Runtime: 2 hours, 49 minutes
Rating: PG-13
Director: Christopher Nolan
Quick Impressions:
My husband actually went to this movie with me. It’s the first movie just the two of us have seen together all fall. We’ve been trying to be as economical as possible with our time and money, but Interstellar is one of a handful of movies this year that my husband couldn’t miss.
I’ve been excited for this film, but not nearly as excited as he has. And, perhaps not surprisingly, I liked Interstellar, but not nearly as much as he did. (I liked it a lot. I just had certain problems with the ending.)
Matthew McConaughey is definitely continuing his winning streak playing engineer turned farmer turned astronaut Cooper. I don’t know how his turn here will stack up against several rumored-to-be Oscar-worthy lead performances I haven’t seen yet, but I could imagine McConaughey getting another nomination for this. His character is definitely the one who drives the film. We get emotionally invested in Coop and his struggles rather easily. The film has an impressive (almost overloaded) cast, but McConaughey is really the clear standout among the principals. (The other person I could see getting a nomination is Jessica Chastain, but she’s in like sixty-seven movies this year, so competition with herself might be a problem.)
The Good:
I wish we could have seen the 70mm IMAX version of the film, but none of those screenings worked out for us. We saw the movie in 35mm, and I have to say, I see why Christopher Nolan wanted to use actual film. I think Nolan just prefers film, honestly, but most people would probably agree that film is a better choice than digital for portraying screen after screen of gritty, gusty dust storms. When grains of dust are such an essential story element, you probably don’t want the movie to look too clean. I’d use film, too. (Despite continuing advances in technology, what a gifted, highly trained photographer can achieve using a traditional film camera puts digital photography to shame. That’s my opinion, anyway. One of the reasons that I use a digital camera myself is that I’m not a highly trained, gifted photographer. I still remember the kind of amazing shots my wedding photographer was able to get by understanding how to manipulate light and shadow. There’s a wonderful richness to film when the right artist knows precisely how to coax it out to its greatest advantage.)
Visually the movie is impressive. (Nolan’s movies usually are.) It’s kind of stagey and majestic. Maybe that’s another reason he chose film, to evoke sci-fi classics of the late 60s, 70s, and very early 80s. (If you see this movie and don’t think immediately of 2001: A Space Odyssey, then there is probably something wrong with you. By the way, the design of the robots in Interstellar is really pretty cool.)
It’s kind of weird to see a Christopher Nolan movie without the cinematography of Wally Pfister, but Hoyte Van Hoytema clearly knows what he’s doing. When you consider things like plot and dialogue, Interstellar definitely has its weak moments, but the entire film looks absolutely fantastic. I would imagine that in the 70 mm IMAX, it’s breathtaking.
Probably my favorite thing about the film’s cool visuals is that every planet we see has such an immersive, distinctive, fully realized environment. We feel like we’re traveling to remote planets right alongside Cooper and his crew. Even Earth seems much more gritty, intense, and atmospheric than the world we actually know. On Interstellar’s Earth, everybody drives rusty old pick-ups through bleak, dusty fields of dying wheat and weathered corn, and it all looks so awesome. You watch and think, Wow. That’s the post-Apocalyptic wasteland I want to live in! (To be fair, it’s not really post-Apocalyptic. It’s just the last gasps of the fading Earth, dying not with a bang but a whimper. We get hints that there was some fairly extreme violence in the past, but society seems to be crumbling chiefly because the Earth is about to die.)
To be honest, I enjoyed the opening act on the Earth a lot, possibly more than all the rest of the movie, in fact (except the sequence on Mann’s planet). What’s great is that the film opens so slowly, yet we always have the profound sense that something gravely important and perhaps somewhat mind-blowing is just on the brink of happening. I think this sense of expectation and excitement is perhaps in some ways more delicious than the extra-terrestrial journey that follows.
Of course, it really helps that I love John Lithgow, and I think young Mackenzie Foy and Matthew McConaughey have great chemistry.
I’m also pretty convinced that Christopher and Jonathan Nolan must have been reading a lot of stuff by Michael Pollan (or at least people with similar ideas). If you’ve never read Pollan’s book, The Botany of Desire, I urge to you take a look at least at the final chapter (about the potato and the dangers of monoculture) and compare it to what we see on screen in Interstellar. As a child, I never knew the slightest thing about how agriculture works, and I’m sure I discounted the importance of farming (like many urban kids who know nothing about the food supply and what it takes to run a farm). Pollan’s books definitely piqued my interest on the subject and made me realize just how little had I considered a field so vital to the survival of our species. In American public schools, you almost never hear gifted kids say, “I’m going to take all AP course and make a push to be at the top of my class so I can graduate with honors and become a farmer.” But why not?
