Interstellar (2014)

 

100 best Science Fiction films

Popular Mechanics list

#86. Interstellar (2014)

 

“[This film] knows that our future is in the hands of all us deeply flawed and deeply conflicted humans, but that there’s still plenty of reason to hope anyway. But we do actually have to try.”

--quote from a Critic whose name I can’t find

 

This is a remarkably bold attempt to capture the Crown of the Greatest of All Space Epics for Grownups, so long sitting on the head of “2001: A Space Odessey” (1968). It strove to celebrate Humanity’s relationship with the Infinite with the same of Scientific Fidelity as “2001 ..,” which is no small task, and though “Interstellar” does eventually fudge some Scientific Rules, it does no more so than “2001 …” did.

 

The challenge for stories like this is that Humans are Finite in a Universe that is the opposite; even though our travels within it will expand, anything beyond Pluto is pretty improbable for Human Flesh-and-Blood. Every night, when we look up to the Stars, we see so much that our great, great, great, grandchildren will never touch.

 

Unlike virtually all of the rest of SF that dares to touch the Stars, “2001 …” and “Interstellar” chose only to fudge the Science by following breadcrumbs left by the world’s leading Scientists, people who have the same Impossible Dreams as the rest of us but also an understanding of why those Dreams are Impossible; still, these Scientists have never stopped looking some Loophole in the Laws of Physics to make their Impossible Dreams Come True. For this reason, the dominance of Scientific Rigor in both films counts for a lot (though many Critics complained about how much “Interstellar” engaged in Physics Exposition); the Rigor promises us more than mere Fantasy, it encourages us to believe that merely by witnessing the stories we have the power of Real Reach.

 

Also, “Interstellar” does things “2001 …” wasn’t interested in trying. It was far more Intimate, more Political, and though it starts in the Future, it makes that Future a familiar one to our eyes: It opens in the farmland of the Midwestern USA (filmed in Alberta, Canada) that’s facing a Threat visually similar to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, though plot-wise more like the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s – 1850s. So we’re offered a recognizable Near-Future of Earth is grounded in a recognizable Crisis before the canvas expands and we follow our Hero, Joseph "Coop" Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), to travel almost Beyond the Infinite.

 

This film’s Near-Future USA is not only Dystopian, but Authoritarian, though the Authoritarians are apparently not excessively brutal. The Government-controlled School System is feeding our children absurd Propaganda, trivializing Science and specifically steeped in denialism of full severity of the Global Climate Crisis that all can see right outside the window. Children are taught the Real-World Moon Landings (1969-1972) were faked, and this lie being part of a larger Agenda get everyone on board with an Economic Shift away from High-Tech Jobs and Industries and becoming wholly Agrarian again. This Dictatorship is trying to Save the World because uncontrolled Blights are destroying entire, essential, plant species, so now all must become Farmers and those Farmers must submit to the Dictatorship’s narrower and narrower Crop options. But, as uncontrollable Toxic Dust Storms choke the Earth, the Dictatorship’s plans prove short-sighted, yet the Dictators are too scared to admit that time has pretty much run out. Earth is already depopulating and imminently it will no longer be able to sustain Human Life.

 

Coop is a former NASA Engineer and Test- Pilot, now a Farmer, because NASA has been eliminated. He muses “We used to look up in the sky and wonder about our place in the stars. Now we just look down and wonder about our place in the dirt.” He’s a single-dad with two children, a son, Tom (played by Timothée Chalamet as a child and Casey Affleck as an adult) and daughter, Murph (played by three actresses, Mackenzie Foy, Jessica Chastain, Ellen Burstyn). Murph will prove more important to the story than her brother, she’s a brilliant and precocious early teen (that’s Actress Foy), challenging her ignorant Teachers are every turn, but also resentful of her dad, first because he doesn’t have the power to change to World, and then for leaving her when he gets the chance to just that.

 

10-year-old Murph is trying to learn to be a hardcore Rationalist, but still believes in Ghosts, and it will turn-out she’s not 100% wrong. Unnatural dust patterns in her bedroom provide a key saving the Human Race. Why in this girl’s room? Well, you’ll have to watch the whole film to understand that.

 

When Ignorance Rules, Truth becomes Conspiracy. Coop discovers a gigantic Secret, that his former Mentor, Professor John Brand (Michael Caine), is running a small, but still well-funded, Secret NASA base, and it is still building and flying Space Ships. John says, “I can’t tell you any more unless you agree to pilot this craft.”

