** MAJOR Spoilers below**
This isn’t going to be a review of the film. I think Interstellar is an incredibly well made film with emotional heft and some remarkable performances.
I’ve read so many disparaging remarks and reviews about Christopher Nolan’s 2014 film Interstellar. Critics sniffed at it, damning it with faint praise and backhanded compliments, and glibly congratulating themselves for deeming it corny (oh, so very clever, get it stupid moviegoers? The movie features corn and is corny! How clever!) But I feel that though the film is optimistic about mankind and the ability of the human mind to overcome staggering odds, it isn’t corny, nor does it go “full blown Shyamalan”
Moviegoers who made the really negative comments and hate on the film seemed to focus their aspersions on the film’s ending, which featured Cooper’s much mocked , “Love, Tars, Love” comments during his time in Murph’s bookcase tesseract.
For a few months, I’ve tried to learn more about the heavy science concepts in the film. I read Kip Thorne’s exhaustive “The Science of Interstellar” book (which I recommend for anyone who wants to prove to their disbelieving friends that hey, this film was pretty well researched-it’s not just making things up as it goes along), and it definitely increased my respect for just how much thought went into the movie, and when liberties were taken.
Moviemaking is such a long, laborious process that it doesn’t benefit anyone to cut corners and just make crap up. Imagine getting up every day and knowing that you would have to deal with this one story and it could take up YEARS of your life. You would work pretty damn hard to make sure that it was mentally stimulating to work on, and would try to make the plot as airtight as possible, or at the very least, emotionally moving to watch at least once for the average moviegoer.
I have a lot of faith in Christopher Nolan as a storyteller. If he was just a hack (as many claim), he could easily have made his fortune polishing third and fourth rate screenplays after establishing his reputation with Memento(2001). Instead, he pursues deeply personal projects, and I can honestly say that Insomnia(2003) is the only project he was probably compelled to take on from a purely mercenary mindset(i.e. I must prove I can make a moderately budgeted film with name talent(Robin Williams, Al Pacino, Hillary Swank) if I am ever going to make larger scale films). He did a pretty great job with Insomnia which deals with the dead girl in a small town trope without feeling like a complete Twin Peaks rip-off, unlike so many others.
So when I read that Christopher Nolan came onto Interstellar after watching his brother Jonathan develop it for years with Kip Thorne and producer Lynda Obst, I am confident that he didn’t take this decision lightly. He spent a great deal of time working through the plot and adding to the story his brother had initially drafted. Christopher Nolan is primarily an auteur filmmaker, drawn to certain topics and themes time after time, and it is just through pure talent and good fortune that he is able to make such incredibly personal films on such a massive scale.
He spent over ten years working on the script for Inception(2010), and over two years working on Interstellar, but like with every artistic work, the creator brings a lifetime of experiences and connections to it, and it is easy to see Interstellar as his broadest exploration of the themes he’s been preoccupied with his entire career.
But Interstellar is also his most optimistic film. But optimism does not automatically mean that the film is overly sentimental, corny or hokey (as many reviews described). This is a film that features an Earth in decline, and frightening hints as to what damage has already occurred. It handles the darker aspects of humanity without creating any outright villains. The closest the film comes to a villainous character is Dr.Mann(Matt Damon), but he comes across as more pitiful than evil, and it’s hard ludicrous to say he was purely evil, he comes across as a pitiful, loathsome coward but not evil, just human. So maybe people view the optimism as corny, or think Nolan is getting soft or sentimental, but I’d say, look at the film again, and see if there isn’t a fair amount of pain to temper but not overwhelm that optimism.
But there are just a few major points that I noticed a lot of the negative feedback centered on, and that’s what I’d like to address here:
The Cooper/Mann fight was stupid!
No. Simply put, this wasn’t supposed to be the kickass action sequence designed to get you out of your seat. This was the nadir of the film: the lowest and bleakest moment for humanity. The fight wasn’t supposed to be some choreographed, discuss at the water-cooler fight scene. It was a clumsy, ridiculous scuffle on barren tundra on a desolate planet with impossibly high stakes. The minute the two men really start going at each other, there is a sudden cut to a wide shot where Cooper and Mann are tussling and they are just a speck in this forbidding landscape. Humans fall back on their animal instincts when things get tough, and it’s incredibly depressing to see that dramatic wide shot and see these two men of science just hitting each other like toddlers when the fate of mankind is at stake. So no, it wasn’t an awesome, elbow your friend in the ribs, did you see that moment? But it was a dramatic and purely visual encapsulation of Mann’s entire ethos: the survival instinct is so strong that it blocks out the high ideals we humans are so proud of, and when push literally comes to shove, we forget all our fancy morals and just fight to survive no matter what or where we are.
