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‘interstellar’: film review.
Christopher Nolan aims for the stars in this brainy and gargantuan sci-fi epic
By Todd McCarthy
Todd McCarthy
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Interstellar
Preoccupied with nothing less than the notion that humankind will one day need to migrate from Earth to some other planet we can call home, Interstellar so bulges with ideas, ambitions, theories, melodrama, technical wizardry, wondrous imagery and core emotions that it was almost inevitable that some of it would stick while other stuff would fall to the floor. Feeling very much like Christopher Nolan ‘s personal response to his favorite film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, this grandly conceived and executed epic tries to give equal weight to intimate human emotions and speculation about the cosmos, with mixed results, but is never less than engrossing, and sometimes more than that.
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Critical and public reaction will range across the horizon, from the mesmeric to outright rejection for arguably hokey contrivances. But it is certainly some kind of event, one that Paramount, domestically, and Warner Bros., overseas, will massively promote as a hoped-for must-see for audiences everywhere.
The Bottom Line A grandly conceived epic that engrosses but never quite soars
While it technically occupies the realm of science fiction, this gargantuan enterprise brushes up against science fact—or at least intelligent speculation—as much as it can in an effort to make the idea of leaving and returning to our solar system as dramatically plausible as possible. But audiences tend to be accepting of even far-fetched premises as long as the rules of the game are clear. Where Nolan takes his big leap is in trying to invest his wannabe magnum opus with an elemental human emotion, that between parent and child; it’s a genre graft that has intriguing wrinkles but remains imperfect.
Citizens of the world convinced that our planet and civilization are now in a possibly irreversible decline will readily embrace the postulation of the script, by the Nolan brothers Jonathan and Christopher, that life here will shortly be unsustainable. Shrewdly, the writers don’t reflexively blame the deterioration on the catch-all “global warming” or “climate change,” but rather upon severe “blight” resembling the Dust Bowl of the 1930s; wheat and other produce are done for, while corn growers, such as Cooper ( Matthew McConaughey ), may have a bit of time left.
Cooper belongs to a lost generation; a former engineer and test pilot, he expected to become an astronaut, but dire economic conditions forced the closure of NASA and the abandonment of the space program. His precocious 10-year-old daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy) shares her father’s long-ago enthusiasm and one of the wittier scenes has an elementary school official reprimanding Murph for believing that the Apollo moon missions actually took place; history has been rewritten to insist that they were just propaganda designed to speed the bankrupting of the Soviet Union in its effort to compete (Nolan restrains himself from adding the canard that Stanley Kubrick filmed the fake moon landing).
There are echoes as well of The Wizard of Oz emanating from Cooper’s remote farmhouse, which he shares with his 15-year-old son Tom (Timothee Chalamet) and Donald (John Lithgow), his late wife’s father. All the same, any fantasies of escape to a better place cannot be indulged — as Cooper laments, “We used to look up at the sky and wonder about our place in the stars, now we just look down and wonder about our place in the dirt.”
But, lo and behold, NASA exists after all; it’s just gone underground. Under the auspices of wise old Professor Brand (Michael Caine), the agency is secretly resurrecting its efforts to find a new home for Earthlings, with the suitably named Lazarus mission. The path to it, Brand explains, is through a wormhole visible near Saturn, and plenty of technical dialogue and physical demonstrations are devoted to detailing how the astronauts will slip through this envelope in space and emerge in a different galaxy near another planet that might support life as we know it (eminent theoretical physicist Kip Thorne receives executive producer credit for his contributions to this and other astronomical aspects of the story).
Cooper cannot resist the invitation to pilot this secret mission, but the angst of having to leave his family behind, specifically Murph, gives him the emotional bends. ”I’m coming back,” he gravely intones, echoing The Terminator, but even if he does return, it seems that, on the other side, he and his crew will age at just a fraction of the rate that Earthlings do at home. Murph is inconsolable and single-mindedly remains so for years.