 

Coop agrees.

 

NASA has discovered a Wormhole near Saturn and three previous Missions sent back Data that of a new Star System with three potentially Habitable Planets, so maybe a place for Humanity to escape the dying Earth. But contact was lost with those Missions so Coop is recruited to lead the fourth. His Space Ship is named Endurance and his crew is John’s daughter Amelia (Anne Hathaway), Astrophysicist Romilly (David Gyasi), co-Pilot Doyle (Wes Bentley), and a Robot named TARS (voiced by Bill Irwin, and the most original Robot design I’ve seen in years).

 

Please note: I just outlined a lot of story-telling, but at this point in the synopsis, the story has barely started. The heart of this Adventure is the Space Voyage, and Coop isn’t even off the ground yet. The film then gives us luxuriously-long Space Flight sequences that powerfully evoke the same from “2001 ..,” travel through a Wormhole, exciting episodes on the new Planets, several eventful asides on Earth, travel through a Black Hole, decades of Future History, Time Travel, and the best dramatic uses of the Bootstrap and Twin Paradoxes I have ever seen. Though this isn’t a short film, almost three hours, but it’s still amazingly economical given how much story-telling it packs in. It could’ve easily been five-hours-plus, like the more coherent TV and film adaptations of Frank Herbet’s novel “Dune” (1965), yet it never once seems rushed.

 

Director Christopher Nolan has carved out a place for himself in World Cinema for his unique ability to make Intellectually Challenging films that also draw a large General Audience (in 2024 he earned the title of the World’s Seventh Highest Grossing film Director). He likes Twisty Chronologies, Unreliable Narrators, and strives for the Mind-Bending. This was evident even in his first two films, which were not SF, but Crime Thrillers: “Following” (1998), which is about a Voyeur whose strange hobby leads him blindly into a terrible trap. “Memento” (2000), is told with its scenes in reverse-order and was about a man trying to solve a murder but Neurological Trauma has left him with no short-term memory; as the story moves backwards, we get to see the things he’s forgotten.

 

His started skirting SF with his fourth film, the first in a Trilogy of Superhero movies about Batman (comic book Character first appearing in 1939) that were Exhilarating in their Action but also unusually Philosophically Engaged: “Batman Begins” (2005), “The Dark Knight” (2008) and “The Dark Knight Rises” (2012).

 

His first fully SF film was “The Prestige” (2006), a period-piece about Magicians that challenged our Perceptions while exploring the dangers of Obession and Self-Deception.

 

Then came “Inception” (2010), concerning Dream Hacking, and the all-time great Mind-Bender of cinema history.

 

These themes, and them being realized with great mutability, continued even after “Interstellar.” Nolan applied the same Aesthetics, Intellectual Muscle, and Awe regarding our Relationship with Time, to Historically Accurate tales of WWII: “Dunkirk” (2017) and “Oppenheimer” (2023).

 

Nolan Wrote this film in collaboration with his brother Johnathan (at this point it was their sixth collaboration) but the seed of this project was planted before either were involved in it, or in filmmaking at all.

 

Back in 1985, prominent Scientist Carl Sagan, then the world’s Best-Selling Author of Popular Science books, collaborated with his wife Ann Druyan (she was uncredited) on his first and only novel, “Contact.” The book transformed the General Audience’s relationship with SF, though that was mostly realized because of the success of its film adaptation in 1997.

 

You see, following the release of “2001 …” there was a slew of SF films of greater Intellectual Ambition aimed at the General Audience, but the problem was, most of those Intellectual SF films faltered financially, and in no small part because most weren’t half as smart as they thought they were. Then came the Historic Success of “Star Wars” (1977), and most of SF cinema’s Intellectual Ambitions flew out the window. (Sagan has hilariously mocked the Bad Science in “Star Wars,” but was “Star Wars” even supposed to have Good Science?).

 

“Contact” was Wrestling the Angel of “2001 …” just as much as “Interstellar” would later do; it was devoted to Scientific Rigor and Humanizing the way our Culture talked about our Relationship with the Infinite. The success of both the novel and the film started a slowly evolving trend of bring SF cinema back to the Intellectual Ambitions of early 1970s, but also to do it better this time.