Love saves everything? Give me a break!
This seems to be the thing nearly everyone who had a problem with Interstellar fixates on. I strongly believe that many people mask their confusion about the tesseract/Murph’s bookshelf scenes with misplaced anger/derision at the complexities of the mechanics of the tesseract. I would highly suggest reading the chapter discussing the tesseract from the “Science of Interstellar” book by Kip Thorne(an executive producer and main science advisor on the film, whose work on gravity and black holes formed the ‘ hard science’ basis for the film). But I would also highly advise anyone whose interest was piqued or really enjoyed this portion of the film in particular to read Rebecca Stead’s Newberry winning novel “When You Reach Me” which itself was inspired by Madeline L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time”, the granddaddy of tesseract stories.
But to address the anger, scoffing and mocking of ‘love’ in this film: let me just say I don’t think love is some magical anathema that just spontaneously solved everything, case closed.
People have stated that they were yanked out of the movie the minute Cooper passed into the black hole. Now, no one knows what exists beyond the event horizon of a black hole. Neil deGrasse Tyson is fond of discussing “spaghettification”-the process by which the extreme gravity of a black hole will stretch you out to infinitely thin strands of single atoms as you fall feet first into a black hole. In effect, he theorizes that you could see your body being stretched into spaghetti strands as you were sucked into a black hole.
Maybe. But Interstellar isn’t a treatise on black holes or astrophysics. It’s a science fiction film that uses accepted theories as a basis for a totally fictional story. So, it’s probably very unlikely Cooper would survive his descent into the black hole, but he does and that’s artistic license. Once he’s past the event horizon and falling towards the singularity, a bright white checkerboard pattern appears, which he falls into.
This is the tesseract, created by the five dimensional beings (i.e. future humans) to help Cooper communicate with Murph. So, it wasn’t ‘love’ that made the tesseract. The only way love comes into play during this entire sequence is that it is Murph’s love for her father compels her to go back to her childhood room and reclaim the watch, the watch that is tied to her last experience and memory of her father.
So the movie does not hinge on love somehow miraculously getting information to Murph, that’s gravity’s responsibility. Love is responsible however for making a woman in her mid-thirties look back at her childhood possessions and save one as a memento.
Now is that unbelievable? How many of us keep concert ticket stubs, childhood doodles, yearbooks, charm bracelets, etc to remember times past? Would it be so unbelievable that Murph would one day want to go back and take that watch, the last thing that her father, the man she loved so dearly it nearly broke her heart when he left her, and get it back just for safekeeping?
Why didn’t she take it earlier? She was given the watch when she was ten, and chucked it across the room as her father(from her point of view) abandoned her. If an object was tied to such a negative memory would you want to stare at it every day, or keep it at the bottom of a box? Murph didn’t throw it away, nor did Tom(it must be said in his favor-he must have known just how important that room and those moments she shared with her father must have been). She kept it, and the simple act of going back to get it, and really looking at are where love come into play on her side. The watch is ticking erratically from the very first moment she takes it out of the box, even before she has the realization that Cooper ‘was her ghost’, so it can be assumed that the watch was already tapping out the Morse code for many years prior.
For Cooper, love is not what creates the tesseract, but what allows the fifth dimensional beings to communicate with Murph. She in fact is they key to humanity’s survival, and Cooper is just a conduit to get information to her. The tesseract is made up of the infinite moments of Murph’s bedroom because the fifth dimensional beings believe Cooper is the best way to transmit information to Cooper. As Cooper says, “they have access to infinite time, but aren’t bound by it”. The fifth dimensional beings can’t find a specific moment in time, because to them, time loses all causality. They most likely can’t pinpoint a specific moment which will lead to a certain triggering event, since they are beyond linear time.
This whole concept of time, being outside of normal time perception is pretty heady stuff, and it’s kind of amazing to think that a movie this expensive and seemingly mainstream deals with some pretty weird stuff. I think that Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons covered this whole loopy time perception stuff so well with Watchmen, and the way Moore describes how Dr. Manhattan perceives time as happening all at once. I like to think the fifth dimensional beings are like an entire race of even more powerful Dr.Manhattans (at least in their grasp of time, and the perception of time).
