The first hour of Interstellar depicts a dying rural world. This particular world is a small corner of the Midwest. Here dust storms terrorize the countryside; blight is rife, oxygen will soon be depleted and corn is the only crop that’ll grow any more. We are told that the rest of the earth is also suffering, but we don’t see it. When Interstellar refers to planet earth, we think of hardy farmers and fields of corn. This seems to be a frequent technique in space exploration movies,- see Tarkovsky’s Solaris and J.J. Abrams Star Trek. The rural and quaint initial setting backlights and primes the svelte technologies and impossible distances of space travel. But in Interstellar the corn does something else as well: it lets us know we’re in in Field of Dreams territory. Magical realism is afoot.
Matthew McConaughey plays Cooper, “Coop”, whose cocky Top-Gun grin swings from being reassuring to insufferable. To be fair, he is not cocky all the time, many tears are shed and grief is the emotional palate of the film. McConaughey is one of those actors who often expresses an array of emotions with throat noises. He has a very loud and expressive gullet. He used this talent to greatest effect in his emotionally wrenching (I’m serious) performance in the dragon movie Reign of Fire. And there’s no exception here, it’s yet more proof of the McConaissance.
Once upon a time Cooper was a hotshot pilot and engineer, but is now a corn farmer raising two children in the new dust bowl. His daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy) has been witnessing paranormal phenomena in her bedroom and has been attempting to decipher what the ghost is trying to say.
But let us be clear: there can be no old-timey poltergeists in Interstellar: the movie has a tremendous yearning to be scientific and rational. We learn that it is not the signs of a ghost that Murph is witnessing but rather communications from “them.” “They” are invisible beings intent on humanity’s salvation . If that sounds suspiciously like Judeo-Christian deities, it’s an accident, for just as there can be no ghosts in Interstellar so also there can be no gods. The religion here is one that believes exclusively in technology, rationalism and astro-physics. But this is a rationalism and an astro-physics that will get bent considerably.
Murph’s friendly “ghost” presents a set of coordinates in binary which Cooper deciphers and then travels too. It is the location of NASA’s last stand. A Professor Brand (Michael Caine) is the presiding scientist and even though Cooper was caught breaking and entering the facility, he is hired as head pilot on a last ditch effort to transcend space-time and save the species. “They,” the benevolent space beings, have placed a wormhole within our solar system which allows a NASA spacecraft to travel impossible distances in search of habitable worlds. Cooper, along with Professor Brand’s daughter Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway) and two expendable crewmen will travel thru the wormhole and boldly go where a few unluckier folks have already gone before.
So the (melo)dramatic tension of the movie is born: Cooper promises his daughter Murph that he will come back to her from a mission that no one has returned from. What’s more the tenants of special relativity require that time slows to a crawl: what Cooper experiences as one hour amounts to seven years back on earth. So can he hold to this promise? This tension threatens to turn Murph into a sentimental macguffin, the insubstantial plot mover, and would do so but for Murph growing up to be bitter and vengeful Jessica Chastain embarking on her own scientific endeavors crucial to humanity’s perseverance. Meanwhile Coop’s son has become a farmer (a very staid Casey Affleck) who willfully persists to live on the family farm even though the dust is lethal. A fight with a sanctimonious doctor ensues.
If that sounds rather de trop for a space movie that’s because it is. Nolan tends to love the frenetic middle-game in his movies and frequently indulges in duration and too much plot. Interstellar, at almost three hours, is no exception. Mere seconds of an action scene taking place across the universe are cut to mere seconds of apocalyptic family drama back in corn-land. The effect does not accentuate the action but rather comes off as equally hysteric and clunky. This culminates in some Star-Trek-style hand to hand combat on an ice planet between Matthew McConaughey and another Alist actor (who will remain a surprise) cut with shots of burning corn.
Still all of this is not to say that I didn’t like Interstellar. The movie is gorgeous. A tremendous amount of effort has been spent to approach 2001: A Space Odyssey level beauty and at times it pulls it off. Late in the movie a climactic set piece is both stunning and conceptually vivid. From corn-fields to spaceship interiors, to quasars the cinematography is visually resplendent. Astro-physicist Kip Thorne co-produced and helped make sure that the visuals were scientifically precise: we see what a black hole theoretically looks like. In this sense the movie is like the iconography of the early church: visualizing the holy mysteries of quantum theory for the illiterate masses.
Ultimately, however, Interstellar is dopey and the terror of space reduced to a bad dream. For all of its hewing to scientific-dogma the movie descends into Beatles-style all you need is love narrative logic. This, as the movie argues, cannot now be explained scientifically, but that’s only because we aren’t yet advanced enough. In the end the movie is just as romantic and un-scientific as the ghosts of baseball stars playing baseball in the corn.
Forest is a carpenter/writer living in Minneapolis. He writes a weekly horoscope for Revolver. Those can be found here. Follow him on Twitter @interrogativs
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