Nolan employs a nifty little homage to 2001 at the 43-minute mark with an abrupt time-jumping cut from Cooper’s pickup truck speeding away from his house to the fiery blast-off of his rocket. Other editing ploys emphasize the complete silence of outer space, which provide a sharp contrast to a soundtrack otherwise filled with lots of talk and Hans Zimmer’s often soaring, sometimes domineering and unconventionally orchestrated wall-of-sound score.
The small crew also consists of Brand’s oddly guarded scientist daughter Amelia ( Anne Hathaway ), thoughtful astrophysicist Romilly (David Gyasi, in an intriguingly underplayed performance that makes you wish he had more to do), insufficiently written scientist and co-pilot Doyle (Wes Bentley) and, last but not least, the mobile computerized robot TARS (voiced by Bill Irwin), an occasionally humorous cross between Hal and R2D2. What goes on among the astronauts is not especially interesting and Amelia, in particular, remains an annoyingly vague and unpersuasive character in contrast to McConaughey’s exuberant, if regret-laden, mission leader, a role the actor invests with vigor and palpable feeling.
It’s a two-year trip out to Saturn, during which the crew hibernates in what’s cleverly called “the long nap” (a perfect title for a short story version of The Big Sleep ) prior to the rough ride through the hole. Perhaps the most implausible detail in the entire film is that, even from another galaxy, a degree of communication with home is possible. But 23 Earth years have passed, meaning that Murph is now in her 30s and is played by Jessica Chastain . She’s just as resentful of her father having abandoned her as she ever was—it’s a refrain that’s seriously overplayed—while Amelia is gratified to learn that her dad, who looked 80ish when they left, is still alive.
What happens once they arrive on a barren, snowy but not entirely inhospitable rock is best left undisclosed, even if the identity of a surprise presence there of a previous voyager won’t remain a secret for long. But aside from 2001, which is obliquely referenced again in a late-on cutaway to an ancient Cooper lying in bed in a sterile room, the landmark sci-fi film that Interstellar intriguingly echoes is the 1956 Forbidden Planet; both involve a follow-up journey to a planet in a different galaxy where humans have previously landed and intensely dwell upon a father-daughter relationship.
But while the double use of this parent-child bond suggests the great importance of this theme to Nolan and represents a legitimate and rare attempt to emotionalize sci-fi, the issue is over-stressed in a narrow manner. Murph’s persistent anger at her father is essentially her only character trait and becomes tiresome; she’s a closed-off character. Her brother, played as an adult by Casey Affleck, remains too thinly developed to offer a substantial contrast to her attitude.
For all its adventurous and far-seeing aspects, Interstellar remains rather too rooted in Earthly emotions and scientific reality to truly soar and venture into the unknown, the truly dangerous. Startling at times, it never confronts the terror of the infinite and nothingness, no matter how often the dialogue cites the spectre of a “ghost” or how many times we hear Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” and its famous “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
Interstellar optimistically and humanistically proposes that, even if the light is slowly dying in one place, a reasonable facsimile might be found as a substitute. But there’s no rage here, just a healthy belief in mid-20th century-style Yankee gumption and a can-do attitude. Whether that’s enough anymore is another question.
Production: Syncopy, Linda Obst Productions Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Ellen Burstyn, John Lithgow, Michael Caine, Casey Affleck, Wes Bentley, Bill Irwin, Mackenzie Foy, Topher Grace, David Gyasi, Timothee Chalamet, William Devane, Matt Damon Director: Christopher Nolan Screenwriters: Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan Producers: Emma Thomas, Christopher Nolan, Lynda Obst Executive producers: Jordan Goldberg, Jake Myers, Kip Thorne, Thomas Tull Director of photography: Hoyte Van Hoytema Production designer: Nathan Crowley Costume designer: Mary Zophres Editor: Lee Smith Music: Hans Zimmer Visual effects supervisor: Paul Franklin Casting: John Papsidera
PG-13, 169 minutes
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Film Review: ‘Interstellar’
Christopher Nolan hopscotches across space and time in a visionary sci-fi trip that stirs the head and the heart in equal measure.
