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#497 - Interstellar
Christopher Nolan, 2014
When Earth undergoes a massive blight that threatens the human race with extinction, a small team of explorers is assembled to travel through a wormhole and find a new planet for humans to colonise.
All things considered, it was surprisingly easy to get fatigued by Christopher Nolan. The Dark Knight and Inception were pretty impressive cinematic experiences, but after the rather underwhelming follow-up that was The Dark Knight Rises it was easy to start becoming less impressed by the man's work. As such, when Interstellar started to gather buzz I was obviously skeptical about it; this same skepticism persisted as I sat through the film. Even so, I didn't outright hate it and decided to give it a second chance recently. As such, I find that I do have a rather complicated attitude towards it that doesn't necessarily translate into a wholly positive or wholly negative rating. If I had to summarise my attitude towards Interstellar in a word, it would be "ambivalence". This is definitely one of those reviews where a rating demands an explanation and I figure I owe it to myself (if not loyal readers) to put it into words.
One of the main things I took away from my first viewing was how much of a sci-fi pastiche this supposedly visionary work ended up being. It begins with documentary footage of old folks talking about living in the Dust Bowl in order to establish a dying Earth that is prone to frequent crop failure and dust storms (because nothing establishes how doomed the world is like having old people reminiscing about the apocalypse as if it were decades in the past). Amidst this, we are introduced to Matthew McConaughey's protagonist, a widower (*ticks off a square in Nolan bingo*) with two young kids who used to be an ace pilot before being forced to abandon his dreams so as to look after his kids and keep his farm going. After the film's gone on for a while, he discovers that NASA has been secretly organising a project that aims to keep the human race alive by searching for inhabitable planets and colonising them, though they are also trying (and struggling) to find a way to establish self-sustaining space stations. To this end, McConaughey's character is recruited to be part of the next mission to go through a wormhole near Saturn and follow up on the explorers who went in search of new planets, but of course things gets complicated...
I'll get the things that I like about Interstellar out of the way first. For starters, it looks pretty good. Nolan and co.'s attempt to create a thoroughly realistic take on science-fiction extends to the development of some incredibly detailed production design and art direction, to say nothing of the interesting technological designs such as those of the military robots that accompany the astronauts. The film understandably won an Oscar for its visual effects, which do well to capture a variety of phenomena such as wormholes, alien planets, and of course the film's climatic sequence that doesn't quite bear discussion without spoiler tags. Hans Zimmer avoids a lot of his usual compositional clichés or at the very least offers interesting variations on them as he composes an organ-driven score that admittedly reminds me of Philip Glass's work on Koyaanisqatsi. The resulting marriage of this music to various scenes of grand interplanetary tableaux is probably one of my favourite things about this movie.
Unfortunately, just because the film manages to create some impressive combinations of sound and vision doesn't mean that the film is impressive as a whole. I mentioned earlier that I considered the film a pastiche, though that's only because there are so many moments that feel like they were lifted from other films and given the slightest tweaks. Whether it's the explanation for traveling through a wormhole that is identical to the one from Event Horizon or certain developments that only serve to remind me of Sunshine (even before I re-watched that film recently), it was hard not to play spot-the-reference rather than get totally lost in the story (though I concede that the former is necessary for translating the science into layman's terms, earlier movies be damned). Considering the fairly inventive take on the heist movie that Nolan provided with Inception, the extremely straightforward nature of this film comes across as a let-down (though I suppose that it might have something to do with the fact that it was someone else's idea in the first place). Even some of the more interesting ideas in use (such as the time dilation caused by space travel affecting the plot in a significant way) don't have the greatest pay-off.
