Interstellar by Christopher Nolan
Interstellar , released in 2014 and written by director Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan Nolan, is a film about space, love, time, and transience. Whether you're impressed or bored largely depends on your sensitivity to sentimentality, bombast, and the need some filmmakers have to pose the big questions of life without providing answers. This is my second viewing of Interstellar ; the last time must have been a few years ago. I must confess, I'm not particularly fond of Christopher Nolan. I think his films evoke something worse in me than disappointment or hatred, and that's indifference. Dunkirk, Oppenheimer, Inception (whose theft of visual and narrative elements from Satoshi Kon's Paprika I’ll never forgive), and Interstellar, none of these films have made me lay in bed later that night and ponder the questions Nolan tries to ask. But thankfully, I find his films entertaining enough, and that's worth something.
I think Christopher Nolan falls short for me with his characters. As a viewer, I primarily connect or disconnect based on how layered, and therefore interesting, the characters are. When I think back on all the characters in Nolan's films, no one springs to mind. When I do think of someone, it's more because the character wasn't the character, but because I kept seeing the actor in it. Leonardo DiCaprio plays with Elliot Page in Inception, Matthew McConaughey plays in Interstellar , Florence Pugh was in Oppenheimer , and oh yeah! Harry Styles was in Dunkirk!
I remember being bothered a while after seeing Oppenheimer . If you ask someone after the film what they remember, they'll probably talk about the historical context or the moral dilemma surrounding the atomic bomb. But the film was about Oppenheimer himself. You're not likely to hear anything about who he was as a person. How do you make a film about the man who developed the atomic bomb, an invention that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, without any emotional connection to him?
But the biggest victims of Nolan's character writing are his female characters. Time and again, they are underdeveloped, clichéd, and exist primarily to serve as the emotional driving force for the male lead. In Inception, it's the suicidal Mal, who is already dead before the film begins; in Interstellar , it's Brand, who initially appears to be a sharp, intelligent woman but is later dismissed as too emotional; and of course, she's responsible for the embryos. In Oppenheimer , Kitty, his wife, is barely present, and the scenes she has with Oppenheimer feel empty. Jean Tatlock has a bizarre and fictionalized scene in the film where she reads the Quran naked with Oppenheimer.
Despite their long runtime, Christopher Nolan fails to infuse his ideas or characters with the necessary depth. His films are full, but not filling. Motivations remain elusive, relationships superficial. Moments that should be emotional don't resonate with me because of this. His actors are talented, but the characters they play are often so flat that their performances rarely shine. Nolan's films are technically impressive and grand in ambition, but for me they lack humanity, and that is a huge omission given the themes he chooses.
In Interstellar, we meet Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a widower, former NASA pilot, and current corn farmer who lives with his two children, Tom (Timothee Chamalet/Casey Affleck) and Murph (Mackenzie Foy/Jessica Chastain), on a farm with his father-in-law, Donald (John Lithgow). The film is set in the future, when Earth is plagued by dust storms and food species are dying due to repeated crop failures. To create this "fictional" world, Nolan had only to look to the past. He drew inspiration from the Dust Bowl , an event in the 1930s when the prairies of America and Canada experienced a period of drought and dust storms. Archival footage from a 2012 documentary about this period was even used in the film. Short segments featuring older adults reflecting on their lives during the Dust Bowl can be seen at the beginning and toward the end of the film. I found them a bit out of place at the beginning, and when they returned at the end, I thought, "Ooh! It's the older adults now sailing through space with Murph, talking about their lives on Earth!" When I realized these were real interviews with real people, I felt a bit tricked, but also felt somehow off. I'm not sure if I think it added value to the film, and thankfully, the idea that it wasn't accurate didn't bother me too much, but I do consider it a fun fact.
Within the world the Nolan brothers create, the bond between Cooper and Murph is central and serves as the story's emotional driving force. I find it somewhat amusing that Murph receives all the attention from Cooper, but also from the writers, while her brother Tom is ignored. The reason he's even in the film is a mystery to me, and any reason I can think of doesn't seem important enough, or at least not developed enough. At some point, the brother and sister become polar opposites. Later in the film, Murph becomes a scientist with hope for the future, while Tom becomes a farmer and withdraws from all hope.
But, as I said, the bond between Murph and Cooper is important. It's thanks to Murph (or rather, thanks to Cooper) that the story even begins to move. She's convinced that a ghost lives in her room. She's not taken seriously until the location of a secret NASA facility is revealed by dust that settles on the floor during a storm. In this secret facility, Cooper is approached for a mission. Humanity is dying out, but under the leadership of Professor Brand (Michael Caine), Cooper, along with a crew (Anne Hathaway, David Gyasi, Wes Bentley), might be able to find a new home planet. Two plans are proposed. Plan A: the new planet will be inhabited by colonies originating from Earth. Plan B: 5,000 embryos will be sent to the new home planet to offer humanity a new beginning. Plan A is a lie.