But the main point is that ‘they’ know that Cooper understands his daughter better than anyone else, and so ‘they’ create this tesseract to allow him a way to find a moment in time to transmit (via gravity) the quantum data that will ‘solve gravity’.
Again, Kip Thorne did a good job of explaining the extrusions that make up Murph’s rooms in the tesseract-he also call them world tubes, but I think that Christopher Nolan was not too concerned with 100% of the audience understanding the exact mechanics of the room/tesseract. The key was that a daughter’s love for her father would lead her back to this one object (the watch) which would in turn lead to their salvation.
I’ve wondered about these scenes; are they too out there for the mainstream audience? Yes, probably. But I admire Nolan’s ambition and sheer confidence to include such a trippy sequence in this movie. It is his homage to the stargate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but I wouldn’t say he dumbed it down for a modern audience. Interstellar and 2001 are just two inherently different films. Kubrick was fiercely independent, and I don’t think he gave a damn if 2001 turned even a moderate profit(he probably would have been satisfied if just broke even, and didn’t prevent him from getting his next project financed). Well, that was 1968, and Interstellar is a massive film (budged at over $160 million), a coproduction between two major studios (Paramount and Warner Brothers) and led to rights of major properties shifting between studios( WB handed Paramount the rights to South Park and Friday the 13th for the chance to get on the Interstellar distribution deal). Nolan is an artist, but he’s not reckless. He knows that there is a huge amount of money involved, so he can’t just make his $160 million film and aim it at 2001: A Space Odyssey diehards. He has to aim at the entire globe, so if it seemed like Cooper and TARS were over explaining things in the tesseract, they probably were. Because if you had the responsibility of writing a film that would need to earn hundreds of millions of dollars just to break even, you might be tempted to have things be as clear as possible. But in the end, these scenes work because Matthew McConaughey’s performance is moving; his despair at finding himself trapped in this unending labyrinth of regret(imagine what those infinite moments of Murph crying look like to a father who pretty much abandoned his daughter) is evident. Conversely his joy at realizing that it was Murph that the one was meant to fix things all along is heartwarming.
So Cooper only loved his daughter? What the hell was Casey Affleck doing in this movie? Why don’t we even know the son’s name, but we hear MURPH like a million times?!
This really bothers me. I think it is incredibly clear the journey that Tom (younger version played by Timothee Chalamet; older Tom played by Casey Affleck) takes throughout the film.
The movie begins with Cooper awakening from a dream/memory of his aircraft crashing some years earlier. It is Murph who hears him and comes to check on him. Murph! Not Tom! Immediately, as an audience, we are keyed into the incredibly close relationship that Cooper has with his daughter. The next few scenes show Tom ribbing Murph, laughing at her belief in the ‘ghost’, making fun of her for getting in trouble at school and generally being an annoying big brother.
There isn’t a huge amount of screen time focusing on Cooper and Tom’s relationship, but it is still pretty clear how much Cooper loves his son. When they are driving to school and get the flat tire, Cooper tells Tom to fix the flat, but Tom asks how he’ll patch out on the road, to which Cooper tells him to figure it out and that “I’m not always going to be there for you”. Cooper treats his 15 son with respect and gives him the distance a teenager that age might want. Murph on the other hand is a ten year old girl, living with three men on a farm in the middle of acres and acres of corn on a dying planet. She would probably cling to her father. Obviously Tom was older than Murph when their mother died, so it’s not too difficult to see why Murph would rely more on her father for emotional support than her seemingly well adjusted teenage brother.
But this doesn’t mean that Cooper ignores his son. During the cornfield chase, he allows his son to drive the truck, and congratulates him for the skillful driving(and is probably grateful he didn’t drive them off a cliff).But if this still isn’t enough to prove that Cooper loves his son, then look at the conversation he has with the school principal about Tom’s test results. He is visibly outraged that his son won’t get the chance to go to college and get a better education. If a man didn’t love his child, he would just take the results in stride, or even more likely not even attend the conference in the first place. But Cooper does love Tom, and later during the baseball game, he checks with his son about the decision to study farming and encourages Tom, and says he’ll be a great farmer.