By Scott Foundas
Scott Foundas
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We begin somewhere in the American farm belt, which Nolan evokes for its full mythic grandeur — blazing sunlight, towering corn stalks, whirring combines. But it soon becomes clear that this would-be field of dreams is something closer to a nightmare. The date is an unspecified point in the near future, close enough to look and feel like tomorrow, yet far enough for a number of radical changes to have taken hold in society. A decade on from a period of widespread famine, the world’s armies have been disbanded and the cutting-edge technocracies of the early 21st century have regressed into more utilitarian, farm-based economies.
“We’re a caretaker generation,” notes one such homesteader (John Lithgow) to his widower son-in-law, Cooper ( Matthew McConaughey ), a former NASA test pilot who hasn’t stopped dreaming of flight, for himself and for his children: 15-year-old son Tom (Timothee Chalamet) and 10-year-old daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy), the latter a precocious tot first seen getting suspended from school for daring to suggest that the Apollo space missions actually happened. “We used to look up in the sky and wonder about our place in the stars,” Cooper muses. “Now we just look down and wonder about our place in the dirt.”
But all hope is not lost. NASA (whose massive real-life budget cuts lend the movie added immediacy) still exists in this agrarian dystopia, but it’s gone off the grid, far from the microscope of public opinion. There, the brilliant physicist Professor Brand (Michael Caine, forever the face of avuncular wisdom in Nolan’s films) and his dedicated team have devised two scenarios for saving mankind. Both plans involve abandoning Earth and starting over on a new, life-sustaining planet, but only one includes taking Earth’s current 6-billion-plus population along for the ride. Doing the latter, it seems, depends on Brand’s ability to solve an epic math problem that would explain how such a large-capacity vessel could surmount Earth’s gravitational forces. (Never discussed in this egalitarian society: a scenario in which only the privileged few could escape, a la the decadent bourgeoisie of Neill Blomkamp’s “Elysium.”)
Many years earlier, Brand informs, a mysterious space-time rift (or wormhole) appeared in the vicinity of Saturn, seemingly placed there, like the monoliths of “2001,” by some higher intelligence. On the other side: another galaxy containing a dozen planets that might be fit for human habitation. In the wake of the food wars, a team of intrepid NASA scientists traveled there in search of solutions. Now, a decade later (in Earth years, that is), Brand has organized another mission to check up on the three planets that seem the most promising for human settlement. And to pilot the ship, he needs Cooper, an instinctive flight jockey in the Chuck Yeager mode, much as McConaughey’s laconic, effortlessly self-assured performance recalls Sam Shepard’s as Yeager in “The Right Stuff” (another obvious “Interstellar” touchstone).
Already by this point — and we have not yet left the Earth’s surface — “Interstellar” (which Nolan co-wrote with his brother and frequent collaborator, Jonathan) has hurled a fair amount of theoretical physics at the audience, including discussions of black holes, gravitational singularities and the possibility of extra-dimensional space. And, as with the twisty chronologies and unreliable narrators of his earlier films, Nolan trusts in the audience’s ability to get the gist and follow along, even if it doesn’t glean every last nuance on a first viewing. It’s hard to think of a mainstream Hollywood film that has so successfully translated complex mathematical and scientific ideas to a lay audience (though Shane Carruth’s ingenious 2004 Sundance winner “Primer” — another movie concerned with overcoming the problem of gravity — tried something similar on a micro-budget indie scale), or done so in more vivid, immediate human terms. (Some credit for this is doubtless owed to the veteran CalTech physicist Kip Thorne, who consulted with the Nolans on the script and receives an executive producer credit.)
It gives nothing away, however, to say that Nolan maps his infinite celestial landscape as majestically as he did the continent-hopping earthbound ones of “The Prestige” and “Batman Begins,” or the multi-tiered memory maze of “Inception.” The imagery, modeled by Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema on Imax documentaries like “Space Station” and “Hubble 3D,” suggests a boundless inky blackness punctuated by ravishing bursts of light, the tiny spaceship Endurance gleaming like a diamond against Saturn’s great, gaseous rings, then ricocheting like a pinball through the wormhole’s shimmering plasmic vortex.
