Christopher Nolan is the man responsible for classics like Memento (2000), The Prestige (2006), Inception (2010) and the Dark Knight trilogies. He is a man of incredible taste and a visionary director with a keen eye for tension, character and tone; a writer with a gift for creating worlds and universes of convincing authenticity; and fearlessly blurs the lines between antagonist and protagonist.
I am the ultimate fan boy when it comes to Nolan’s work. He’s detail orientated, unabashed by the limits of filmography, bold and diligent, and what’s more, he has been consistent. And frankly, I do see all and much more of this ethic and hard work in his latest masterpiece, ‘Interstellar’.
Unfortunately, I just didn’t like it.
There are undoubtedly things that I liked about this movie; almost all of it being the cinematography – and I feel it is unfair not to mention this aspect of the film as I believe it to be a visually stunning movie.
However, for such a beautiful film dedicated to exploration, discovery and saving the human race, I was surprised how incredibly annoying and uninspiring all the characters were, most of them bordering on idiocy. This aspect really took me out of the enjoyment of the film.
I wanted to see more of the planets they visited, I wanted them to actually explore those frozen plains, fly to the other side of the planet covered in waist deep water; I wanted to see more of what was promised on the movie poster.
But what did we get? The movie continuously pulled us back to some burning corn field on earth, and gave us a combined 12 minutes of planet exploration, a couple people walking around on the surface and then someone dies – I mean literally within the (relative) day of arrival someone dies on that new planet.
It was then two and a half hours of flat, disappointing characters. These deluded and incompetent ‘astronauts’ bestowed with the task of saving us all. The only two characters, who displayed any sort of logic or understanding of the ultimate mission, are killed in the most meaningless way.
I mean fine, maybe the point is to show ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances and then examine how that individual would bear the responsibility; only these aren’t ordinary people. These are the last few brilliant people on earth, tasked with traversing the universe to save a species! Was the memo not clear?
Now, everything I’ve stated was probably done intentionally – nobody acts perfectly in all situations and I concede that how the characters reacted under conditions of extreme stress provided a certain cold and desperate realism to the final product. But personally, I don’t think it paid off. Even though the characters acted very human, their immediate circumstances weren’t relatable to me; and so I couldn’t possibly understand how they were feeling let alone root for them.
Let me give you a few examples, bearing in mind you may disagree with these:
Cooper (Mathew McConaughey), is on a mission to save all humans. He believes that they are on a quest to find the next habitable planet. To do this, he must leave his family behind, in particular, his daughter, Murph. Throughout the film, Cooper is dead set on completing his mission and flying home to see his kids.
Now, I may not know what it feels like to leave a daughter behind and possibly never see her again – but it’s not such a stretch to empathize with it. What is difficult to imagine, is weighing between ‘seeing your daughter again’ or ‘saving the human race’. If Cooper had died on his journey, we’d have been able to feel the pain and regret in his dying moments, an emotional tear jerking scene where he reminisces about his promise to his daughter.
However, he does end up saving the day by giving his daughter some arbitrary ‘universe code’ to complete some gravity equation, which then saves the human race by creating some huge donut-shaped, space stations.
Let me ask you, how did you feel about him having saved the human race? Were you happy for him or were you relieved, emotional or vindicated? Or were you frothing at the mouth, momentarily seizing in your seat trying to figure out how he ended up floating behind a bookcase?
I never truly grasped what Cooper did, nor why the story needed him. I never sided with Cooper because even though he was the main protagonist, he always seemed to be in the periphery of things. There was a greater urgency at hand, but all he wanted to do was see his daughter. Again, it’s very human to yearn for a loved one, but given that the movie is about space exploration; ‘an explorer who wants to go home’ just doesn’t have a good ring to it.
Professor Brand (Michael Caine) can’t solve a theory about gravity and so decides to waste everybody’s time pretending to work on an alternative, while in actuality, put all his eggs in one basket for the survival of the human race – a washed up pilot and his own daughter, Brand (Anne Hathaway).
I can’t even begin to fathom why he pretended to work on a useless solution for 20 years, other than add tension and urgency to Cooper’s mission. I can’t believe anyone in his position can be so arrogant and stupid to think that keeping your failures a secret, and then coming clean on your deathbed like some tasteless April Fool’s gag, was a good idea.
Again, I don’t know what it’s like to fail on such magnitude that I end up going senile and dooming a whole planet to death, so Professor Brand just seemed like an asshole. He doesn’t appear to be good or evil, he’s just an idiot and his mistake as a character is, for all intended purposes, to drive the plot along.
Brand (Anne Hathaway) has been preparing for a mission to find a habitable planet to save the human race. She is in love with one of the astronauts who set out to find new planets, planets which they are now traveling to, to assess its habitability. When the team has to choose between two planets to visit due to a lack of fuel, she argues against the going to the planet with a higher chance of habitability in favour of the one her lover is on.
Brand is the worst person in the universe. She’s stupid, a hypocrite and infuriatingly patronizing. Early in the film, we find out that Edmund’s (Brand’s lover) signal was lost three years prior to their voyage and Brand immediately suggests it’s just transmission failure (yeah, that’s super scientific). Then when they visit a planet consisting only of water and massive waves, she causes one of her team members to die because she wanted to extract vital information on a broken transmitter.
Seriously? Those waves didn’t just turn up at that exact moment for the first time, honey. Is one more wave going to finally destroy all of it? Possibly. Is it worth risking your life for it? Probably not. But no, she just walks off towards the 100 story waves, and then has the gall to blame Cooper for all of it.
Throughout the film, she continuously gives Cooper lip about only wanting to get home, but when it’s her turn to sacrifice visiting her lover’s planet, suddenly all logic is out the window and ‘love’ is the answer. When she doesn’t get her way, she becomes cold and snappy, even goes as far to threaten Cooper that if he fails, he’ll also never see his daughter again.
It’s fair to say that being scared and making bad decisions when you’re a fish out of water in a strange and unknown place is very normal. But acting like an insolent child while on a mission to save a planet of people just makes you look like a dipshit, and no one wants to admit they can relate to a dipshit.
I’ll seize the trivial critiques of characters here. Ultimately the movie was enjoyable when there wasn’t a character blabbering on screen and I was able to experience an amazing adaptation of space travel in all its beauty and deadliness.
Otherwise, I found the events of the movie inconsequential; built on shaky foundations of a pre-apocalyptic world (while only really observing the effects on small section of farmland) and topped with an extra serving of Deus Ex Machina.
Maybe I’m being too harsh, but this very same subject matter was no problem for Danny Boyle’s ‘Sunshine’ back in 2007, and as the apocalyptic/space exploration genre goes, I think the execution of ‘Sunshine’ was far superior.
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