After all of the profits he generated by making the Dark Knight movies and Inception, filmmaker Christopher Nolan basically had carte blanche to spend as much money as he wanted making whatever movie he wanted the next time around. Similarly, after all the universally praised work that he’s been doing over the course of the last few years, Matthew McConaughey has become essentially free to star in whatever projects he chooses. Given all of that rarified power, what both men chose to do is to work with each other on Interstellar, a science fiction movie about a dying Earth, the ties that bind us together as a species, and a last-ditch gambit to find a way to keep our species—and, by proxy, that connection—alive.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that Interstellar is an event movie—large in hype, scale, visual splendor, and storytelling ambition. This isn’t just a story about how humanity deals with a crisis, though it is that. It isn’t just a story about a regular man who gets called on to do an extraordinary thing, though it’s that as well. It’s a big screen adventure. It’s a meditation on the relationships between fathers and daughters. It’s that sort of genre-heavy “hard sci-fi” story that’s more concerned with exploring future possibilities and imaginative ideas than it is in being pure escapism—all while still being pure escapism. When you factor in all of the things that Interstellar is trying to do in one movie, it becomes clear that it really is an attempt at creating one of those sweeping, mythic pieces of art that’s looking to provide answers to all of the big questions of life, the universe, and everything. And, sure, maybe it isn’t quite able to pull all of those lofty goals off, but it is still refreshing to see a mainstream release that’s got the chutzpah to try.
The first act of the film is mostly concerned with establishing McConaughey’s protagonist, a former pilot and current farmer named Cooper who raises his two kids, Tom (first Timothée Chalamet, later Casey Affleck) and Murphy (first Mackenzie Foy, then Jessica Chastain), alongside their grandfather, Donald (John Lithgow). What that means is that we don’t get any big explanation for why the world is full of dust storms and crops that won’t grow. We’re just dropped into their situation and asked to figure out what’s going on and how far into the future we must be thanks to context clues, which works really well in making the first part of the film an intriguing little mystery that’s able to maintain your attention through slight of hand while it does the necessary work of establishing its characters. The second segment of the movie, where Cooper stumbles across what’s left of NASA and gets recruited by a scientist named Professor Brand (Michael Caine) to lead a dangerous expedition through a wormhole in order to find a new habitable planet for humanity, is a different story though. This is where the more complex sci-fi ideas start to get introduced, so this is where the characters are forced to begin explaining everything that’s happening, at length, through mouthfuls and mouthfuls of expository dialogue.
The bad news about that is that any movie that has to constantly stop and have its characters explain itself to you isn’t going to be as well-executed or entertaining as a movie that’s able to communicate to the audience in a largely visual way. There is a silver lining in that cloud though, which is that even the most tedious expository dialogue ever written wouldn’t sound completely terrible being delivered by someone as comfortable in his craft as Caine, who is the performer tasked with most of the heavy lifting when it comes to keeping the audience educated on all of the scientific theories this space travel story explores. He’s just so naturally charismatic that he’s still able to make even the driest of material sing. Heck, he even gets an emotional moment toward the end of all the jargon dumps that might make you squirt out a tear or two.
As far as the performances go, Interstellar completely belongs to McConaughey though. Not only is it through his character’s eyes that we experience the many wonders Nolan and his co-writer brother Jonathan have conjured up, but he’s also the character who does the most growing and changing over the course of the film without ever having to switch from being portrayed by a child actor to an adult one. We’re with Cooper through every step of his journey, from humble beginnings, to hero astronaut, to the weird stuff that happens in the reality-bending climax. He confronts the unknown, he makes sacrifices, he’s put in life or death situations, he navigates the mine field of fatherhood, and thanks to McConaughey’s innate relatability and authenticity, even the most outrageous of the situations he’s put in still feel real and resonant. And if you think the emotional moment that Caine’s character gets is a tear-jerker, you haven’t seen anything until you’ve taken in the scene where a time management mishap sees Cooper having to check over two decades worth of video messages from his children in one sitting. It’s an overwhelming experience, which McConaughey forcefully conveys with his performance. He’s so good here that he even brings to mind memories of Tom Hanks’ performance during the climactic moments of Captain Phillips, which is one of the most raw things Hollywood has given us in the last decade.