 

One thing Scientist Sagan wanted was give us a Scientifically Defensible Speculation for breaking that one unbreakable Speed Limit, the Speed of Light (670,616,629 mph, which may look pretty fast, but it’s slower than a snail when you’re talking about travel between Star Systems), because he really, really, really, wanted to Touch the Stars. His Speculation, not much different from the one employed in “2001 …” (co-Written by Arthur C. Clarke who, like Sagan, was a working Scientist of some prominence) required traveling through a Stargate. “Contact” went beyond “2001 …” in that it went into some detail of about how the Stargate was supposed to work: Sagan relied on creating an Artificial Wormhole.

 

Wormholes are one of those things in Physics that probably exist but haven’t been found yet; their hypothetical reality is broadly accepted because other things that have been found seem to depend on the existence of this unfound thing. Wormholes seem to resolves some questions regarding the Curvature of Spacetime.

 

Scientist Albert Einstein’s most famous, yet incomplete, equations are his Field Equations, part of his work on General Relativity. All of this was published in 1915, but more than a century later, though most of General Relativity now have Experimental Proofs, there’s an aspect of the Field Equations that retain a gaping hole: The Cosmological Constant, the elusive force that keeps the Universe in balance. In the Equations, Einstein noted the part that he hadn’t figured out yet with an upside-down letter “V,” called a “Lambda.”

 

The concept of Wormholes is part of our continued struggle to Dance the Lambda. They are “transcendental bijection of the spacetime continuum or alternatively an asymptotic projection of the Calabi–Yau manifold manifesting itself in anti-de Sitter space” (and no, I have no idea what that quote from Wikipedia actually means) which might act as tunnels through Spacetime, connecting two distant points in the Universe, so the long-sought-after Loophole that violates the Speed of Light. BUT! they also supposed to be sub-Atomically tiny. Sagan’s novel hinged on building an Artificial Wormhole large enough for a Human to travel through and Touch the Stars.

 

Both film Producer Lynda Obst and Physicist Kip Thorne were involved in the film version of “Contact” and both wanted to take the ideas to the next step cinematically. They came up with a concept which would evolve into “Interstellar” and sold it to Producer Steven Spielberg. He then put the project was put on-hold for years. Finally, Spielberg hired Writer Jonathan Nolan to pen the script, but then it was put it on-hold again. Later still, Spielberg withdrew and the project and it was taken over by Director Christopher Nolan. The final script was a collaboration between the two brothers. Producer Obst and Physicist Thorne remained attached throughout.

 

This film, like “Contact” before it, is anti-“Star Wars,” not only because it chooses to engage the Brain as much as the Heart, but even in some basic approaches of the filmmaking even though both were taking pictures of the same things (namely, Space Ships). All of these three were FX spectacles, but “Contact” and “Interstellar” tried as much as possible to rely on Practical Effects while the “Star Wars” franchise was always on the absolute cutting-edge of Post-Production Imaging. When the “Star Wars” franchise finally got around to Prequel Trilogy (1999-2005), Writer/Director/Producer George Lucas went full-Digital in the filmmaking since most FX were Digital already. Many of us (like me) casting a cold eye on those three films, seeing them as better advertisements for Digital than being actual movies but, over-all, the industry followed Lucas’ lead: Lower-Budget films mostly have no other choice economically, Bigger-Budget films saw speed in editing as easier FX.

 

Not Director Nolan, who remained committed to shooting on actual film, both 35 and 70mm in this case. He even insisted that theaters set up for 35 or 70mm films got first crack during distribution, giving them a financial advantage over those theaters that had to wait for digital prints.

 

The score by Composer Hans Zimmer was unusually bombastic for him or, well, for pretty much anyone, but I mean that in the best possible way. The music was allowed to drown out the dialogue is some scenes inside the crowed Space Ship (there were Critical objections to that) but silent in others, especially in the scenes outside Space Ship; that was a contrast that reminded the Audience that the Crisis is Human, but it was being played out against an indifferent Infinity. There are pounding organs but fewer orchestral strings and drums than most Space Films.

 

Editor Lee Smith’s work was both brisk and patient, consistent with the film’s repeated shifts in pacing. Smith was with Nolan for two-of-the-three “Batman” films, and earned high praise for cross-cut editing, building different storylines at different rates; that is evident here, though not nearly as manic. In the early scenes, set on Earth, it stresses economy without losing the explicit references to the work of the famously contemplative Director Terrance Malik, whom Director Nolan clearly wanted to evoke. It slows during luxurious Space Voyage sequences, but smoothy quickens again as the most adventurous incidents that soon arise. A white-knuckled Chase-Through-Space and Docking Sequence were particularly well done.

