I tried.
I really tried to love INTERSTELLAR.
I mean, what’s not to love? Matthew
McConaughey and a host of Hollywood A-listers.
A big concept with science at its heart.
Stunning visuals. Heart-pounding
action. Super-cool robots. Did I mention Matthew
McConaughey?
But like a lot of arranged marriages, this
one failed despite everyone’s best efforts to match audience and film. The intended was certainly handsome enough,
but the pairing lacked the necessary chemistry.
First of all, you should know I’m not a
detail-oriented person. Really. I spend my hard-earned cash in an actual
movie theater nearly every week because I love completely immersing myself in
the film experience for two hours (or, in this case, three), giving myself over
to the filmmaker and the world he or she has created. I often have to see a movie more than once to
get the details I need for a review because the first time around I’m too much
into the total experience to grab them.
So it takes a lot to yank me out of the story and make me go, “Huh?” in
the middle of the film.
Writer/director Christopher Nolan (THE DARK
KNIGHT trilogy, MAN OF STEEL) gave me plenty of absolutely incredible moments
of wonder in his film—dust storms overwhelming a weary town, Saturn and her
rings, a spherical (!) wormhole in black space, distant mountains on a planet
far, far away that turn out to be . . . well, I won’t spoil that for you. But missed details of science or logic
just kept grabbing me by the back of the collar and snatching me up out of my
comfortable place in the world Nolan had established.
Some examples: A blight has destroyed all the wheat in the
world, we’re told at the beginning of the film.
All that’s left is corn. (No
mention is made of the many other grains humans grow, but okay.) In one early scene, McConaughey’s character,
Cooper, and John Lithgow, who plays his curmudgeonly father-in-law (terrific,
even if his character is a cliché) look over to a neighbor’s field, which is on
fire. “Blight?” Cooper asks, referring
perhaps to a leftover field of wheat. “No,”
FIL answers. “They say that’s the last
crop of okra. Ever.”
Okra?
Really?? I mean, how many people
who see this film will even know what okra is?
Only those of us here in the South (and quite a few people in Africa,
but this film isn’t about them, as we’ll see later) will miss it when it goes,
trust me. And I just spent three minutes
thinking about okra when I should have been paying attention to the film.
Okay, I just get over that when, at the end
of a tough day, Cooper and FIL sit down on the porch to relax with a nice, cold
beer. Beer. In a commercial bottle, mind you. No shortage there, apparently, though the
world seems awfully short of other things.
And beer is made of what? Yeah, wheat.
Yes, it can be made of other things—sorghum, most notably, or millet—but
corn not so much. How about some good
ole white lightnin’? That would make more sense! And, again, I’ve spent
two minutes thinking about beer.
The “secret” agency that sponsors humanity’s
last-ditch mission to search out a new planet for colonizing? NASA.
Right. When even now, NASA is
losing ground to other nations in the space race. And this is all of humanity we’re talking
about. Shouldn't it be a joint
task force of some kind?
They still have computers in this limited
future, used mostly to run automated farm equipment, but even so. Yet the most important intellectual endeavor of
our history is undertaken with chalk on a blackboard, with not a computer in
sight. Or is this just the way
theoretical physicists work?
I’m no scientist, but even I can tell you
what conditions you might find on a planet circling close to a black hole. Think the moon
has an effect on tides? My decision regarding
that planet would be to move on. But, of
course, that would make for a boring movie, wouldn’t it?
As for a scientist found all alone on an
ice-bound planet after years in cryo-sleep?
Warning, warning! Danger, Will Robinson! Oh, but that’s right. His robot is ALL BUSTED UP! If we had any sense we’d be firing all thrusters right now.
Then there is the scientific coup-de-grace. **SPOILER ALERT** To save the human race, our
heroes must enter a black hole and transmit data back out of it. At first it’s just the robot that must
survive long enough to do this (unlikely enough—NOTHING escapes a black hole,
not even light), but then, of course, Cooper is drawn in, too. Instead of certain death, he finds himself in
a “three-dimensional construct of five-dimensional space”, according to the
robot, who somehow is in there with him.
And what does it adjoin? His
daughter’s bedroom! So he can
communicate with Earth! Yay!
I’m sorry, I’ll put up with a lot, but not if
it’s supposed to be based on science as we know it. There’s a bunch of stuff here about solving
the relationship between gravity and time, and something about the power of
love which makes little sense. I saw the
movie twice and I’m still not convinced.
It’s not like 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, in which there was plenty of room
for interpretation. Here we’re given a
construct in detail. It just doesn’t
hold up. (And if it was the basis of an SFR novel, the author wouldn't survive the savaging she'd receive from SF fans.)
Lest you miss this film thinking there’s
nothing of worth to be seen, let me just say there is much that touches the
heart in INTERSTELLAR. Matthew
McConaughey’s Cooper is wonderful—conflicted, complex, wearing his emotions on
his weather-beaten face for all to see, and yet yearning for the stars. He’s the perfect metaphor for our human
aspirations. Jessica Chastain, as his
grown daughter, Murphy, captures her anger and drive as well as her lingering
hope. All of the supporting cast is stellar,
and the human part of the story works well when Nolan is not busy lecturing. Then there's the scene which gives "taking a flying @#@#$ at a rolling donut" a whole new meaning--worth the price of admission in and of itself.
If Christopher Nolan had let an editor have
a bit more time with his ungainly giant of a film, INTERSTELLAR might yet have
found a way into my heart despite its many flaws.
Cheers, Donna
