Interstellar (Paramount, Warner Bros., Legendary Pictures, Syncopy, Lynda Obst Productions, 2014)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, September 13) I showed my husband Charles a Blu-Ray disc of the 2014 science-fiction movie Interstellar, produced and directed by Christopher Nolan, who also co-wrote the script with his brother Jonathan. I got interested in this movie in an unusual way: on August 5 Charles and I had attended one of the Monday night summer organ concerts in Balboa Park, an event billed as “Music in the Movies” (https://musicmagg.blogspot.com/2023/08/martin-ellis-delivers-goods-in-movie.html) and featuring organist Martin Ellis. In addition to the predictable selections from famous, well-known movies like Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., Jurassic Park and Frozen, Ellis played a surprisingly haunting seven-minute medley of themes from Interstellar, composed by Hans Zimmer. I’ve long dismissed the “room man” (I’ve given him that nickname because “Zimmer” is the German word for “room”) as a competent, unexceptional hack, so I was startled when Ellis played some of the Interstellar score and it turned out to be rich, haunting, beautiful music quite a lot more complicated than I’d have expected from Zimmer and fully worthy of a place on a symphonic concert program. This morning I got out my recording of the concert and played through the Interstellar excerpt, prefaced by Ellis saying he thought the music would work on the organ – no surprise there because Zimmer had included a significant organ part in his orchestration. The next morning after the Ellis concert I ordered the Blu-Ray disc of Interstellar from Amazon.com, but with one thing and another it didn’t arrive until August 27 and because it was a pretty long movie (2 hours and 49 minutes) we didn’t get around to watching it until last night.

I was a bit anxious about whether I’d like the movie because of Christopher Nolan’s involvement, but I needn’t have worried: this time Nolan blessedly kept his penchant for ambiguity under control and made a quite compelling science-fiction thriller. It’s set on a near-future dystopian Earth in which food crop after food crop has been destroyed by a blight that has killed off wheat and okra (described by Charles as a particularly slimy and ill-tasting vegetable) and is threatening the last food crop humans have left, corn. Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is living on a farm in the Midwest with his two children, son Tom (the young Timothée Chalamet) and daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy). The various pestilences that have both figuratively and literally burned out almost all food crops (the literal comes from the farmers’ decision to burn the dead plants that were supposed to generate edible produce but didn’t because of the blight) have also created giant dust storms. (According to the closing credits, Christopher and Jonathan Nolan sought advice from Ken Burns and his collaborators on the PBS documentary about the real Dust Bowls in the Midwest in the 1930’s to make sure he depicted them accurately.) The dust clouds are so severe that Cooper’s father-in-law Donald (John Lithgow), who’s still living with them, warns them that whenever they set the table, the plates should go upside-down so they don’t accumulate dust that will render them unusable. The blight and the resulting collapse of civilization has also cut off employment opportunities; Cooper himself in the “before” time had been a pilot and an engineer with the Air Force and his son Tom wants to go to college to train for those jobs, but those jobs no longer exist. In fact, the current U.S. government has decided as part of their ideology to deny that humans ever landed on the moon; the official texts say that the U.S. just faked having done moon landings to bankrupt the Russians into spending more money on space exploration than they could afford so the U.S. would win the Cold War. When Murph (as she’s inevitably nicknamed) brings one of Cooper’s old textbooks to school and offers it as authority that humans once did land on the moon, she gets into a fistfight and is suspended from school.

Murph has been getting signals from some sort of outside intelligence – though we don’t learn until the end of the movie whether it’s extraterrestrial or supernatural – that turn out to be a message in Morse code directing her and her father to a set of coordinates that turns out to be the location of the last, super-secret base of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). This installation is run by Professor Brand (Michael Caine) and it’s discovered a worm hole in the vicinity of Earth through which a spaceship could travel to a planet in another galaxy (hence the film’s title) to which the earth’s surviving human population could be relocated, since if it stays on earth the human species is doomed. Since Cooper has piloting experience, he’s drafted to lead the next mission through the worm hole to find a potentially habitable (to humans) planet in the next galaxy over. Among the members of his crew is Brand’s daughter (Anne Hathaway), along with a Black crew member and a mobile robot named TARS (voiced by Bill Irwin). They make it to a potentially habitable planet on which they were preceded by Mann (Matt Damon), only Mann and Cooper end up having a fight during which Mann deliberately cracks the visor of Cooper’s space helmet so he’ll be exposed to the ammonia-rich air of the planet and will die. The crew back on Earth had considered this planet as a possible second home for the human race because the theory was the surface air was a normal nitrogen-oxygen mix without the heavy-duty ammonia concentration that made the upper atmosphere toxic, but it turns out that the entire planet’s atmosphere is ammonia-laden and unbreathable by humans. Mann wrecks the “Endurance” ship that’s supposed to take them to the next candidate planet, where Brand’s boyfriend Edwards ended up, and Cooper coldly jettisons Brand’s capsule along with TARS to reduce the ship’s weight. His idea is to get close enough to the giant black hole “Gargantua” to slingshot over to the next planet, but it turns out he doesn’t have to because he ends up in a room in the fifth dimension through which he can communicate to his young daughter Murph on earth – who in the meantime has grown up to be a physicist and to be played by Jessica Chastain.

Cooper is able to communicate to his daughter the data needed to establish earth’s connection to the black hole and use gravity as the energy force to evacuate surviving humanity to its new home – and ultimately Cooper is reunited with his daughter, even though by now she’s an old woman and is played by Ellen Burstyn. The gag of differential aging of the principals in a science-fiction story, inspired by and justified with Einstein’s general theory of relativity, is at least as old as the 1930 science-fiction musical film Just Imagine (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2015/07/just-imagine-fox-film-1930.html), in which time-traveling Swedish comedian El Brendel, who lost consciousness in 1930 and came to in 1980, meets a doddering old man who turns out to be his son. In the dialogue for Interstellar Cooper is repeatedly warned by the NASA scientists that time will go by much differently for him than it will for the people he leaves behind on earth, which is how he remains visibly the same age throughout while his kids had to be played by a succession of different actors (Timothée Chalamet grows up to be Casey Affleck, which strains credibility more than a bit), but it’s still a shock when Cooper meets his daughter in the hospital where she’s a doddering old woman facing death – though she’s also acclaimed as the savior of humanity and the base they’re on is named after her.

I’ve long thought of Christopher Nolan as the filmmaking equivalent of the little girl with the curl: when he’s good (The Dark Knight Rises and Dunkirk) he’s very, very good and when he’s bad (his first two Batman films, Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, along with Inception) he’s horrid. Here he’s very, very good, telling his story linearly and mostly avoiding the incredible surprises he’s often put into his scripts (though Charles and I are still trying to figure out what dramatic purpose was served by an explosion on the surface of the ammonia planet that takes out half of the earth people’s encampment there). Interstellar is an amazing movie, quite well done in the modern-day dystopian sci-fi manner, and probably the most angst-ridden science-fiction movie since the Russian Solaris directed by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1976. Through much of the movie Cooper is torn by guilt over abruptly abandoning his family on earth and not telling them where he was going or what he was doing, and the pangs of family separation hang heavily over this movie and make it far more than just a space opera with a modishly modern-day depressing subtext. Certainly Interstellar makes me even more curious than I was before to see Nolan's current movie, Oppenheimer.