There are reputable performers involved, but even they aren't good enough to elevate a script that frequently feels extremely utilitarian in its attempt to craft a sufficiently intelligent and complex blockbuster. Nolan has drawn less-than-favourable comparisons to Stanley Kubrick for prioritising technical prowess and provocative spectacle at the expense of strong character development; that particular shortcoming seems especially pronounced in a film that is (rather ironically) about the fundamental triumph of the human spirit and how humans as a species are special enough to deserve to survive. Any emotional expressions seem to exist solely to push the narrative forward (which is also ironic considering how the film's narrative seems to imply that the opposite is true) - while that's arguably true of many a film, here it feels exceptionally blatant that the characters and their feelings are of less concern than the plot. This utilitarian approach to sentiment even extends to some of the film's best scenes, such as the one where McConaughey checks his messages. The fact that it gets to the point where an emotionally distant scientist starts to wax lyrical about how the power of love is a tangible force in the universe only serves to drive home that this is probably the most human-oriented film that Nolan has attempted yet and it still feels incredibly rough when it comes to developing humans. It's just as well that several of the performers involved have just enough talent and charisma to infuse some rather flat characters with at least some personality, though they can only do so much in this film.
If you rate on a strict ten-point scale with no allowing for fractions or decimals, there is no true middle of the scale. A five out of ten is slightly below average and a six out of ten is slightly above average. Though there is enough to like about Interstellar that I don't feel like I can hate it as a whole, there's still so much wrong with it that I still don't feel like I can give it a good rating due to its incredible inconsistency. It runs for almost three hours and is clearly intended to be an epic blockbuster that also has a considerable degree of smarts to it, but such smarts are undone by the underweight development of the human factor. I may yet give this film a third chance, but it'll be a while away because I'm not altogether convinced that the grandiose depictions of the final frontier and what lies beyond the infinite are enough to carry a lengthy and somewhat hollow film. In this context, I find it somewhat amusing that Zimmer's score sounds so much like the music from Koyaanisqatsi, an art film that featured no human characters to care about and was mostly focused on creating a mesmerising series of audio-visual experimentations. Most films that receive the following rating usually provoke complete indifference, but Interstellar - for all its many flaws and not-so-many strengths - provokes anything but that.
Christopher Nolan, 2014
When Earth undergoes a massive blight that threatens the human race with extinction, a small team of explorers is assembled to travel through a wormhole and find a new planet for humans to colonise.
All things considered, it was surprisingly easy to get fatigued by Christopher Nolan. The Dark Knight and Inception were pretty impressive cinematic experiences, but after the rather underwhelming follow-up that was The Dark Knight Rises it was easy to start becoming less impressed by the man's work. As such, when Interstellar started to gather buzz I was obviously skeptical about it; this same skepticism persisted as I sat through the film. Even so, I didn't outright hate it and decided to give it a second chance recently. As such, I find that I do have a rather complicated attitude towards it that doesn't necessarily translate into a wholly positive or wholly negative rating. If I had to summarise my attitude towards Interstellar in a word, it would be "ambivalence". This is definitely one of those reviews where a rating demands an explanation and I figure I owe it to myself (if not loyal readers) to put it into words.
One of the main things I took away from my first viewing was how much of a sci-fi pastiche this supposedly visionary work ended up being. It begins with documentary footage of old folks talking about living in the Dust Bowl in order to establish a dying Earth that is prone to frequent crop failure and dust storms (because nothing establishes how doomed the world is like having old people reminiscing about the apocalypse as if it were decades in the past). Amidst this, we are introduced to Matthew McConaughey's protagonist, a widower (*ticks off a square in Nolan bingo*) with two young kids who used to be an ace pilot before being forced to abandon his dreams so as to look after his kids and keep his farm going. After the film's gone on for a while, he discovers that NASA has been secretly organising a project that aims to keep the human race alive by searching for inhabitable planets and colonising them, though they are also trying (and struggling) to find a way to establish self-sustaining space stations. To this end, McConaughey's character is recruited to be part of the next mission to go through a wormhole near Saturn and follow up on the explorers who went in search of new planets, but of course things gets complicated...
