SPOILERS THROUGHOUT
I can't think of another big budget filmmaker out there as ambitious, in visuals and in subject matter, as Christopher Nolan. His detractors spend their time poking holes in the movie's plot or criticizing how accurate certain details are, completely overlooking the bigger picture. Nolan likes to grapple with intense subjects, often from too many angles, but there's a passion in his work that proves that plot points are not always the most important pieces of the cinematic puzzle. Even in his low budget early features, Following and Memento, there was already evident a sense that this guy had much grander projects in store. He wants to take us places we haven't gone before, and if we have, he's going to ensure we experience it in a way that is fresh and new.
Nolan's latest movie, Interstellar, does just that. It introduces elements we are familiar with in the movies, and manages to bring them to life with an enhanced level of human interest and wonder. As is often the case, Nolan and his writing partner (and brother), Jonathan Nolan, have so much they want to share with us that the screenplay gets overstuffed. But I'll get back to that later. First, I want to focus on what really worked for me about this movie. Fascinatingly, Interstellar opens in the future, but we'd never expect that since the world looks precisely as it does today. Mankind is on the verge of extinction, although instead of conveying that through post-apocalyptic visuals (the closest thing we get are dust storms), Nolan keeps it simple and feeds us tidbits of information through dialogue. Instead of showing global suffering, the movie keeps things intimate and focuses on one family.
Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is, like many others, a corn farmer, as all other crops are extinct. He's a widower raising two children, Tom (Timothée Chalamet) and Murph (Mackenzie Foy). His deeper bond is with Murph, as she shares his love for science. It is this love that leads her to discover a code that gives the coordinates to NASA, who is now hiding underground and has a proposition for Cooper. With life on Earth dwindling away, mankind is going to have re-populate elsewhere, and several potential planets have been found. NASA needs Cooper to fly a shuttle through a wormhole and visit each one to see which will be inhabitable. The catch, of course, is that he'll have to leave his family and perhaps never see them again.
This within itself would already be an intriguing set up for a movie, but Interstellar takes things up a notch by adding the complication that after going through the worm hole, and when landing on the other planets, time will move at a slower speed than that on Earth (an hour in space can amount to years on Earth). This aspect, for me, is the heart of the movie, since we know that the mission is not going to run as smoothly as it should and Cooper will have to face the fact his kids will be older than him if he makes it back. It doesn't help that Murph is so angry with him for leaving her behind that they part ways on bad terms, something that Cooper always regrets. There's a gut wrenching scene late in the picture where he is able to relive their last conversation, and he watches with horror as he makes the decision to walk away from his daughter again.
At its best, Interstellar is a movie about dealing with loss, regret, aging, and even more specifically, your children aging faster than you. There's a great deal of pain built into the scenes where Cooper and his second in command, Brand (Anne Hathaway), watch videos sent by their loved ones, the space between them seemingly infinite. Never before has the gap between the viewer and their tiny screen felt as vast as it does in these moments, especially when Cooper receives the first transmission from Murph as an adult (played by Jessica Chastain). At its core, this is a movie about the power of love, about how it transcends time and space. Sound ridiculous? It is, but Nolan directs it with such conviction, and his cast is so achingly committed, that the feelings displayed through visuals and performance feel completely real. It doesn't hurt that Hans Zimmer's score adds an extra (and welcome) level of melancholy.
If only Nolan had kept his focus on that. He and Jonathan are good writers, but as their projects have grown, they tend to throw too many elements into the pot, and with that comes an often exhausting amount of exposition. This was first apparent in Inception, which told so much when it would have been more beneficial to show us instead. This time out, there are scenes filled with talks of physics and relativity and worm holes that get so detailed that I needed a rewind button to make sense out of it. And why have so much scientific explanation anyway? It just feels like an excuse for Nolan to beat us over the head with how much research he did and to make sure the purists in the audience won't call a foul.
One of the big surprises of the movie is the subtlety of the visual style. The full scope of being in space is realized, to be sure, but instead of going all out on dazzling special effects in every sequence, Nolan keeps the big stuff under wraps until the last third. Until then, most of the scenes are kept in the confined quarters of the shuttle, as if we're supposed to be enveloped in the worries and loneliness of the characters and forget that nothingness surrounds them. It gets under the skin as the movie progresses, making us grateful once Cooper and his team finally do find land. Even here, Nolan holds back. The first planet is covered in water, the second, with ice.
Cooper finds a ship already on the ice planet, complete with a survivor sleeping inside. His is one of several red herrings revealed to show the desperation of self survival and the way authority figures lie to us when they don't really have a solution. The confrontation on the ice planet is one of the clunkier segments in the movie, nice to look at it but heavy handed in execution. Nolan has already made his point about man's need to save himself, so the sequence feels unnecessary. Much more rewarding is the climax once Cooper passes through another worm hole and is able to revisit moments of his past with Murph.
The movie's final section proves that it holds more value as a human drama than a science fiction movie. I say this because Nolan doesn't seem interested in explaining or exploring the how's and why's of the new planet where humanity has started over. We just get brief glimpses of it, with some of the visual ideas taken straight from Nolan's own Inception. There's real tenderness, however, in the still youthful looking Cooper reuniting with Murph, now an old woman on her deathbed. Seeing each other again is a gift, one that Cooper was willing to risk in order to ensure she and her future generations would be able to continue to thrive. It's the most lovely and emotional moment of Nolan's career thus far, earned due to the strength he builds in the bond between this father and daughter.
So how does one sum up Interstellar, a movie that wants to have its cake and eat it several times over? Even if it lacks the overall impact of Nolan's best movies (The Dark Knight trilogy, Memento), it shares with them a true understanding of human nature, our constant struggle between doing what's right and doing what's best (and if they're the same thing). Men are always at odds with themselves in the worlds Nolan creates, and with each new movie, he finds ways to challenge and frustrate us like no other filmmaker around. Even if his movies rarely hit it completely out of the park for me, I feel lucky to have him. Interstellar, warts and all, joins a long list of movies in 2014 that have reached further than most movies dare. I can't wait to see it again.
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