Though it does seem that Cooper is more distressed at leaving his daughter behind (as the advertising highlighted), it’s only because Murph (in a magnificent performance by Mackenzie Foy) is the more vulnerable child. Cooper understands it will hurt his daughter infinitely more when he leaves. She will effectively be an orphan, as will Tom, but a 10 year old girl who is getting into fights at school over science textbooks, and who believes her bookshelf is communicating with her probably needs a strong, comforting presence in her life more than a teenage boy who can already drive a truck and seems ready and willing to take over the farm.
Cooper’s love for Tom is again emphasized during the heart wrenching scene where he watches the 23 years of messages after the debacle on Miller’s planet. He is obviously distraught that he missed so much of his son’s life. When Tom (now aged two decades, and played by Casey Affleck) says that he’s going to let him go, Cooper begs his son not to, to hold onto the faith that those messages will reach him, that he’s alive, that he still loves and desperately wants to return to his family.
But Tom does make that decision to stop believing in the existence of his father, and I think the key to the way Casey Affleck plays the older version of Tom lies in John Lithgow’s portrayal of Donald. Donald is Cooper’s dead wife’s father, and he seems a bitter man, hardened by the decline of the world. He is realistic whereas Cooper is a dreamer, and it seems clear that he wouldn’t disagree too much with those ‘new revised’ editions of the textbooks that Murph’s teacher mentions. Donald is pragmatic, and blunt and probably just a bit too grumpy to make the most loving and supportive parental guardian one could imagine. He is dismissive of Cooper spending the night staring at the patterns the dust makes on the floor after the dust storm. Once Cooper leaves, Donald becomes the primary caretaker of Murph and Cooper. It’s pretty clear that Dr.Brand(Michael Caine) notices ‘a spark’ in Murph and takes her under his wing ,and she probably got a warmer grandfather figure who appreciated her love of science and exploration from him, while Tom would seemingly agree with Donald’s harsher worldview, and would mature into a tougher, more world weary man than if his father had raised him.
Casey Affleck plays Tom as an short tempered, possibly abusive husband and father who keeps working the land year after year, brushing off the failing crops as part of life, and waiting for better luck next year. He rolls his eyes at Murph(now older, played by Jessica Chastain) when she expresses discomfort at going to her old room, and is extremely annoyed at her persistent belief that their father will somehow return or save them.
I think it is entirely purposeful that Cooper is not reunited with both his children at the end of the film. This is a movie filled with optimism and hope for the ability for man to overcome impossible odds. Tom lost hope in his father, while Murph did not. Her unyielding belief in her father’s love led her to find the watch which held the key to solving gravity. Her faith was rewarded, while Tom’s dismissal of his father, and in fact, the ideals his father held so dear turned him into a bitter, angry and disappointed husk of a man. So it’s not that Cooper loved Murph more, it’s just that she didn’t lose faith in him. She waited her entire life for the chance to meet him again, while Tom lost faith in his mid thirties.
So he meets his daughter in the end? How stupid! How unrealistic! It’s such a stupid, corny ending!
No. A really stupid unrealistic ending to an otherwise pretty ok movie is the utterly idiotic reuniting of Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning and her wimpy brother at the end of War of the Worlds(2005), from Steven Spielberg. So if you want to throw Nolan under the bus for earning an emotionally moving ending, then you have to call out Spielberg for that unearned piece of sentimental drivel.
The stupid, corny, ending to Interstellar is this: Cooper somehow travels back in time/ through a rip in the space time continuum and is reunited with a thirty something Murph (played by Jessica Chastain). They then solve gravity, and enjoy the rest of their long lives together. Yuck.
Instead, the ending to Interstellar is incredibly bittersweet, and looked at from a certain angle, pretty damn depressing. Yes, Cooper gets rescued by scout ships and moved to Cooper Station. He wakes up and is surrounded by people born several generations after he left Earth. No one he knew or had contact with on Earth is alive besides Murph and Brand in the entire cosmos. Imagine that: waking up decades from now Rip Van Winkle style and knowing that every single person you’ll meet has lived an incredibly different existence from the one you knew. It would be pretty isolating and disconcerting.
Add to that, Cooper is led to his new home on Cooper Station, which is a replica of his old home. He looks around and you can see his discomfort. Wouldn’t it be pretty creepy to travel to a new place and find a museum of your home, with rooms roped off and talking heads on screens talking about how ‘life used to be’? Cooper has probably only physically been away from his home for only about 2 years(the trip from Earth to the wormhole near Saturn-spent in cryosleep), but it still must be incredibly uncomfortable to live in a building that is seen as cultural landmark by an entire culture.
