Space invaders

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.— Oscar Wilde

Without revealing too much about Christopher Nolan’s latest space epic, Interstellar, the Earth is kaput. Its support systems are failing from a non-specified “blight” that is causing crops to wither as the movie opens, and most people are urged to become farmers and grow food, rather than study to become scientists or engineers. Matthew McConaughey plays Cooper, a former NASA pilot in a time when NASA has been discredited and blamed for wasting precious resources on space travel instead of food science. Schools teach kids that the moon landing of 1969 never actually happened; that it was all a propaganda move to push the Soviet Union into bankrupting themselves. Dreaming of a future beyond Earth is discouraged, and it seems the human race is resigned to its own extinction. “We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars,” Cooper laments in one of several homegrown speeches. “Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.”

It is true, space exploration used to have more romance to it, before it all became sort of routine and way too costly. Now it’s the millionaires and billionaires who dream of space, like Richard Branson and Elon Musk. Not governments. 

But movies like Interstellar and Gravity don’t exactly help matters. They’re patently designed to scare the crap out of those who still dream of going into space, because all kinds of bad, horrible things can happen out there. Like running into Matt Damon, for instance.

McConaughey is the right choice to play Cooper, the man sent on a mission to save the Earth by flying a crew through a wormhole placed near Saturn as, presumably, an invitation to better worlds to colonize. He’s in a soulful phase, and soulful is needed to lift Interstellar beyond its high concepts and bloated pacing. Jessica Chastain provides yet more soul as Cooper’s grown-up daughter, Murph.

There is a tendency for the Nolan brothers, director Christopher and screenwriting partner Jonathan, to overpack their movies, both premise-wise and length-wise. They insist on making audiences do more work than they’re probably used to doing in a Cineplex. Movies like Memento, The Prestige and Inception could have gone the easy route — taking on the genres of noir, mystery and sci-fi respectively, and offering pure popcorn pap for the summer audiences. Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight movies, too, could have been mere crowd pleasers, but they weren’t. They were overlong and kind of exasperating, but mostly brilliant. And there is always something in their movies that is as maddening as it is perplexing — perhaps the fact that they are such clever boys, and tend to overthink things a bit too much. Inception suffered a little from its convoluted Rube Goldberg antics, as did The Prestige at times. There’s a distancing that takes place, and the Nolans often appear more concerned about the design of their films than the heart at the center.

Interstellar doesn’t fall into that trap, because of McConaughey and Chastain mostly, and because it focuses on a father-daughter relationship that crosses time and will have even non-parents weeping.

Suffice to say Cooper and crew try to investigate the planets mapped out by three previous astronauts sent through the wormhole — almost like the Goldilocks of interstellar travel, trying to see which planet is too cold, which one is too wet, and which one is juuuust right for human existence. There are wormhole-size plot gaps here and there, which others have pointed out, but the largest gambit seems to be placing our faith in the power of love to cross oceans of time — time in its fifth-dimensional form, available simultaneously, all the time, like YouTube is. As usual, the Nolan brothers have constructed a Rubik’s Cube puzzle for the audience to explore and eventually have solved before their eyes, and this one is even more vexing and complex than Inception’s, but arguably more satisfying.

(Though I have a suspicion that the best Nolan brothers movie remains Memento, because it was the easiest, most straightforward Rubik’s Cube, before they started getting into 36-square and multidimensional versions.)

But there are problems. One thing we could have done without: the overuse of Dylan Thomas’ poem “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” which is referenced no less than three times to indicate how mankind must “rage” against extinction. Okay, we got it the first time. No need to wear it out.

Then there is the metaphor of dust, which could have been woven into the story in a more poetic or organic way (“ashes to ashes, dust to dust”) but wasn’t, really.

And while we’re on the subject of metaphors, the film shares one — gravity —with last year’s Oscar bait space flick of the same name. But that film evoked the need to reconnect yourself with Earth, to claim your place there. What resulted was a more straightforward, affecting narrative, which Interstellar, despite all its bells and whistles, fails to achieve.

And more than one viewer has wondered, why didn’t “they” place the wormhole closer to Earth, rather than across the solar system next to Saturn?

But in fairness, Nolan seems to be held to a higher standard of scientific accuracy than most directors. Every geek came out full-force to poke holes in Interstellar’s “flaws,” as though it were a paper for Scientific American. Yet having said that, it doesn’t feel like a classic, not like 2001, which it is inevitably compared to, because it ties up its plotlines too neatly, instead of leaving us with a sense of enigma, or wonder about space.

Still, we can applaud Christopher Nolan and sibling for continuing to think outside the box, and coming up with grand cinematic schemes at a time — just like the time depicted in the movie — when imagination is stunted and stymied and people will stand still for endless sequels instead of an original, thought-provoking experience at the movies.

For all the provoking of thoughts, however, Nolan’s movies still tend to reduce down to a couple of notions that come at the end, in a big reveal of sorts, and this can seem a little sleight-of-hand and overly clever at times. For all its packaging, the message of Interstellar — as others have noted — is pretty much the same as The Fifth Element or Contact.

And the huge “problem of gravity” that lies at the heart of Interstellar is either too complicated for a non-physics student or non-comic book geek like myself to fully grasp from the script, or it’s simply a MacGuffin inserted to give everyone in the movie something to hunt for and keep them busy.

Or maybe, as McConaughey tried to explain to us all in True Detective, time is really just a flat circle.