 

The lead FX Supervisor was Paul Franklin (the list of FX experts, including other Supervisors, is too long to include here). As often in cinema and SF more than any other Genre, it’s impossible to tell where Editing ends, FX begins, then FX ends, and Cinematography begins. Supervisor Franklin (who won an Oscar for his work with Director Nolan on “Inception”) must receive main credit for the Space Scenes, which set a new standard for that kind of visualization. Similarly, the exciting Tidal Wave had to be wholly his, but that scene also involved Actors, and the Tidal Wave had to be put in the context of them, so that scene also belonged to Editor Smith and Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema (new to the entourage, replacing Nolan’s regular Cinematographer Wally Pfister and would continue to collaborate with Nolan hence).

 

Van Hoytema was likely the most important of the three. The film relied of Practical FX as much as possible, but still rich with CGI. It was filmed on film, yet the textures are consistent from In-Camera to Post-Production imaging. Van Hoytema, like Smith, was sensitive to the Inspirations drawn from Director Malick during the Earth-bound scenes, and the richness of the visual textures were not lost during radically different-looking Space Voyage. In the early scenes, one can see Malick’s “Days of Heaven” (1978), but Malick gave us another film, “The Tree of Life” (2011), which Crossed the Universe, and you can see that here too. (Not for nothing, Actress Chastain was in both films.)

 

The film includes a chaste Romance between Characters Coop and Emilia. They were too busy, and quarters too cramped, for them to really get it on, yet she did say to him, “Love is the one thing that transcends time and space.” But the film’s real Emotional Center was Coop’s relationship with his daughter Murph.

 

Murph stays resentful of Coop for a long time, but still remains very much her father’s daughter. She follows in his footsteps, becoming the protégée of Professor John (who probably misses Emilia the way Coop misses Murph) and plays a vital role in the saving Humanity. By this point Murph is played by Actress Chastain (she and Actress Foy are really excellent as the same Character at different ages) and the dynamic that the still-pissed off Murph was still the very much a Daddy’s Girl was something I found insightful. Early in the film, Coop tells his daughter the story of how she got her name, she’s named after “Murphy’s Law,” but not in a bad way. “Murphy’s law doesn’t mean that something bad will happen. It means that whatever can happen, will happen.”

 

The theme of Destiny is woven through the film, though for the life of me, I can’t remember the actual word, “Destiny” being used even once.

 

Murph’s solution for saving the Human Race is radically different than the path than Coop embraced, and Coop can’t see any of this from the other side of the Universe, but his contribution proved essential. That’s where the Bootstrap Paradox comes in: It’s a Causal Loop that seems to defy Causality because it is self-fulfilling, it Causes itself, lacking a progressive, linear, origin in its Cause-and-Effect (that’s the Time Travel part). Bootstrap Paradoxes are lots of fun, but very Bad Science. On the other hand, they are all about considering the nature of Causality, so it is about the core of what Science is, even as they screw with it.

 

As for the Twin Paradox, radically fast speeds (Relativistic Speeds), or proximity to extreme mass, can slow Time down for those affected by it, but for those outside the effect, Time continues in its familiar pace. The Paradox come into play throughout the Space Voyage, but especially on one Planet where every hour spent on the surface is seven-years Earth-time.

 

When Characters Coop and Emilia return from that Planet’s surface to the Endurance, they catch up on their mail, decades video messages from Earth. Emilia is pleased John is still alive, but Coop must face images of Tom and Murph. When Coop left Earth, they were children, but now they’re adults, his near-contemporaries. He missed all of their growing-up. Worse still, he’s unable to message them back. Coop’s emotional dam bursts and he raggedly sobs in grief for what he gave up.

 

That was McConaughey’s best moment it the film, and this film does largely rest on his shoulders. Over-all, 2014 may have been McConaughey peak year professionally; he was terrific here and was collecting his Awards from performances of the previous year, including an Oscar for “Dallas Buyers Club” and an Emmy for “True Detective.”

 

Coop and Murph are the film’s best developed Characters, while the second-tier Characters (Tom, John, Amelia) are developed only well enough to support the Narrative, which, unfortunately, is how most SF is written. I must give Actress Hathaway as Character Amelia extra-credit, she gives the Audience more than the script provided her. The third-tier Characters as developed even less, though Actor Gyasi proves excellent in the role of the painfully under-written Character Romilly.

