‘Interstellar’ dazzles with huge ideas
Print Edition
SINCE his breakthrough with the backward-running “Memento,” Christopher Nolan has made a plaything of time. In “Interstellar,” he slips into its very fabric, shaping its flows and exploding its particles. It’s an absurd endeavor — and one of the decade’s most sublime movies.
As our chief large-canvas illusionist, Nolan’s kaleidoscope puzzles have often dazzled more than they have moved, prizing brilliant, hocus-pocus architecture over emotional interiors. But a celestial warmth shines through “Interstellar,” which is, at heart, a father-daughter tale spun across a cosmic tapestry.
There is turbulence along the way. “Interstellar” is overly explanatory about its physics, its dialogue can be clunky and you may want to send composer Hans Zimmer’s relentless organ into deep space. But if you take these for blips rather than black holes, the majesty of “Interstellar” is something to behold.
The film opens in the near future where a new kind of Dust Bowl, one called “the blight,” brings crop-killing storms of dust upon the Midwest farm of engineer-turned-farmer Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) and his two children, 10-year-old Murph (Mackenzie Foy) and the 15-year-old budding farmer Tom (Timothee Chalamet). In the imperiled climate, space exploration is viewed as part of the “excess” of the 20th century. Cooper, a former NASA pilot, still believes in science’s capacity for greatness.
Cooper’s curiosity brings him to a secret NASA lair. Large-scale dreaming has gone underground. They enlist him to pilot a desperate mission through a wormhole to follow an earlier expedition that may have found planets capable of hosting human life.
Much discussion of gravity and relativity follows, as Nolan tries valiantly to place his quasi-plausible sci-fi tale within the realm of mathematics and science. “Interstellar” is a trip, for sure, but it’s not a supernatural one. There will be no aliens poking forth from bellies or monument-blasting battles with extraterrestrials; it’s just about us humans.
The journey means Cooper will, under the best of circumstances, be gone for years. The parting from Murph, who resents the abandonment, is wrenching. He’s a dutiful, driven father stepping out to work, only in another galaxy.
What happens when the spaceship, Endurance, moves past Saturn and passes through the wormhole? For starters, Nolan and his cinematographer, Hoyte Van Hoytema, conjure beautiful galactic imagery, contorting space and, eventually, dimensions.
But what he’s really doing is dropping countless big ideas — science, survival, exploration, love — into a cosmic blender, and seeing what keeps its meaning out there in the heavenly abyss. Nolan juggles the philosophical questions in an often dazzling, occasionally frustratingly incomplete way.
However, under extreme gravitational forces, the core of “Interstellar” holds.
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