Arts & Events

What a preposterous, prolonged, pretentious pile-up of portentous poppycock! Interstellar, Christopher Nolan's latest movie, is visually spellbinding, resolutely inconsistent, exasperatingly illogical, and ultimately unsatisfying. Here is the plot in an astronautshell: The Earth is a goner but a heroic pilot and Intergalactic Escape Hatch will save humanity. Wormholes and technology to the rescue!  

Wired magazine offers the following synopsis: "The story . . . is set in a dystopian near future when crops have failed and humanity is on the verge of extinction. A former astronaut gets recruited for one last flight, a desperate attempt to reach other star systems where humans can once again thrive." 

The basic premise of Nolan's three-hour enterprise is so disturbing that it could give rise to a new term: misterranic ("Earth-hating")—a film based on the unsettling premise that Terra, planet Earth, deserves to be a target for ridicule. 

Here are a few of the misterranic quotes taken from the film and its attendant publicity posters: 

"Mankind was born on the Earth. We were never meant to die here." 

"This world's a tragedy. It's been telling us to leave for a while." 

"Your daughter's generation will be the last to survive on Earth." 

"We've forgotten who we are: explorers, pioneers—not caretakers." 

"We're not meant to save the world. We're meant to leave it." 

"We used to look up at the stars. Now we look down at the dirt." 

"We'll find a way. We always have." 

"We are explorers. It's in our blood." 

"We're still pioneers. We've barely begun."  

"Our greatest accomplishments cannot be behind us for our destiny lies above us." 

"Mankind's next step will be our greatest." 

"Empathy rarely extends beyond our line of sight." 

In the director's memorable 2000 masterpiece, Memento, much of the film's intellectual pleasure derives from the retrospective untangling of an intricate time-line entwined in an ingenious plot. In Momento's wormhole of amnesia and recollection, the maelstroms of dismembered memories all tie together—eventually. It's a jigsaw puzzle where—with time, effort, and due diligence—everything all fits together. 

With Interstellar, however, viewers may stumble away from the experience feeling the same kind of frustration that accompanies an attempt to assemble a piece of living room furniture purchased from IKEA. 

Warning: Spoiler Alerts  

Matthew McConaughey stars as a Gary-Cooper-like former NASA space pilot named, well, "Cooper." His ten-year-old daughter, Murphy, is a strong-willed math prodigy who insists her upstairs bedroom is haunted by a poltergeist. Why? Because one entire wall of Murph's bedroom is filled with a floor-to-ceiling array of books and, every now and then, a book or two will mysteriously pop off the shelves and crash to the floor. In her notebook, Murph sketches patterns of the spaces created by the displaced books. Her notes resemble binary code. 

Cooper, who is trying to cut it as a corn farmer in a world where every other crop has failed and the days of corn (and all Earthly farming) are numbered, sees nothing in his future but the looming clouds of apocalyptic dust storms. Until, that is, he stares into Murph's sketchbook. 

"Binary codes!" he exclaims, "These are coordinates!" 

Grabbing a handy map, Cooper uses the coded coordinates to draw a circle around the location in the middle of nowhere and sets out with in the middle of the night to discover what lies at the end of the encrypted poltergram. 

What he discovers is a hidden underground NASA rocket base. By an amazing coincidence, it's being run by one of Cooper's old buds from NASA, Professor Brand (Michael Caine). Why is the base hidden in the middle of nowhere? Because the government is trying to hide evidence of a budget-busting operation that the public believes was shut down years ago. (As if a rocket launch is something that could be hidden from public view.) For some reason, teachers at Murph's school are now instructing their pupils that there never was a space program and the US landing on the moon was a staged hoax designed to trick the Russians into bankrupting themselves by building competing space rockets! 

Security forces at the hidden NASA base naturally want to know how Cooper and Murph managed to find thieir secret operation. Dad and daughter are at a loss. They mumble something about gravitational force fields. Fortunately (not to mention, improbably) NASA just happens to have interstellar rocket sitting on its launch pad in the next room, raring to go. All they need is a pilot. Brand kicks the plot along by telling Cooper (and the audience): "You were the best pilot we ever had. Get out there and save the world." 