With each stop the Endurance makes, Nolan envisions yet another new world: one planet a watery expanse with waves that make Waimea Bay look like a giant bathtub; another an ice climber’s playground of frozen tundra and sheer-faced descents. Moreover, outer space allows Nolan to bend and twist his favorite subject — time — into remarkable new permutations. Where most prior Nolan protagonists were forever grasping at an irretrievable past, the crew of the Endurance races against a ticking clock that happens to tick differently depending on your particular vantage. New worlds mean new gravitational forces, so that for every hour spent on a given planet’s surface, years or even entire decades may be passing back on Earth. (Time as a flat circle, indeed.)
This leads to an extraordinary mid-film emotional climax in which Cooper and Brand return from one such expedition to discover that 23 earth years have passed in the blink of an eye, represented by two decades’ worth of stockpiled video messages from loved ones, including the now-adult Tom (a bearded, brooding Casey Affleck) and Murphy (Jessica Chastain in dogged, persistent “Zero Dark Thirty” mode). It’s a scene Nolan stages mostly in closeup on McConaughey, and the actor plays it beautifully, his face a quicksilver mask of joy, regret and unbearable grief.
That moment signals a shift in “Interstellar” itself from the relatively euphoric, adventurous tone of the first half toward darker, more ambiguous terrain — the human shadow areas, if you will, that are as difficult to fully glimpse as the inside of a black hole. Nolan, who has always excelled at the slow reveal, catches even the attentive viewer off guard more than once here, but never in a way that feels cheap or compromises the complex motivations of the characters.
Nolan stages one thrilling setpiece after another, including several hairsbreadth escapes and a dazzling space-docking sequence in which the entire theater seems to become one large centrifuge; the nearly three-hour running time passes unnoticed. Even more thrilling is the movie’s ultimate vision of a universe in which the face of extraterrestrial life bears a surprisingly familiar countenance. “Do not go gentle into that good night/Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” harks the good Professor Brand at the start of the Endurance’s journey, quoting the melancholic Welshman Dylan Thomas. And yet “Interstellar” is finally a film suffused with light and boundless possibilities — those of the universe itself, of the wonder in a child’s twinkling eyes, and of movies to translate all that into spectacular picture shows like this one.
It’s hardly surprising that “Interstellar” reps the very best big-budget Hollywood craftsmanship at every level, from veteran Nolan collaborators like production designer Nathan Crowley (who built the film’s lyrical vision of the big-sky American heartland on location in Alberta) and sound designer/editor Richard King, who makes wonderfully dissonant contrasts between the movie’s interior spaces and the airless silence of space itself. Vfx supervisor Paul Franklin (an Oscar winner for his work on “Inception”) again brings a vivid tactility to all of the film’s effects, especially the robotic TARS, who seamlessly inhabits the same physical spaces as the human actors. Hans Zimmer contributes one of his most richly imagined and inventive scores, which ranges from a gentle electronic keyboard melody to brassy, Strauss-ian crescendos. Shot and post-produced by Nolan entirely on celluloid (in a mix of 35mm and 70mm stocks), “Interstellar” begs to be seen on the large-format Imax screen, where its dense, inimitably filmic textures and multiple aspect ratios can be experienced to their fullest effect.
Reviewed at TCL Chinese Theatre, Hollywood, Oct. 23, 2014. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 165 MIN.
- Production: A Paramount (in North America)/Warner Bros. (international) release and presentation in association with Legendary Pictures of a Syncopy/Lynda Obst Prods. production. Produced by Emma Thomas, Christopher Nolan, Obst. Executive producers, Jordan Goldberg, Jake Myers, Kip Thorne, Thomas Tull.