Interstellar’s preview won me over with that line about, “We didn’t run out of [stuff engineers make]. We ran out of food.” So, of course, the part of the movie that focused on such (timely) concerns definitely held my attention. I remember several times in junior high and high school learning about Thomas Malthus. What I took away from these lessons was not to be a pessimist. Malthus was so…Malthusian, so worried we were doomed, but he was shortsighted and (because of that) wrong. I mean, obviously the earth supports a teeming population now, and every one of us regularly eats a healthy and balanced diet of highly nutritious, entirely safe, eternally sustainable foods, right? I think it’s nice to see a movie focusing on these issues. We get so many movies about zombie plagues, and nuclear wars, and space disasters. It’s nice to see a story that reminds us that something as mundane and dull as the Dust Bowl is just as big a problem as those more lurid disasters if it’s what is currently happening to you.
I also like the framing device at the beginning of the film (a frame that closes before the end, so I’m not sure if it’s really a frame, but the word frame is making me think of American Gothic, so it seems to fit to me). Interstellar gives us a futuristic setting presented to us as the past, so instead of the more usual, “This is how it will all end,” tone, we get more of a, “In those days it was so bad, we thought it would all end.” Just the basic set-up of the movie puts such an optimistic, triumph of the human spiritish spin on what would otherwise appear to be a situation of hopeless doom. So the whole time you watch and think, “What will happen next?” because a big point that the movie makes is “Something always happens next,” which seems strangely optimistic and uplifting for a Christopher Nolan film.
I’m not suggesting that the voyage into space isn’t cool, of course. Like I said, the immersive detail on those foreign planets is incredible.
A number of the supporting performances are also fantastic. In particular, I was totally charmed by David Gyasi as Romilly. When you consider that most of the time what Romilly does is sit around and wait, the charisma Gyasi brings to the character is remarkable.
As I mentioned before Jessica Chastain is very good, too. It must be quite difficult to take over a role and show up in the film just as the character you’re playing is at her most emotional. Young Mackenzie Foy is fantastic as Murphy, too, but by the time Chastain gets to take over, the character is at her most emotionally raw. She’s practically unhinged, and she doesn’t have time to let any of that build gradually because Foy has shown us that portion of the character’s life (although we don’t see too much of that, either). To me, the scenes with Michael Caine and Jessica Chastain were so emotionally charged that their intrusion into the other storyline seemed a little abrupt, but I can’t deny that both Caine and Chastain are giving great performances (as you would expect).
Bill Irwin also gives a very memorable performance as the voice of TARS.
And I have to say, Anne Hathaway plays one really strange character, but by the end of the movie, I had totally fallen in love with Brand, and I have to give Hathaway all of the credit for that because I think the character was strangely (if not poorly) written and must have been a great challenge to play convincingly. (I had just decided, “I hate her,” and then like twenty minutes later, I was like, “She’s so awesome! What a great person!” And nothing really changed, so I’m not entirely sure how that happened. Maybe she just began to seem better and better by sheer virtue of not being insane, evil, or dead.)
Best Scene:
When you watch Interstellar’s previews, you really only learn that it has a huge cast, it’s the work of Christopher Nolan, and it involves a crew of astronauts journeying to the outer reaches of space because Earth is no longer capable of producing sufficient food to feed the human race.
Part of the fun of watching this movie (surely the reason audiences are willing to bear with it for almost three hours) is never knowing exactly where we’re headed next. So I’ll try not to go into too much detail with what I say here.
The relatively late sequence on Dr. Mann’s planet is by far my favorite part of the movie. I don’t recall seeing the actor who plays Mann in any of the previews, so maybe I shouldn’t mention the person by name here. But that performance deserves high praise, too. And I think what’s happening on this planet would be much more immediately clear to the crew of the Endeavor did they not receive a surprising transmission that pulls their focus at a key moment.
All of the scenes with Mann are good, but the best part is the journey to the surface.
Best Action Sequence:
After the journey to the surface on Mann’s planet, we get like three (arguably four) scenes of breathtaking action all smushed together. Any one of these is phenomenal and worth the price of admission to the movie, but calling any of them out as the best action sequence is kind of cheating, because I just declared that that entire portion of the movie was the best scene (after scene after scene). I don’t want to give any spoilers, so it’s very hard to talk about this portion of the film.
I will say that another great action sequence happens when the wave comes.
Best Scene Visually:
I’m sure I’m in the minority here (given that the space stuff was so flashy and grandiose and impressive), but I really like the farm scenes at the beginning of the film.
I’m also a fan of the baseball scene at the end of the movie (because it’s so trippy and disorienting for a minute). And then we’re back to those great farm scenes I like so much.
Probably everybody else in the entire world is like, “Wow, how breathtaking! After seeing Interstellar, I want to travel to the farthest reaches of the universe!” And I’m like, “That’s it! I’ll go live on a failing farm! Maybe I’ll see a ghost there!”