(We now interrupt this review for a consistency question. If Prof. Brand needed a pilot and he knew Cooper was "the best," why didn't he try to reach Cooper with a phone or email? Instead, Brand and NASA sit around and wait for Cooper's daughter to provide her father with an encrypted message that could only be divined by tracing the pattern of missing books and studying lines of sand piled on the bedroom floor.) 

One thing is certain: Cooper must be "the best pilot" NASA ever had because Nolan shows him hopping into the commander's seat and taking off without any briefing on the mission and no training in the operation of a never-before-flown spacecraft. 

Cooper has signed up for what could be a one-way mission (There is a Plan A and a Plan B.) Under one of the plans, the astronauts save the human race by populating a barren (but human-friendly) planet with a human community re-created from several metal barrels filled with fertilized human eggs cryogenically frozen to survive years of space travel. 

(Consistency question: It is unexplained how the astronauts might carry these thousands of frozen ovum to conception since the brave quartet that crews the mission includes only one woman—and Anne Hathaway's character, Amelia Brand (she's the professor's daughter), seems incapable of maintaining much of a romantic interest, let alone serving as a literal Earth Mother, charged with deploying the mission's only available womb to repopulate an entire surrogate planet.) 

The fifth member of the interstellar crew is a computerized robot—one of the most poorly conceived, unconvincing and uncharismatic machines ever to appear in a sci-fi flick. The robot, CASE, is a thick, walking slab with a voice so unremarkable that it is often difficult to distinguish when it is a crewmember speaking or whether it is the robot. The only sure way to determine that it is the robot speaking is the screen that serves as the robot's face. It resembles the screen on 1982 Commodore 64 home computer—a blank square that fills up with typed white letters whenever the robot needs to say something. (But wait! There's really no need to type the message on the screen because it has already been spoken!) 

Somehow the same inexplicable but plot-handy force that told Cooper to hone in on NASA's hidden space-cave (a force referred to throughout as 'They" or "Them") also has revealed to NASA the existence of a wormhole that makes it possible for rockets to take a shortcut through intergalactic space and explore 12 potential replacement planets on the flipside of the known galaxy. 

Our daring astronauts blast off on their mission with full knowledge that—as they travel in close proximity to the black hole—time will be distorted by gravity and they will age slower than the families they left behind on Earth. 

Even deep in space, a single one-hour exploratory mission on the surface of a watery planet will register as decades for the single astronaut left behind on the mother ship. So, when the expeditionary team returns to the mother-craft, their colleague greets them as an old man. 

The time-shift angle plays out to great emotional advantage when Cooper watches a series of long-delayed recorded messages sent by his children back on Earth. Cooper sobs as he watches his children age before his eyes, from one message to the next. 

Once through the wormhole, adventures on a prospective Brave New Planet ensue. Unfortunately, the chosen planet turns out to be cold and inhospitable, owing to an unexpected betrayal by a previous astronaut. At this point, Nolan inserts a completely unnecessary 20-minute subplot involving an explorer named Dr. Mann (an uncredited Matt Damon in a compelling, villainous cameo). If nothing else, the subplot allows the audience to watch two space-suited astronauts battle one another mano-a-mano over the surface of a semi-frozen planet. 

There is an explosion (always a good way to kick the plot along): The return to Earth is endangered. Cooper makes a noble gesture that seems suicidal. He plunges toward his doom inside the black hole but, just as his spaceship disintegrates around him, he is rescued by an array of Hollywood special effects. Surrounded by flashing CGI lights and calamitous sound effects, Cooper finds himself drifting in space. Suddenly, without explanation, he begins to plunge down a Cosmic Elevator Shaft until he comes to rest in a fifth-dimensional viewing gallery that allows him to peer into his ten-year-old daughter's bedroom. Caught behind the "haunted" cryptographic bookshelf, Cooper tries to get Murph's attention. (Actually, thanks to the simultaneity of the relativistic time-gravitational continuum, there are now two Murph's: the ten-year-old version and a 23-year-old version. Both show up in the bedroom as Cooper bangs and shouts only inches away—um, relatively speaking.) 

Is Cooper banging his fists in hopes of gaining Murph's attention by dislodging some books? (Cool revelation: That would mean that Murph's "poltergeist" was actually her father reaching out from another dimension!) Dislodging some books could produce a "binary declaration" that would signal Coop's presence and perhaps make it possible for Murph to decode the message and free Cooper to leap through the confines of his multi-dimensional clothes closet and throw himself into her arms. This really appears as a possibility, since Nolan shows us a close-up of several volumes of Murph's books being jostled from their position by Cooper's hammering fists. But no…. 