So, not only is Cooper incredibly alone, and living in a mausoleum of a home, but the only person who has any notion of what he has gone through is not even a human, it’s TARS. Also don’t forget, that to everybody on Cooper Station, it’s not immediately clear that Cooper was even is a vital part to their salvation. They (as Murph says) believe that “she did it on her own”. To most people on Cooper Station, and presumably the other orbiting stations, Cooper is just one of the Lazarus mission survivors. How would he even begin to discuss his time in the tesseract without sounding like he perhaps spent a bit too much time out in the void of space? People don’t even like accepting those scenes, and that’s from the perspective of us watching a SCIENCE FICITON FILM let alone hearing about it from a farmer/engineer from the distant past?
Now onto the incredibly bittersweet part of the ending, which would nullify any notion of the film being corny if just accepted for what it is. Murph is transported to Cooper Station (the doctor says she’s been in cyrosleep for two years), and it takes two weeks to get to Cooper Station. To parse that tidbit of information out, and analyze its implications: Murph is considered the savior of humanity, so it’s clear she would be the recipient of the best medical care this new community has to offer. Privileged people today already get the best care and medicine money can buy, so just imagine how Murph must have been cared for. So it’s not a huge stretch to believe she lived to an advanced age. Next, she’s been in cryosleep for two years: she must have had such an unwavering belief that she would somehow be reunited with her father that she extended her already long life past its natural ending point. Her patience and faith paid off-she does reconnect with Cooper but immediately tells him she is dying. One can surmise that she was somehow just holding on to life in the hopes of seeing her father again, and can now peacefully be removed from whatever life-support systems/care that kept her alive.
The scene where Cooper and Murph are reunited at her deathbed is incredibly moving. I don’t find it overblown or corny, or trite, because there is an enormous amount of pain in the scene. Yes, there is a joy at seeing a father reunited with his beloved daughter, but how long does their reunion really last? A few minutes? A few hours? The way the scene is edited, it seems to only last for a few moments, just a few sentences really before Cooper leaves the room. Even if somehow Cooper and Murph were able to chat for a few hours, it will still be incredibly short amount of time for them to be together. Murph hasn’t seen her father for decades, while Cooper has missed out on an entire lifetime with his beloved daughter. A daughter who probably reminds him of his deceased wife(notice that Cooper wears his wedding ring the entire movie-a tribute to a wife who died years earlier), a daughter who must have suffered so much with feelings of despair, abandonment, hopelessness, betrayal, outrage.
He knows he can’t make up for her years of suffering, so Murph does an incredibly brave thing, and tells him to leave, and not watch her die. She says (in a stunning performance from Ellen Burstyn) “No parent should have to watch their child die”. She spares Cooper the misery of watching his daughter leave him, (their roles reversed). They part once again, but he is able to back out of the room, facing her the entire time(as opposed to his earlier leave taking, when he turned his back on her, abandoning her alone and weeping on that bed, surrounded by just her books). He now leaves the room, and sees her children and grandchildren enveloping her in warmth and love and safety. She has overcome the pain of his leaving her, and grown into a powerful, brave and empathic woman. He may still live with the regret of leaving his children on a dying Earth, but he knows that he made the right decision, since his whole voyage was essentially in service to getting Murph the information needed to ‘solve gravity’.
The soundtrack was overpowering!
Now this complaint really bothers me. I think the score by Hans Zimmer was breathtaking, and in the IMAX screening I attended, was mixed to perfection without drowning out any dialogue. I think the complaints about the sound mix are again people transposing confusion for nitpickiness. The scene that it seems like most people had trouble hearing/understanding was when Dr.Brand(Michael Caine) was on his deathbed. Yes, it may have been a bit trying to get every single word he said, but he was speaking with his last breath, and people, it’s Michael Caine who gives exactly no shits about who understands his accent and who doesn’t, I think he’s made that pretty clear over the past few decades.
And anyway, even if one didn’t catch every single syllable of what he said, Murph paraphrases the gist of the conversation a few minutes later when she sends the video message to Amelia Brand.
It was unrealistic! None of that could really happen!
This was a science fiction film. Yes, it used hard science and real facts and accepted and respected theories as a basis for the story, but at the end of the day Christopher Nolan and his collaborators were not pretending that this wasn’t a science fiction film. It’s also just a damn good story.
Film Frame of Mind 
