The Earth is dying, and the future of mankind rests on a band of intrepid explorer-astronauts to locate an atmospheric standard world. Sound familiar? It is not just the plot of the latest Christoper Nolan film, but also one of the most recent newly-common tropes in science fiction, and works like Virtuality, Earth 2, After Earth, and Titan AE. As I've said before, science fiction is a collective social cathartic experience, and it seems that we, as a species, are concerned about the future of our little blue world. Much like the film that Interstellar is patterned after, 2001: A Space Odyssey, this film could become the standard by other future science fiction films are set by. Interstellar is directed by the peerless Christopher Nolan, with the script written by Nolan and his brother with help from noted theoretical physicist Kip Thorne. Given that and the subject matter, I went to see Interstellar late Saturday night after my first week of teaching at an local Dallas IMAX theater, It is my hope that this blogpost signals the return of FWS back to regular traffic. On with the SPOILER-FREE review. Oh, and I ended up seeing Interstellar and Big Hero 6 in the same day. Very different films.
The Spoiler-Free Plot
The future is not pretty, and Terra is not a happy world. Humans and all life on Earth are suffering through an environmental collapse that has left human civilization in an emergency agrarian society mode, with governments and society at large, just hanging on. Added to this that the bulk of the food crops are failing all around them, and human life on Earth is about to go out. Hope arrives with an unknown wormhole forming near Saturn that could allow humanity to explore the cosmos to locate some vacant real estate in another galaxy. The only thing is that the US government axed NASA years ago due to budget issues. However, some rouge underground scientists have been constructing an space vehicle called Endurance to travel through the looking glass, the bulk of the film starts, the major plot points are revealed along with other weirdness. What will the crew and LEGO robots of Endurance see on the other side of the wormhole?
A small team is assembled to investigate to several likely planetary locations that have been selected by previous 12 manned probes called Lazarus Mission. This colonial survey mission is led by former-NASA test pilot-turned-farmer Cooper, played by fellow Texan Matthew McConaughey. Cooper struggles with leaving his family, given the grim realities of interstellar travel and conditions on Terra. Yep, temporal dilation...and it is a real bitch. After the good FTL ship arrives into the other galaxy, events unfold that will change the course of human history.
The GOODWithout a doubt,
Interstellar is a beautiful film with an impressive cast, realistic designs, wonderful (and impressive) actors, outlandishly great effects, and haunting music by Hans Zimmer. At those levels,
Interstellar is firing on all cylinders. The film also touches on our place in the universe, what and who we really are at our core. It also discusses the perils of FTL travel and the connection that love forges, especially between parents and their children. The dying Earth is much different that shown in other recent films, and future Earth of
Interstellar appears more similar to Dust Bowl Oklahoma than
Mad Max.
To add that layer, Nolan mines the PBS documentary on the Dust Bowl (which I watched), and uses it with great effectiveness. When it comes time for the time to travel millions of lightyears away, the distance and the nature of deep space is surprising realistic that allows the audience to travel emotional and mental to those very distance points of light, The two alien world environments seen on-screen are very well designed allowing the audience an instant and real alien vista to look upon that seems alien and hostile. I wish there more. The ship,
Interstellar, and the
Ranger landers are also done with real-science and real beauty. This is also applied to the oddball robot designs that appear to be out of the video game
Minecraft, however they work on-screen and are impressive in an odd way. However, the greatest moment of the film comes when the
Endurance enters the wormhole. It is an moment that needs to be experienced on an IMAX with the speakers pumping. Truly, one of the great moments in science fiction cinema. All-in-all,
Interstellar is one hell of an visual/auditory feast that has a creepy air to it.
The BAD
If you notice what I said about the good of
Interstellar,
it was not the script or the overall story nor the dialog. Where
Interstellar falls flat on its face, is the story, where it goes, and what the actors say between them. The scenes back on Earth are much better than once the action switches to the
Endurance. Often I felt that the dialog fails to move the plot or the central ideas forward, and they often discuss other things in oddball ways. It also doesn't help that the music simply overpowers the dialog audio track, and drowns out the spoken word, especially at critical points. Then there is the editing. Not since that French
Special Forces movie have I seen a jumpy mess of a film. Scenes snap at the pace of an caffeinated kitten, leaving the audience jumpy and felling like they fell through an wormhole. While this may work for a few scenes, it robs most scenes of any kind of gravity, and creates plot holes. While I did praise the music, it also made me very intense...
The UGLYIt is the end. I am so tired of film that go rouge and gets mind-fuckery weird at the very end. The connection for
Interstellar to
2001: A Space Odyssey becomes more apparent when the end 15 minutes unfolds, and the story and film suffers. There was a better film under the bullshit that the Nolan brothers laid over the basic story. The film should have about the journey and the race to find another world, not a "ghost" or the role of gravity in space/time.
Interstellar is a little like Chinese food. You could pick around the ingredients you don't like, but the dish is incomplete without it, even if you hate celery. I liked the hunt-for-another-world storyline and the father-daughter-in-a-dust-bowl situation, but there is there other parts that I cannot discuss in an spoiler-free review, and they drag down a much better move into the deep dark water, and murder it.
The Bottom line on the film and Should You See Interstellar?This film is getting wildly mixed reviews by professional critics and word-of-mouth, causing some to doubting a trip to the ole cinema. So, should you it? Yes. I think so. The power of the images coupled with elements of the story are worth the IMAX experience and your cash. However, at the end of this film experience while walking back to my Toyota, I came away with this:
Interstellar is one part
2001: A Space Odyssey, another part,
Field of Dreams, and another part
Gravity, and it mostly doesn't work...it is like when your Hollandaise sauce breaks after you worked so hard to create it.
The Forever War/Interstellar ConnectionWhile watching this space trek through the corn fields of the future, I could not help but wonder if we are seeing what
The Forever War film
might look like in Nolan's
Interstellar. Both deal with aspects of the horror of FTL travel, how deep space alienates our space travelers from the bulk of humanity, and how this long strange trip alters human behavior. Honestly, some of the visuals should have saved for
The Forever War movie...but, if this is what
The Forever War movie will look like, we could be in for a real treat.
