Film Review: ‘Interstellar’ stretches time and plausibility
There are few things I find more gratifying than to have my faith in a favorite filmmaker once again renewed. Unfortunately, in the case of “Interstellar,” that filmmaker is Stanley Kubrick, not Christopher Nolan.
Nolan’s new movie is a stew of “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Contact,” with just a sprinkle of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “The Wizard of Oz.”
It starts in the near future (just how near isn’t specified). The Earth is dying. One by one, the crops are disappearing, and barren farm areas are buffeted by giant sandstorms.
Wheat is gone forever. In the first few minutes, someone says, “This is the last harvest for okra” — a rather smaller catastrophe, unless you’re way into gumbo. Former test pilot Cooper (Matthew McConnaughey), now a farmer, does his best to create a home for his father (John Lithgow), his middle-school son Tom (Timothe Chalamet, who turns into Casey Affleck), and his precocious pre-adolescent daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy, who turns into Jessica Chastain, a better deal all around).
We know that somehow mankind survives, because the very first shot is of an old woman (Ellen Burstyn), being interviewed about those awful times of her childhood. We see a few other seniors, reminiscing the same way. They could be talking about the Great Depression’s Dust Bowl, but they’re not that old. And why would Nolan have characters talking about the Depression anyway?
Through a series of semi-believable events, Cooper finds himself the captain of a small crew flying a space vehicle, with Brand (Anne Hathaway) second in command. Several astronauts have already been sent to see if certain possibly habitable planets are indeed habitable, and Coop and the others are supposed to collect the results.
This is the point where you’re likely to snicker, “We all know that the nearest would literally take ages to get to.” True, but it turns out that scientists — housed in a huge, remote lab, and including Brand’s father (Michael Caine) — have found a wormhole (or something like that) and use it as a short cut — to vastly cut down the length of the voyage.
Many, many complications ensue. Among them: Count the years the crews spend in suspended animation; add to that the effect of going through a black hole or whatever that sucking singularity is; and it’s quite possible that Cooper might return to find himself younger than his kids.
The heart of the scenario is nothing new, but that’s not the problem with “Interstellar.” Nolan stretched time around in “Inception,” intercutting four (or was it five?) levels of alleged reality and dreams, nested like Russian dolls. Toward the end he intercut the ongoing cliffhangers in each of those levels, even though it makes no sense whatever; time seems to be moving at roughly the same pace in most of them.
He does a simplified version of that trick here, intercutting Cooper’s time frame — each day of which corresponds to a year or two on Earth — with the aging of the folks back home. At various points, the action stops while the characters explain to each other (but really to us) about gravity and time distortion and the fifth dimension — not the Up, Up, and Away! group — and reconciling relativity and quantum mechanics.
Most of this has the suspicious feel of gobbledygook. Maybe that’s why the climactic “science” breakthrough has Cooper and Brand yelling it back and forth at high speed.
This gets really tedious — note that film is a smidgen under three hours — particularly because it doesn’t merely “seem” like gobbledygook; it also sounds, appears, feels, smells and tastes like gobbledygook. It’s bad enough to have the characters solve the central problem of 20th-century physics; it’s much worse to try and spell it out and explain it to the audience.
In “2001,” Kubrick knew that it would cheapen the film to make the ending explain unanswerable real-world questions — better to leave it as baffling as possible. In “Interstellar,” Nolan acts as though he has come up with the answer. And if you think that’s bad, just wait till you hear what it is.
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ANDY KLEIN is the film critic for Marquee. He can also be heard on “FilmWeek” on KPCC-FM (89.3).