You can forget all about that binary-code-hidden-in-the-bookshelves plot device. For some reason, the 23-year-old version of Murph now intuits that it is not the bookshelf that is the key to her father's whereabouts, but the wristwatch that he gave her on the night of his departure for space. Plucking the wristwatch from its perch on the enchanted bookshelf, Murph notices that the secondhand is moving erratically, jumping forward and backwards abruptly. Being a math prodigy, she quickly concludes that the secondhand is clicking out messages in Morse code! Nolan fails to show us how Cooper, on his side of the dimensional wall, manages to pull off this tick-tocky magic trick. 

Armed with this new information, Murph hops in the family pick up and drives all night to the hidden NASA bunker (where she is now employed as an assistant to Professor Brand). Rushing into what looks like high school science classroom, Murph approaches a blackboard—a frikin' 20^th century blackboard!—covered with portentous-looking equations. She swipes a wet cloth over the blackboard and begins scrolling a new line of notations. 

By the next morning—algebra-cadabra!—her work at the chalkboard done, Murph is seen charging down NASA's corridors with a fistful of paper printouts that she starts throwing into the air while crowing that she has made a major discovery. 

In the meantime, Cooper has been inexplicably released from his fifth-dimensional chamber of horrors and deposited alone back in space—inexplicably orbiting somewhere in the vicinity of Saturn. 

Fortunately for Cooper, "Murphy's Law," (or whatever it was that his daughter churned out on those flying scraps of paper) has somehow alerted NASA to the location of Cooper's orbiting body. Coordinates! Again! 

As a result we see, in the following order: (1) A close-up of Cooper's somnolent face, eyes closed as he circles in lonesome orbit and (2) A close-up of Cooper's face as he wakes safe and sound in a hospital bed where a smiling doctor tells him (and I quote): "You've had a close call." 

Cooper has landed in a hospital bed at "Cooper Station," a colony of refugee humans surviving inside a small artificial planetoid floating near the rings of Saturn. 

Cooper's reunion with his daughter is scripted to be Poignant Plus. Although Cooper still appears to be in his 30s, he is pointedly reminded that he is actually 120 in Earth-years before he is invited to visit his daughter, who has been shipped in for a visit. Murph appears on her deathbed, outfitted with gray hair, wrinkles and a breathing tube. Three generations of watchful relatives move aside as Cooper approaches and kneels at Murph's side. They share an exchange of emotional pleasantries that ends when Murph observes: "No parent should have to watch their child die." So, instead of staying at his daughter's side in the final moments of her life, Cooper takes this as an invitation to leave. The rest of the relatives remain, encircling the bed and hiding Murph from view as she prepares for her own one-way interstellar journey. 

And what happens with planet Earth? Danged if I know. The last we see of it, a grown-up Murph is hugging her brother and celebrating the discovery that her dad's watch has been sending messages in Morse code. Her brother, meanwhile, is presiding over the mass torching of the family's doomed corn crops. 

The best I can determine is that life on Planet Earth ceased to exist and the only thing left of the human community is the outpost of solitary survivors inhabiting Cooper Station. 

There is no explanation as to how Cooper Station survives—how it sources its food, where it obtains its energy—but everyone looks well dressed, well fed and pleased with himself or herself. This ersatz Earth also happens to have a thriving manufacturing base that mainly turns out single-person spacecraft. Which is convenient, because one member of Cooper's doomed crew, Amelia Brand, is still wasting away, abandoned and alone on an empty planet (conveniently one with breathable atmosphere) and Cooper seems to be the only one in the film who is aware of her predicament. Grabbing a space helmet and a bag of snacks, Coop hotwires a rocket (the gas tank is conveniently topped off for a long trip through a wormhole) and jets off—presumably to save the spaced-out damsel. 

And that, I swear, is how the opus ends. 

Please write me if you've got a clearer idea on what this film was all about. 

Bonus Review: More Spoilers! 

Here is a companion review from Chris Stuckmann, a self-described fan who has watched Interstellar three times.