The film starts with a 30 minute long section that introduces the pilot-turned-farmer Cooper, the future world and his relationships with his family. It's an opening act that takes a long time and is clunkily-paced, but accurately sets the tone for the rest of the film. We basically find out that Cooper loves his daughter but doesn't really give two shits about his son. Then within the space of 10 minutes we go from farms and dust bowls to rockets, relativity and artificial gravity. All of a sudden there's Michael Caine, he knows Cooper from 'the past' and immediately he's hired as a the pilot of their new rocket (which conveniently is located next to a boardroom with a movable wall so that they can have a dramatic reveal). As an opening act, it's too long but manages to reveal too little, not a great start.
Note that there are many spoilers ahead...
We then get into the meat of the story, which is Cooper and the 3 other astronauts traversing a worm hole to another galaxy where humanity might find a suitable planet for colonisation. Cooper and the others have to wrestle with the concept that their mission is one that might save the entire human race, but also one of great sacrifice in which the technicalities of relativistic space travel mean they may never see their loved ones again. Does their mission outweigh their individual desire to experience love for another human? Is love something that can transcend the boundaries of space and time? Why are the mysterious higher-dimensional beings bothering to help humanity escape the boundaries of Earth?
No matter how exciting and bold the ideas behind the film are (and I think they are), the director doesn't seem to be able to keep the story on track. Whenever the story starts to get going the director seems intent on slowing it down. Anne Hathaway stands up and gives a speech about love that just about falls on the right side of being cheesy. Matt Damon turns up as a scientist on a planet for a pointless 30 minutes to prove that humans are at fault for their own downfall. We have multiple cuts to a docking mechanism between two spaceships - they're not docking properly and something bad might happen - WE GOT IT THE FIRST TIME! Then when the film moves into its existential finale, the director keeps bringing it back to the mundane when he should be allowing the audience to share in Cooper's bewilderment at his journey through higher-dimensional space. Cooper has to 'give them the message' in morse code in a wrist watch? This is pretty cheesy in anyone's definition. Can't we stick on the emotion of the moment? Of Cooper's reaction to seeing his daughter again? Of Cooper's realisation that though he would give anything to go back and be with his daughter, it was his choice to leave that saved her? Please?
Having said all this though, I need to stress that I don't think it's a bad film. It's just a film wants to have its cake and eat it. It wants Cooper to go on an existential journey of discovery through multiple dimensions and realise humanity's place in the stars, but also it wants him to retain his humanity, shed a tear with his elderly daughter and get the girl at the end. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, in order to transcend humanity's mundane existence, Bowman has to give up his humanity and be reborn as the star child - that's his sacrifice. In Interstellar Cooper sacrifices seeing his daughter grow up, but in the end gets it all back because, well, for some reason he ends up back in the solar system just in time to have a weepy final scene with his daughter.
Comparisons with 2001: A Space Odyssey are easy to make and justified. Interstellar is a visually stunning film and it should be commended for aiming extremely high. In particular the sequences where they traverse the worm hole and then the black hole look amazing. All the shots on the various planets they visit are beautifully rendered, the Tars robot works as an effective comic relief and the scientific rigour - though pretty far from actual science - is pretty darn good. In particular I enjoyed the Einstein Field Equations for and the conformal spacetime diagram on Michael Caine's blackboard.
I guess my problem really comes from how if a film tries to set the bar higher, then I'm going to judge it with a different hat on. I enjoyed Unstoppable, because that was a film about a train that can't slow down - so I judged it as such. I didn't really enjoy Interstellar, because it's a film that asks questions about the nature of love, individual versus the collective and questions if we are alone in the universe - so I'm going to such it as such. It's a film that wants to ask the same philosophical questions as 2001: A Space Odyssey, but at the same time wants to be about family, love and relationships. That's a huge ask for any story-teller to pull off; and I just don't think the director gets it right.
Having said all that, you have to go and see this on the big screen. 3 hours be dammed, it looks bloody amazing.
I find myself agreeing with much of your review. Particularly, I felt that the film tried too hard to cram too many aspects in. The start sequence was annoyingly long!
ReplyDeleteAlso, I really didn't appreciate Michael Caine reading Dylan Thomas. It was out of context.
Having said this, I suppose I enjoyed Intersteller, but I still have an enduring preference for 2001. Indeed; Moon is a much more concise sci fi film.