I'll get the things that I like about Interstellar out of the way first. For starters, it looks pretty good. Nolan and co.'s attempt to create a thoroughly realistic take on science-fiction extends to the development of some incredibly detailed production design and art direction, to say nothing of the interesting technological designs such as those of the military robots that accompany the astronauts. The film understandably won an Oscar for its visual effects, which do well to capture a variety of phenomena such as wormholes, alien planets, and of course the film's climatic sequence that doesn't quite bear discussion without spoiler tags. Hans Zimmer avoids a lot of his usual compositional clichés or at the very least offers interesting variations on them as he composes an organ-driven score that admittedly reminds me of Philip Glass's work on Koyaanisqatsi. The resulting marriage of this music to various scenes of grand interplanetary tableaux is probably one of my favourite things about this movie.
Unfortunately, just because the film manages to create some impressive combinations of sound and vision doesn't mean that the film is impressive as a whole. I mentioned earlier that I considered the film a pastiche, though that's only because there are so many moments that feel like they were lifted from other films and given the slightest tweaks. Whether it's the explanation for traveling through a wormhole that is identical to the one from Event Horizon or certain developments that only serve to remind me of Sunshine (even before I re-watched that film recently), it was hard not to play spot-the-reference rather than get totally lost in the story (though I concede that the former is necessary for translating the science into layman's terms, earlier movies be damned). Considering the fairly inventive take on the heist movie that Nolan provided with Inception, the extremely straightforward nature of this film comes across as a let-down (though I suppose that it might have something to do with the fact that it was someone else's idea in the first place). Even some of the more interesting ideas in use (such as the time dilation caused by space travel affecting the plot in a significant way) don't have the greatest pay-off.
There are reputable performers involved, but even they aren't good enough to elevate a script that frequently feels extremely utilitarian in its attempt to craft a sufficiently intelligent and complex blockbuster. Nolan has drawn less-than-favourable comparisons to Stanley Kubrick for prioritising technical prowess and provocative spectacle at the expense of strong character development; that particular shortcoming seems especially pronounced in a film that is (rather ironically) about the fundamental triumph of the human spirit and how humans as a species are special enough to deserve to survive. Any emotional expressions seem to exist solely to push the narrative forward (which is also ironic considering how the film's narrative seems to imply that the opposite is true) - while that's arguably true of many a film, here it feels exceptionally blatant that the characters and their feelings are of less concern than the plot. This utilitarian approach to sentiment even extends to some of the film's best scenes, such as the one where McConaughey checks his messages. The fact that it gets to the point where an emotionally distant scientist starts to wax lyrical about how the power of love is a tangible force in the universe only serves to drive home that this is probably the most human-oriented film that Nolan has attempted yet and it still feels incredibly rough when it comes to developing humans. It's just as well that several of the performers involved have just enough talent and charisma to infuse some rather flat characters with at least some personality, though they can only do so much in this film.
If you rate on a strict ten-point scale with no allowing for fractions or decimals, there is no true middle of the scale. A five out of ten is slightly below average and a six out of ten is slightly above average. Though there is enough to like about Interstellar that I don't feel like I can hate it as a whole, there's still so much wrong with it that I still don't feel like I can give it a good rating due to its incredible inconsistency. It runs for almost three hours and is clearly intended to be an epic blockbuster that also has a considerable degree of smarts to it, but such smarts are undone by the underweight development of the human factor. I may yet give this film a third chance, but it'll be a while away because I'm not altogether convinced that the grandiose depictions of the final frontier and what lies beyond the infinite are enough to carry a lengthy and somewhat hollow film. In this context, I find it somewhat amusing that Zimmer's score sounds so much like the music from Koyaanisqatsi, an art film that featured no human characters to care about and was mostly focused on creating a mesmerising series of audio-visual experimentations. Most films that receive the following rating usually provoke complete indifference, but Interstellar - for all its many flaws and not-so-many strengths - provokes anything but that.