense
of disbelief. Obviously, when dealing
with theoretical metaphysics and issues of relativity, anything is possible. Some
in the audience may buy the solution at hand; as for me, while I’d like to
believe that love trumps all other concerns in the universe, what plays out
here is more than a stretch and borders on the ridiculous.
The specter of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey hangs over this film, not because they are both of the same genre with similar
grand designs, but because Nolan evokes the landmark 1968 sci-fi classic again
and again. From the appearance of the
computers that assist Cooper and his crew throughout, to shots and sequences
that mirror the previous film to Hans Zimmer’s overpowering, organ-based score,
“Interstellar” strives to be in the same league as its predecessor but fails to
escape its long shadow. This is not because Nolan fails to make a distinctive
film of his own, but because he loses the nerve to ape Kubrick’s film all the
way to the end. 2001 was purposely ambiguous,
not hemmed in by expectations or convention, left open to the audience’s
interpretation. Nolan opts for a
feel-good happy ending and a third act that goes out of its way to explain the
theoretical science it employs, such as it is. As a result, Interstellar ends
up being not only far too obvious in its intentions but discernable and plain
when it should be challenging mysterious.
This article appears in Oct 30 – Nov 5, 2014.
