Christopher Nolan is a director with a commendable determination to film his movies on old-school film stock as well as an interest in folding big ideas into big Hollywood thrillers. Occasionally he succeeds in making a film that brushes against greatness. With The Dark Knight, Nolan dramatized terrorism in full berserker fury and wondered how a society ruled by law should respond. With Interstellar, he asks whether science can save the world from catastrophe on a mammoth scale (and if love between fathers and daughters conquers all). While often visually impressive, Interstellar suffers from some of the problems that plague routine science fiction (all that exposition about space and time) as well as Nolan’s irrepressible urge to supersize.
Matthew McConaughey dominates the cast with his raw-boned, rough-elbowed characterization of Cooper, a former astronaut in a near-future America whose history textbooks deny the reality of the Apollo moon landings. Little wonder the U.S. has fallen to conspiracy theories. The world order has been diminished by “the Blight,” a plague that kills most crops (excluding corn) and threatens to engulf the dwindling population with vast, choking dust storms. Negotiating this on-the-brink landscape with a beef jerky Clint Eastwood rasp, Cooper runs a family farm with his father-in-law, teenage son and adolescent daughter. The daughter believes poltergeists are trying to tell her something, and those cryptic bumps in the night become a key to Interstellar’s grandiose climax.
Suffice to say that seemingly providential forces lead Cooper to a NASA base concealed in the heartland cornfields and presided over by courtly Dr. Brand (Michael Caine). Brand has discovered an anomaly near Saturn, a wormhole that might enable astronauts to escape the speed of light limit and travel to distant solar systems in search of new worlds. Cooper—a man who hasn’t had the right stuff since the Blight cast its pall—volunteers along with Brand’s daughter, Amelia (Anne Hathaway).
Nolan borrows a page from Ken Burns’ Dust Bowl documentary in early scenes, relying on grizzled survivors of the Blight to recount the environmental disaster that overwhelmed the Earth. However, much of Interstellar travels the path of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Comparisons to the classic are inevitable. Interstellar’s mission through the gleaming lights of the wormhole includes HAL’s snarky can-do descendent, TARS, a robot cleverly visualized as a set of gleaming kinetic panels. In some of the film’s best cinematic moments, the space vessel wheels like a donut through the silence. The ship’s cramped cabin (with the crew taking turns in suspended animation to pass the time) contrasts with the immensity of infinity beyond the thin shell enclosing them.
But with Kubrick as a measuring stick, Nolan comes up short. 2001 was poetry for the eyes and mind, while Interstellar is prose complete with conventional action scenes and family melodrama. Daughter Jessica Chastain materializes halfway through on videos beamed from Earth, nursing bitterness against the father who left her behind, yet she follows dad’s steps into NASA as she tries to find a solution to the Blight before it’s too late. Of course, the screenplay goes on about relativity and the space-time continuum.
Pushing three hours, Interstellar has too much talking and not enough wonder and is eager to explain rather than allow mystery to inspire the imagination. Fifty years later, people still talk about the meaning of 2001’s conclusion. Interstellar’s climax includes a cool looking M.C. Escher impression of multiple dimensional space, a fine picture whose spell-it-out dialogue leaves little to imagine or to ponder.