  

The mail-reading proved only one of the film’s many marvelous scenes. Very early on, we watch a Baseball Game and the strange action of the ball demonstrates the Gravitational effects a rotating Bernal Sphere, something I don’t believe has ever been shown in a narrative film before; it also assures us that Humanity will survive the Crises even before the film presents them to us. Then there’s a breath-taking sequence of the Space Ship Endurance gliding past Saturn’s Rings, followed by it ricocheting through the Psychedelic Wormhole. There’s the fore-mention desperate run to escape a sudden Tidal Wave. And an exciting confrontation on a glacier.  That’s followed by the fore-mentioned Chase-Through-Space and Docking Sequence. Also, there’s the debris-strewn approach to the Black Hole.

 

I’d like to take a moment to compare this film’s Ideals with some Real-World Resentments.

 

I have seen more than a few enraged essays and memes about the newly important Private Space Corporations and how when the Billionaire Bosses speak of Colonizing Mars, they sound like the Elites can Escape Mother Earth and leave its problems behind, taking no interest or ownership of how their Exploitation of their Mother caused those problems. In this film, that issue is unaddressed.

 

People who indulge these resentments mostly people who want to rearrange the Federal Government’s Spending Priorities, like providing more money for Public Schools, which is good, but then comes the question of what they’re planning on take that money away from as those Priorities shift; that’s where the fighting starts. Character Coop’s stand on this is explicit, and though his statement sounds righteous, it must be given pause once one digs into it, “It’s like we’ve forgotten who we are: explorers, pioneers, not caretakers.”

 

Those enraged by the Billionaire Space Guys aren’t usually the Kooks who believe the Moon Landings were faked, but perhaps they still hold to the strong belief that NASA hid the full cost of the Moon Landings because the Taxpayers would’ve balked at the full figure. Though that isn’t true, it’s casually accepted by non-Kooks, for example film Director Roddy Doyle, whose movie “Sunshine” (2007) was a call for the need for more Investment in Space Exploration to save the Human Race. That might seem a contradiction, it really isn’t, but the very fact that it sounds like a contradiction speaks volumes of the tough choices we collectively face. Another line from Coop, “Mankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here.”

 

Critic James Dyer observed the following, which represents a connectivity between “Interstellar” and the stylistically similar but less Rigorous in its Science, “Sunshine”:

 

“Born a year after the Apollo landing, Nolan grew up in the aftermath of the space race, when young eyes still turned upwards in wonder. Decades later, with the Space Shuttle decommissioned and children staring blearily down at the glow of their smartphones, it’s his disappointment at NASA’s broken promise that forms the driving force behind ‘Interstellar.’”

 

True, Director Doyle is about twenty-years Nolan’s senior, but one can feel how they dream the same way.

 

Without being dismissive of resentments vented at the misbehaving Billionaires, these rants sound much like this film’s failing Government, punitively demanding we Dream Smaller. This film could easily be seen as the worst nightmare of these (maybe-but-probably-not) Neo-Luddites, as the film writes-off and runs-away from Earth rather than trying to save it. But this film also taps into two of SF’s greatest Virtues: Optimism and Global Consciousness.

 

There was a series of Research Studies exploring the Psychological Effects of Media Exposure that was recently published in the Journal “Communication Research.” These studies concluded that SF, more than other Genres, increases people’s Identification with all Humanity, because it encourages the Audience to experience Awe in their daily lives, and that Awe facilitates a stronger sense of Global Identity:

 

“Research suggests that identification with all humanity (IWAH), a socio-psychological basis underpinning global solidarity, may be fostered by science fiction (sci-fi) ... we propose a genre-specific pathway of self-transcendent media effects and test it from both the immediate and longitudinal perspectives ... The preliminary study … revealed that sci-fi was distinctive in its capacity to elicit awe, a nuanced self-transcendent emotion in response to vast and novel stimuli. Using two [other] controlled experiments … [researchers] found that sci-fi narratives … boosted state IWAH by inducing awe.”

 

Maybe we need to feel we can touch the Stars, even if we can’t. Maybe it’s one of the things that sustains us. Maybe it’s one of the things that will save us.

Trailer: 

Interstellar Movie - Official Trailer - YouTube