- Crew: Directed by Christopher Nolan. Screenplay, Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan. Camera (Fotokem color and prints, partial widescreen, 35mm/70mm Imax), Hoyte Van Hoytema; editor, Lee Smith; music Hans Zimmer; production designer, Nathan Crowley; supervising art director, Dean Wolcott; art directors, Joshua Lusby, Eric David Sundahl; set decorator, Gary Fettis; set designers, Noelle King, Sally Thornton, Andrew Birdzell, Mark Hitchler, Martha Johnston, Paul Sonski, Robert Woodruff; costume designer, Mary Zophres; sound (Datasat/Dolby Digital), Mark Weingarten; sound designer/supervising sound editor, Richard King; re-recording mixers, Gary A. Rizzo, Gregg Landaker; visual effects supervisor, Paul Franklin; visual effects producer, Kevin Elam; visual effects, Double Negative, New Deal Studios; special effects supervisor, Scott Fisher; stunt coordinator, George Cottle; assistant director, Nilo Otero; casting, John Papsidera.
- With: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Ellen Burstyn, John Lithgow, Michael Caine, Casey Affleck, Wes Bentley, Bill Irwin, Mackenzie Foy, Topher Grace, David Gyasi, Timothee Chalamet, David Oyelowo, William Devane, Matt Damon.
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Movie Review
Off to the Stars, With Grief, Dread and Regret
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Anatomy of a Scene | ‘Interstellar’
Christopher nolan discusses a sequence from his film..
By A.O. Scott
- Nov. 4, 2014
Like the great space epics of the past, Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” distills terrestrial anxieties and aspirations into a potent pop parable, a mirror of the mood down here on Earth. Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” blended the technological awe of the Apollo era with the trippy hopes and terrors of the Age of Aquarius. George Lucas’s first “Star Wars” trilogy, set not in the speculative future but in the imaginary past, answered the malaise of the ’70s with swashbuckling nostalgia. “Interstellar,” full of visual dazzle, thematic ambition, geek bait and corn (including the literal kind), is a sweeping, futuristic adventure driven by grief, dread and regret.
Trying to jot down notes by the light of the Imax screen, where lustrous images (shot by Hoyte van Hoytema and projected from real 70-millimeter film) flickered, I lost count of how many times the phrase “I’m sorry” was uttered — by parents to children, children to parents, sisters to brothers, scientists to astronauts and astronauts to one another. The whole movie can be seen as a plea for forgiveness on behalf of our foolish, dreamy species. We messed everything up, and we feel really bad about it. Can you please give us another chance?
The possibility that such a “you” might be out there, in a position to grant clemency, is one of the movie’s tantalizing puzzles. Some kind of message seems to be coming across the emptiness of space and along the kinks in the fabric of time, offering a twinkle of hope amid humanity’s rapidly darkening prospects. For most of “Interstellar,” the working hypothesis is that a benevolent alien race, dwelling somewhere on the far side of a wormhole near one of the moons of Saturn, is sending data across the universe, encrypted advice that just may save us if we can decode it fast enough.
Movie Review: ‘Interstellar’
The times critic a. o. scott reviews “interstellar.”.
What our planet and species need saving from is a slow-motion environmental catastrophe. Rather than explain how this bleak future arrived through the usual montages of mayhem, Mr. Nolan (who wrote the screenplay with his brother Jonathan) drops us quietly into what looks like a fairly ordinary reality. We are in a rural stretch of North America, a land of battered pickup trucks, dusty bluejeans and wind-burned farmers scanning the horizon for signs of a storm. Talking-head testimony from old-timers chronicles what sounds like the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, until we spot a laptop on the table being set for family dinner.
The head of the family in question is Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a widower who lives with his two children and his father-in-law (John Lithgow). Once a NASA pilot, Cooper now grows corn, the only thing that will grow after a blight has wiped out most of the planet’s other crops. The human population has shrunk to a desperate remnant, but the survivors cling to the habits and rituals of normal life. For now, there is plenty of candy and soda and beer (thanks to all that corn); there are parent-teacher conferences after school; and Cooper’s farmhouse is full of books and toys. But the blight is spreading, the dust storms are growing worse, and the sense of an ending is palpable.