If movies have taught me nothing else, it’s that there’s nothing in this world more likely to attract a ghost or an alien than a dilapidated, old, white farmhouse and a big, gusty, overgrown corn field. (The presence of Mackenzie Foy, whom I first noticed in The Conjuring, probably helps, too.)
Most Oscar Worthy Scene, Matthew McConaughey:
McConaughey is good from start to finish, and if he weren’t, the movie would fail. But his most Oscary moment is the one in which he catches up on the transmissions he has missed.
Most Oscar Worthy Scene, Jessica Chastain:
I think Murphy’s first transmission is probably Chastain’s strongest scene, though her work is fine throughout.
For what it’s worth, I think Anne Hathaway ending up with a nomination for this is not outside the realm of possibility, but I am hard pressed to come up with a single scene in isolation which showcases the best aspects of her performance.
The Negatives:
Movies don’t usually confuse me these days, but this one sure did.
The movie begins in a fairly straightforward manner. The pacing is slow and steady, giving us measured, methodical plotting and gradual, careful character development. But then Murph and Cooper follow a clue to make an incredible discovery, and suddenly everything is happening so fast.
I realize that a major concern of the movie is relative time (and time slippage), so thematically it makes sense to show how unreliable and unsteady our perception of time is at other moments, too. But it still feels abrupt to shift from almost nothing happening in a slow and stately way to everything high stakes imaginable unfolding so rapidly that the audience feels a bit bewildered.
One minute we’re talking about the (non)future of growing wheat, okra, corn, and the next we’re closing in on Saturn.
I don’t get it. How does this top secret organization actually work (because by the looks of things, the answer has got to be not very well)? Why (if they need Cooper so desperately) does he have to find them? Surely with the resources at their disposal, it would be easier for them to find him (through ordinary channels). There’s just something very weird about the quick turnaround from “What do you think you’re doing here?” to “We need you desperately. Now,” that just didn’t sit right with me. That sequence of events felt less like reality than like the delusion of someone actively mentally ill.
But I got over that because obviously something had to happen to make the movie more exciting and really get things started. I won’t deny that the mysterious expedition into the remote reaches of space is the big drawing point of the film, so, fine, they have to get there somehow. I can live with that.
But there were other things that didn’t quite feel right to me, too. One of them was the character of Anne Hathaway’s Brand. I thought she was very strange, and I found it hard to believe she was a real person. I’ve heard various complaints for years about how Christopher Nolan movies never feature strong, realistic female characters. But I don’t know. I thought Hathaway made a very compelling Selina Kyle in The Dark Knight Rises. She was one of the clear highlights of the movie, in fact. (And Marion Cotillard’s character in that film also made sense. I thought Cotillard’s character was also a strong presence in Inception. Mal was unusual, and presented in an atypical way, but she was certainly captivating.) I’ll allow that Rachel Dawes can be very frustrating and sometimes annoying, but that doesn’t really make her unrealistic or one dimensional, just difficult. (I think Rachel’s a bit more abrasive when played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, but she’s also more compelling and realistic when Gyllenhaal plays her.) But Rachel still makes sense as a person. She’s just not always easy to like.
I think Hathaway manages to give a pretty good performance in the end, but it certainly can’t be easy. She’s given the weirdest material. For someone who’s supposed to be an expert in her field, she has the most unprofessional manner I can possibly imagine. And precisely because she is a female scientist, she should never say anything as ridiculous as that bizarre speech she gives to Cooper to justify her planet preference. A man might be able to get away with that, but I can’t believe that a woman would ever try it—especially not when she’s trying to brag about her professionalism to two men. Isn’t she the one who told Cooper in the beginning that they don’t always need to be honest with each other? Surely if she wanted to get to the surface of that planet badly enough, she would make up some scientific sounding lie. That is really not the moment to speak from her heart and unburden her soul. Every woman I have ever known who has been serious about career advancement is extremely carefully not to say things that will make it so easy for the “level-headed men” to use misogynistic stereotypes to discredit her opinions. She should know that once she gives that crazy speech (which is also pretty clunky), Cooper will never agree to do it her way. He’s already disinclined to do it her way, anyway. He thinks she’s letting her personal feelings cloud her judgment and says so, and then she basically says, “What judgment? All I have is personal feelings. Who needs judgment?” Her deeply held beliefs aside, she clearly has no sense of strategy or pragmatism.
Honestly, I can imagine only two explanations that would make her strange behavior in this scene make any sense at all. 1) While the other two were in cryosleep, she was busy reading all of the Harry Potter books and just finished Book 7. 2) She’s actually terrified that on her planet of choice, the situation may be similar to that on the first planet. She can’t bear to imagine that scenario, so on some level, she wants to be talked out of going to the planet, but she can’t admit that to herself consciously.
