Suck me into a wormhole and spit out the bottom line, so here it is: Can the much-hyped Interstellar match the awe of 2001: A Space Odyssey? Can the new Christopher Nolan's film surpass the metaphysical wonder of Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris?
A scene from Interstellar.
To both: no.
A meek no or a cynical no? Maybe a moderate yet solid no.
True to form, Nolan's film will nudge his fans into the core of delectable bafflement and science-bending construct (What happens inside the wormhole? What does it look like when you fold time?). And the spectacle — the dust-covered Midwest, the extraterrestrial calamity, the view of a cosmic maelstrom and the black hole — presents a bold vision from the pensive professor of the Hollywood factory.
But a sense of genuine wonder? A feeling of floating out of the theatre because life is more than we believe it is and because the cosmic is the spiritual and vice versa — which is how we feel after watching Kubrick's Space Odyssey, Tarkovsky's Solaris or, to a lesser extent, Spielberg's Close Encounters Of The Third Kind? Glance at the story from The New York Times on the opposite page. Maybe Interstellar can sneak onto last place on the list — or at most somewhere around the 10th. To elevate it anywhere near a classic is rash and unsupported by Earthly gravity.
Going cerebral while grinding the emotional is Nolan's trademark. His high seriousness of tone (often aided by the presence of Michael Caine) is massaged on the most abstract themes: the meaning of memory in Memento, the layers of dreams in Inception and the oceanic, black, beauty of the unknown — deep space — in Interstellar. Lathered on them, sometimes, is a Shakespearean labyrinth of anxieties, as in The Dark Knight.
Other times it's just that mushy thing called love. Inception is all haywire, a mille-fueille of consciousness, but it's Leonardo DiCaprio's and Marion Cotillard's love that acts as the glue. Interstellar, too, is a time-space-dimension-astrophysical epic adventure, in which oddly and maudlinly enough, love is the greatest gravitational pull.
I heard that reviewers in the US were ordered not to reveal (and made to sign a form) too much of what happens, including the names of some of the cast members. Here, we didn't have to sign anything, a mark either of our reputable discretion or total insignificance. Anyway, in a not-too-distant future, when Earth is nearly spent, dust covers everything and the "caretaker population" — at least in the US — farms corn to feed the dwindling human race. Matthew McConaughey plays Cooper, an ex-pilot/engineer who's reduced to an agricultural existence resembling a scene from The Grapes Of Wrath, frustrated that his abilities mean nothing in a dying world.
Cooper has a son, Tom (who grows up to be played by Casey Affleck), and Murph (first the brilliant Mackenzie Foy and later Jessica Chastain). When Cooper deciphers a mysterious binary code on his daughter's bedroom floor — this is just one of the geek-speak deluges that messes with you throughout the film — he joins the now-clandestine Nasa, led by Dr Brand (Michael Caine as the wise old man).
Soon Cooper and Brand's daughter Amelia (Anne Hathaway) are blasted off into space, past the rings of Saturn and into the warp of a time-bending wormhole. Their mission is to search for a habitable planet that will be mankind's new home. Along the way, Cooper, Amelia and a few other cosmonauts, as well as their sarcastic robot, encounter mega-tsunamis, a frozen planet of toxic ammonia, a gargantuan black hole with a sizzling event horizon and an increasing sense of despair. They speak in heavy Nasa jargon, and their lengthy explanations of astrophysics, the malleable concept of time, the relativity aftermath and the unsolvable equation of gravity (which can travel through dimensions, we're told) either makes you feel smart, if you half-understand it, or distracts you from the thrust of the story, especially when you realise that this geeky stuff hardly matters when the riddle can be solved with the classic, dependable, never-outdated wild card of emotion and love.
Cooper's anxiety isn't about finding a new interstellar home, but coming back to his daughter, who nurses a grudge against him for leaving her on what seems to be a suicide mission. Yes, there's even a long discussion on the physics of love, and how that inexplicable demon could even trump science in our final survivalist struggle.
The Nolans (Christopher directs an co-wrote the script with brother Jonathan) throw everything into the cauldron: a space adventure, a suspenseful thriller and a domestic melodrama that aims for nothing less than a weepy climax. Interstellar is stunning, but it's also frustrating.
This is a manufactured epic wrought in the complex mould that combines Hollywood dazzle with deep-thinking sci-fi metaphysics — and as these two layers pile up, the film begins to feel bloated. At certain points, Hans Zimmer's organ-heavy score looks to imitate the cosmic waltz of Space Odyssey, though our feet aren't actually lifted off the ground this time.
If we feel wowed — and we sometimes do — it's not because the film pushes our perception beyond our existential limits, like Space Odyssey or Solaris did, but because it's such a well-made sci-fi package, one that makes sure its heart throbs in the right places.
Space is a void. It's the great abstract, and thus a great cinematic vehicle. But Interstellar, for all its 160-minutes, is too literal-minded, too conspicuous to leave us with a sense of doubt and apprehension.
As for the great unknown, maybe it's best to keep us partly shadowed in the dark of the black hole, instead basked in all five dimensions (or just four?) of the glorious light of love.