This is big. It’s huge. We don’t make movies like this anymore – we hardly ever did. I’m not talking about big in the sense of budget or even big like epic. We do that plenty: spend the GDP of a small nation to make men in capes fly or monsters stomp or toys sing. I’m talking big when it comes to ideas. Big when it comes to optimism. What passes for science fiction these days is dreary and depressing. Postapocalyptic and apprehensive. We stopped looking out and started looking down, and back, and in. We lost wonder and replaced it with worry.
Which is why Interstellar is so thrilling. It is full of stirring notions of what humanity might be capable of, and follows through with the breathtaking adventure that necessarily follows. Or, well, the adventure that necessarily follows if we chase those possibilities instead of ignoring them. It’s full of enormous risk-taking in the quest for something better for all of us. It’s full of hope for humanity.
Interstellar does have looming apocalypse, yes, but that’s merely the impetus for the adventure. In the near future, nature is slowly collapsing and human structures are stagnating. But even here, a little bit of wonder and excitement can be rustled up by someone with the inclination for it. Our introduction to Cooper (Matthew McConnaughey) comes through a chase he leads his kids on to capture a feral surveillance drone – its solar panels and other technological goodies are invaluable salvage – that is free for the taking since any semblance of mission control collapsed a decade back.
Coop is a lonely would-be adventurer in a world that, like ours, has lost its taste for space exploration. But a few people in a NASA that has been driven underground, literally and figuratively, are maintaining the dream, including mathematician Brand (Michael Caine) and his scientist daughter, Amelia (Anne Hathaway). And there’s real urgency to their work, because they’ve discovered a wormhole out near Saturn that could hold the key to humanity’s salvation: a new planet to call home. It doesn’t take much to convince Coop that a trip through the wormhole to scout for a habitable planet would satisfy both his thirst for adventure and his desire to save his children from the oncoming doom.
Director Christopher Nolan – writing once again with his brother, Jonathan – could easily have expanded this to a ten-hour miniseries; there’s so much that could have been lingered over here. YetInterstellar, at nearly three hours, certainly isn’t rushed, either. Nolan takes plenty of time for a sort of deep-space grandeur that was surely inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey. The image of the tiny ship Coop and his small crew leave Earth in passing in front of the immensity of Saturn brought tears to my eyes with its juxtaposition of the might of nature and the audacity of humanity.
(This is no art film, though: the other movie I would bet money inspired Interstellar, at least partly, is the 1979 Disney space adventure The Black Hole. That movie blew my mind as a kid, and I bet it did Nolan’s, too.)
This is a film as bold as the ideas and adventure it embraces as humanity’s destiny, never dumbing down its science and never pretending that the clash between reason and emotion isn’t something that even brilliant scientists battle in themselves. The most humanist thing about what might be the most humanist SF film in ages is this: it knows that our future is in the hands of all us deeply flawed and deeply conflicted humans, but that there’s still plenty of reason to hope anyway. But we do actually have to try.
INTERSTELLAR (3 1/2) • Directed by Christopher Nolan Starring Matthew McConnaughey, Michael Caine, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Wes Bentley, John Lithgow • Rated PG-13 • 169 min. • At Maya Cinemas, Century Cinemas Del Monte, Northridge Cinemas, Lighthouse Cinemas, Cannery Row XD.