The Nolans cleverly conflate scientific denialism with technophobia, imagining a fatalistic society that has traded large ambition for small-scale problem solving and ultimate resignation. But Christopher Nolan , even in his earlier, more modestly budgeted films, has never been content with the small scale. His imagination is large; his eye seeks out wide, sweeping vistas; and if he believes in anything, it is ambition. As it celebrates the resistance to extinction — taking as its touchstone Dylan Thomas’s famous villanelle “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” with its repeated invocation of “rage against the dying of the light” — “Interstellar” becomes an allegory of its own aspirations, an argument for grandeur, scale and risk, on screen and off.
Dick Cavett , a son of Nebraska, used to ask (quoting Abe Burrows), “How you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm, after they’ve seen the farm?” Cooper and “Interstellar” are clearly marked for something other than agrarian pursuits, but the first section of the movie is the richest and most haunting, establishing a delicately emotional tone and clear moral and dramatic stakes for the planet-hopping to follow. Cooper is devoted to his children, in particular his daughter, Murph, played as a young girl by the preternaturally alert and skeptical Mackenzie Foy and as an adult by Jessica Chastain. When her father is recruited for a secret NASA mission to search for a habitable new planet, Murph is devastated by his departure. Her subsequent scientific career is both a tribute to his memory and a way of getting even.
The Nolans are fond of doubled characters and mirrored plots, and so “Interstellar” is built around twinned father-daughter stories. Among Cooper’s colleagues on board the spaceship is Dr. Brand (Anne Hathaway), whose father, also called Dr. Brand (Michael Caine), has developed the theories behind their quest. He and Murph remain on the ground, crunching the numbers and growing older in the usual earthly way, while Cooper and the younger Brand, thanks to relativity, stay pretty much the same age. (Cooper’s son, Tom, played by Timothée Chalamet as a boy, matures into Casey Affleck). The two pairs of daughters and dads perform variations on the theme of paternal and filial love, finding delicate and moving passages of loyalty, rebellion, disillusionment and acceptance.
A lot of other stuff happens, too, as it tends to out in space. A cynical critic might suppose that the last two hours of “Interstellar” were composed in a fit of spoiler hysteria. Nondisclosure pleas from the studio have been unusually specific. Forget about telling you what happens: I’m not even supposed to tell you who’s in the thing, aside from the people you’ve seen on magazine covers. I guess I can disclose that Cooper and Brand are accompanied by two other astronauts, played by a witty, scene-stealing David Gyasi and a deadpan Wes Bentley, and also by a wry robot who speaks in the voice of Bill Irwin.
The touches of humor those characters supply are welcome, if also somewhat stingily rationed. Nobody goes to a Christopher Nolan movie for laughs. But it is hard to imagine that his fans — who represent a fairly large segment of the world’s population — will be disappointed by “Interstellar.” I haven’t always been one of them, but I’ve always thought that his skill and ingenuity were undeniable. He does not so much transcend genre conventions as fulfill them with the zeal of a true believer. It may be enough to say that “Interstellar” is a terrifically entertaining science-fiction movie, giving fresh life to scenes and situations we’ve seen a hundred times before, and occasionally stumbling over pompous dialogue or overly portentous music. (In general, the score, by Hans Zimmer, is exactly as portentous as it needs to be.)
Of course, the film is more than that. It is in the nature of science fiction to aspire to more, to ascend fearlessly toward the sublime. You could think of “Interstellar,” which has a lot to say about gravity, as the anti-"Gravity.” That movie, which would fit inside this one twice, stripped away the usual sci-fi metaphysics, presenting space travel as an occasion for quiet wonder and noisy crisis management. Mr. Nolan takes the universe and eternity itself as his subject and his canvas, brilliantly exploiting cinema’s ability to shift backward and sideways in time (through flashbacks and cross cuts), even as it moves relentlessly forward.
But “Gravity” and “Interstellar” are both ultimately about the longing for home, about voyages into the unknown that become odysseys of return. And “Interstellar” may take its place in the pantheon of space movies because it answers an acute earthly need, a desire not only for adventure and novelty but also, in the end, for comfort.
“Interstellar” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). A few expletives, a lot of peril.
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