Maybe in a movie like Interstellar the lead actor never really ends up being the true star though. As good as McConaughey is as our slightly superior to everyman hero, it’s Nolan’s crafting that’s bound to be the big attraction that gets everyone into a theater seat. From the structural experimentation of Memento, to the scale of the action in The Dark Knight, to the layered ideas of Inception, Nolan has never been afraid to push the boundaries of what mainstream filmmaking can be, and Interstellar is no exception when it comes to the man’s penchant for valuing ambition above all else. Not only does this movie create a future Earth, completely new worlds, and feature stunning shots of space exploration, it films large portions of these things using a 70mm IMAX camera, so that if you see it in a theater equipped to project the format, the usual wide screen frame periodically stretches from floor to ceiling to take up the entire wall, much like the sequences Nolan filmed using the format in The Dark Knight, only this time around he’s done a better job of weaving the changing aspect ratios into the thematics of the film. In general, Nolan seems to choose to move into the larger format whenever something is being explored, or a character is moving off into the unknown in some way, and that added visual oomph ends up driving home the adventurous spirit of the film with quite a bit of visual emphasis.
It can be said that Interstellar has a few structural similarities to 2001: A Space Odyssey, and possibly a few thematic similarities to Contact, but largely it’s a unique creation, and its focus is on exploring big ideas about relativity, the nature of time and matter, and so many other high-minded science-type stuff, rather than just on creating fantastical action scenarios, which is the case for most modern, mainstream science fiction films. The good thing about the script the Nolans have written is that it does still manage to naturally weave its exploring of those ideas into really effective action moments though, which makes it engaging on both an intellectual and an emotional level. A scene where Cooper and his crew are trapped on a water planet, with their ship’s engines flooded, while gigantic mountains of water pound down on them and every minute they’re trapped there lasts for days on Earth, is particularly harrowing. Movies need big stakes in order to hold your interest—particularly movies as long as this one—and Interstellar is constantly establishing huge new stakes, both personal and on a universe-wide scale, so that it never wears out its welcome.
Despite its strong performances, interesting ideas, and thrilling action sequences, there are a few fatal flaws in the Nolans’ script that keep this one from becoming one of those great, epic movies that will eventually be considered part of the canon though. Firstly, they just don’t seem to be very good at handling sappy emotion. When actors like Caine or McConaughey get a chance to emote using mostly their faces and bodies, and few words, the results are really effective, but when characters like the one played by Anne Hathaway have to deliver monologues about the nature of love and how it exists as a force throughout the universe, nary an eyeball will be left unrolled by the end of her spiel. Sentiment that’s explained to you rather than shown to you tends to be rather unbearable, and this movie contains a good deal of the told type.
That establishing of stakes that we mentioned earlier eventually gets out of control too. The vast majority of Interstellar is a Man vs. Nature story, and that works out pretty well, but then there are a couple surprise developments towards the end that add a Man vs. Man element to the proceedings as well, and they derail the story in a big way. Early on Hathaway’s character explains to us that nature can’t be evil, only man, but that doesn’t mean that a story necessarily needs to confront evil in order to be satisfying—surviving the challenge of traveling through wormholes into other galaxies and exploring deadly new worlds was already enough. Eventually Interstellar tries to fold too much conflict into its storytelling, and, in its ambition (perhaps ironically), it manages to sully itself by allowing melodrama to creep into a story that was, until that point, doing a great job of connecting with its audience in a natural way. It’s highs are high enough, the connections between its main characters are strong enough, and its visual splendor is impressive enough that Interstellar easily makes for a satisfying trip to the theater, but its constant over-explaining of itself and its third act grasping toward drama pretty much guarantees that it won’t age well over the course of future revisits.