During the filming of Interstellar , two cameras were primarily used: 35mm Panavision and 70mm IMAX. This is also evident in the film's changing aspect ratio, where one scene fills the entire screen, while others are surrounded by a black bar. Whether I find this annoying or not, I'm not sure. I do find it an odd choice. Despite never really feeling a connection with Christopher Nolan, I can greatly respect his filmmaking style, or perhaps I should say his disapproval of excessive CGI. While he demolishes a Boeing for his film Tenet, recreates an atomic bomb for Oppenheimer, for Interstellar he installs an IMAX camera on the nose of a jet to film the space scenes. I find that a much more interesting fact than the fact that 202 hectares of corn were planted for the film. Farmers do that often enough. I also appreciate the attention paid to the film's reality. The film wasn't conceived by the Nolan brothers, but by producer Lynda Obst and theoretical physicist Kip Thorne. Kip Thorne remained closely involved as a scientific advisor. He had two rules for Nolan: the film mustn't conflict with known laws of physics, and if you're going to speculate, do it from a scientific perspective, not from your imagination. Thanks to Thorne, the film has received applause from the scientific community, for example, for the depiction of the black hole. Ultimately, of course, it remains a fictional film, so some aspects were handled more creatively, such as the time dilation on Planet Miller. Planet Miller is a point in the story that both fascinates and frustrates me. On this planet, one hour is equivalent to seven years on Earth. But the scene that plays out here lasts about 15 minutes, with no time jumps or editing that suggests a time shift for the characters we, the audience, are experiencing. When the ship can't take off because it's too wet, the robot TARS tells them they have to wait 45 minutes to an hour. But after a conversation, again without jumps or cuts, that still falls within those 15 minutes, there are suddenly only two minutes left, and they can leave the planet. When they return, 23 years have passed. Huh? 15 minutes is a quarter of an hour, is 7 divided by 4, is 1.75? Those 15 minutes would only cost them 1.75 years, not 23+ years. I think major mistakes were made in the editing or the overall conception of this scene. If you want to make them skip 23 years, at least make sure the characters clearly spend more than three hours on the planet. Even with the TARS warning that they'd have to be shut down for 45 minutes to an hour, the calculations don't add up. Simply by making the travel time and/or preparation time more explicit, this problem wouldn't have arisen. The worst moment in the film for me to ponder isn't the fact that Cooper and Brand suddenly skipped 23 years, but that Romilly had to spend all those 23 years alone on the Endurance, with or without hope that the others would return. The soundtrack during this moment is very powerful, and contains a nice detail. Every tick in Hans Zimmer's music represents a day passing on Earth. Hans Zimmer's score for this film is currently one of the most popular film scores ever. But that very fact takes me out of the film. I can't deny that it's fantastic music, but sometimes things suffer because of their popularity. It's been played to death, used as audio on TikTok,Like a random meme on Instagram. Because of that, the music now feels out of place. Not because of the music itself, but because of its cultural oversaturation. Hans Zimmer and Christopher Nolan can't do anything about that, of course, but it does impact the viewing experience.
The script isn't always elegant. Dialogue doesn't always feel natural, but sometimes it feels like a nudge in a certain informative direction. An "Oh yeah, you need to know this as an audience!" moment. Like the scene where Cooper is talking to two teachers about his children, where the conversation veers into moon landing denial and ultimately a remark that it would have been nice if the MRI were still there, because then his wife might still be alive. As if we, the audience, are too stupid to figure that his wife has passed away. Also, not exactly a comment to make during a high school counseling session. Despite frustrations with the script, there are moments that are well done, like the video messages from Tom and Murph after the crew has been on Miller's planet, or the betrayal of Dr. Mann (Matt Damon). I remember clearly not seeing his betrayal coming when I first saw the film, but now I see that it doesn't come out of the blue completely. The music swells, his conversation with Cooper interspersed with the news on Earth that Tom's family can't stay at the farm due to their health, and the fact that TARS is unable to get Dr. Mann's broken robot working. These uncertain, negative circumstances create the underlying feeling that the conversation with Dr. Mann won't go well. What does a man see before he dies? If someone I just met were to ask me that, while we're both away on a strange planet, away from our crew, I'd hold on tight to my helmet. It's one of the few moments where Nolan's tendency toward overdramatization feels justified.
Love ultimately proves to be the film's overriding theme. Love transcends space, time, gravity, and transience. Love is the connecting factor between Cooper and Murph, allowing him to send her messages through a four-dimensional library within a black hole. For some, this is poetic, for others, perhaps cringe-inducing. For me, it was somewhere in between. That's that indifference I always experience with Nolan's films. But despite that, I can appreciate Interstellar . It's an enormously ambitious project, and it's a film that tries a lot. Nolan pushes boundaries, not only conceptually but also technically, and I think that, even though I'm not his, or Interstellar 's, biggest fan, he earns his popularity to a certain extent with that urge for discovery. But to enjoy his films, you have to convince yourself that you're watching something fantastic.