Clearly scenario 1 is a joke (and I’m not knocking the Harry Potter books; I love them), but I will admit that scenario 2 is at least plausible. I still find the scene (and the character) very strange. Another odd thing is how remarkably near the end of the movie, she suddenly becomes so sympathetic and likable. The only thing that has really changed is the information she now knows based on the transmission that she’s received. But it’s like her entire character transforms, and she becomes both a) nicer to Cooper, and b) much more rational and decisive.
I don’t see this as Nolan’s failure to create realistic women, though, because the character of Murph seems perfectly fine to me. Her last scene is slightly odd, but that brings me to my third major complaint.
The entire ending of the movie is just very, very weird. When the action reaches a certain point, you start thinking to yourself, How are they going to make this come together? How are they going to make it work? They just don’t have time. I can’t imagine how they’re going to pull together a coherent, satisfying ending.
And they don’t. Well, I will say that my husband had no problem with the ending. And he did explain one aspect of it to me in a way that actually made sense (though neither of us is quite convinced that’s the reading that Nolan intended).
I didn’t hate the ending, but I did find it extremely confusing. There’s one plot element that I was convinced was the case since some of the earliest scenes of the movie. I was convinced from the start that a certain character was the one doing a certain thing. I just could never figure out how. And (no offense, but) it kind of seems like Christopher Nolan could never figure out how either. I really don’t think the explanation provided by the movie makes a great deal of sense. To me, it all seems a little anticlimactic, kind of like the end of M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs, a movie that wasn’t bad, but was definitely nowhere near as profound as it thought it was.
I will admit that there are certain things that human beings just don’t know yet, so putting satisfying answers to those still unanswerable questions into a popular movie would be an extraordinary feat indeed.
But ultimately, I think the ending could have been much more satisfying. (It’s also weird how quickly she dismisses him at the end. Wouldn’t the other people gathered be interested in meeting him?) (I’m being deliberately vague again to avoid spoilers).
I felt like movie left key things too open-ended. Now, granted, that does tie in with some major themes of the film, this idea that life is open-ended and even if we can’t see a solution to a problem ourselves doesn’t mean the answer doesn’t exist. Just because we don’t know the future, it’s still coming. But I would have liked a bit more explanation of exactly who it was that put a certain thing in a (very unlikely) place and when and why. Because all I can think of is an elementary level science book called The Ideas of Einstein I read when I was in sixth grade, and this picture of a guy getting all totally stretched out like a piece of spaghetti and then other even more horrible things happening to him, and even if some scientists say, “Well, that doesn’t always necessarily happen,” my brain thinks, “Really? Are you sure? Because it happened in that picture in my book!”
Now my husband’s explanation of this is all a bit mystical, and I find that easier to accept than what I thought the movie was implying. He points out that there’s a certain future that’s common to all humans, and that following certain events, surely people would no longer be limited by three dimensions (again I’m trying to be as vague as possible). So that, actually, does make sense to me (because otherwise, if you just think about the future of all humankind, I find it hard to shake that scene from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure where they “find” his dad’s keys.) I just think that Nolan should have told us a little more clearly exactly what was really going on for sure. The frustrating thing is, Interstellar approaches being a masterpiece at moments, but then the ending does not feel as skillfully crafted as the beginning (at least, not to me).
One other minor complaint—I’m not sure why the movie has such an enormous cast when most of the actors are so underutilized. David Oyelowo is only in one brief scene. Casey Affleck’s character deserves more development than he gets. Wes Bentley barely gets to do anything. And I’m pretty sure Topher Grace is only in it, so we’ll all say, “Hey, look! It’s Topher Grace! Remember Topher Grace?” His part is really underwritten, and besides that, Jessica Chastain is way too intense a scene partner for him. It’s like he disappears beside her.
Of course, Nolan has always loved using famous faces from the past in relatively minor roles, so maybe I’m being a bit too picky on this one.
Overall:
Despite some hesitancy on my part to embrace the ending, I actually really liked Interstellar. (I feel like I should have some opinion on the score, but I don’t. Hans Zimmer has an impressive body of work, but sometimes I get a little tired of him, though I’m not sure that’s fair.)
Visually the movie is absolutely stunning. If you plan to see it, definitely see it on the biggest screen you can (and go for film, not digital, if possible). The performances are great, too, particularly Matthew McConaughey as a readily sympathetic central character whose emotional journey through life becomes the very core of the story.
Although I’m not sure I love the ending, I do think Interstellar is probably the best sci-fi film to come out of Hollywood in just about as long as I can remember. (It’s kind of like the first half of Prometheus, but then with a second half that actually continues to make sense for a hearteningly long time.)
If you want to see it, you should probably do it now while it’s in theaters. You’ll lose a lot on a small screen.