The best thing anyone can do to increase your enjoyment of a film is to dampen your expectations. Hype will fuck up your enjoyment of… anything. So, there is a certain amount of irony with me writing this piece. Everyone I spoke to in regards to Interstellar said it was another Nolan disappointment. For someone who didn’t care for Insomnia and felt damn near offended by Inception, but was still a fan of Nolan, this was heartbreaking. Also, look around on the internet, the critics didn’t fawn over Interstellar either – so I gave it a miss in the cinema. When you have a newish baby, you can’t just upsticks and go spend £20 on a film unless it’s really worth it (I digress).
I think Nolan gets a bad rap for being a cold director with no heart – Memento and the Prestige both had deep emotional cores. I think people have forgotten that Nolan had that soppy side to him and let his time with the Batman films and Inception fool them. Interstellar is ALL heart. Yes, it’s a film about space and science that I don’t understand, but first and foremost this film is about Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper and his daughter Murph. As a father to a stubborn daughter myself, I latched on to this hook and found Cooper’s desperation to save his family and keep his promise to his daughter heartbreaking, gripping and fascinating to watch.
Man, this film got me.
A quick summary: Our chickens have come home to roost – earth is done for. It is quickly turning into a ball of dust. The government is lying to its citizens about all sorts of stuff, including the moon landing. The only way to save humans is to find a planet to call home… basically Battlestar Galactica without the Cylons. Anyway, a wormhole thingy has conveniently appeared within our reach and it allows us to visit other galaxies. Now apparently Neil DeGrasse Tyson says the science is on point, so that is good enough for me.
The film is merciless in pushing the message that although we humans can do wondrous things, we cannot beat time. To watch Cooper desperately try to get back to his family and failing is, again, heartbreaking. To watch him react to missing important events back home, the births of grandchildren, the deaths of family members – it is… heartbreaking. Over and over again, time keeps beating Cooper. An hour spent in a foreign plant could amount to a decade in the ship just orbiting above the same planet and two decades back home on earth. That thought is truly terrifying. Time is a genuinely terrifying villain.
I understand why people didn’t like this film, there are elements near the end that could be seen as silly, but at that point I was completely sold, so it didn’t bother me that much. And the film had me watching quantum physics and astrophysics documentaries like I knew what the hell anyone was talking about. I was looking for the answer to the question of: What is the plan? If the world goes to shit, like it does in this film, what then? Ultimately, we humans are selfish and until the problem is facing us head on I don’t think we are going to prioritize space exploration like we should.
And that is the biggest compliment I can give to this film, it has me asking questions that I have never posed before – like ever. I have never been tickled by physics. I have watched numerous films and television shows that have taken place in space, but none have made me look up into the night sky in wonder like Interstellar.
This was taken from my blog, Chocolate Films.
