We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.
To say that I walked into Interstellar with the burden of context would be putting it mildly. This film, still Christopher Nolan’s longest movie, immediately followed on the heels of his two worst films in my opinion. But, trepidations be damned, I ponied up for my three-hour tour (with trailers added to the run time, of course) in full IMAX. And I suppose following, in particular, my very negative reaction to The Dark Knight Rises might have given this movie a boost. But I think the more instructive context to put this movie in is Inception.
Obviously, there are themes and patterns and tropes (some might even say tics) that run through Nolan’s films, but I think that Inception and Interstellar are two of the most similar movies in Nolan’s canon. They’re both high-concept sci-fi movies that burden their script with a lot of exposition. They’re both movies with large ensemble casts and pretty mind-blowing special effects. Probably most importantly, they’re both trying to pull off the exact same balancing act. They both want to be mindblowing awe-inspiring epics with a small, emotionally-compelling family story at their respective hearts.
And I feel like this is absolutely a minority opinion, but I think Interstellar succeeds in every way that Inception fails. I think Interstellar is an exhilarating return to form for Nolan and while it’s near the bottom on my list of great movies, I do still put it on that list. It’s not perfect, but it’s exceptionally excellent. It was how I felt in 2014 and it’s how I feel now with a rewatch under my belt.
A lot of it does have to do with that balancing act I mentioned above. I feel like this movie does deliver on the thrilling adventure, eye-popping visuals and mind-twisting journey that an epic needs; but I also feel that it’s a movie populated with real people with real emotions making real decisions in the midst of the epic story they find themselves in. The characters here really work for me. I feel like Inception and The Dark Knight Rises was an exercise in Nolan making his characters broader and broader while also making them shallower and shallower until you were left with either characters that didn’t feel real because there was nothing to them or characters that didn’t feel real because they were cartoons. But both the writing and the performances really deliver on the characters here. With an ensemble of characters this large, not everyone gets to be fully fleshed out, but the ensemble of actors bring even the smaller roles to life. John Lithgow, Michael Caine, Wes Bentley (an actor I usually dislike), Casey Affleck, Jessica Chastain and (back before I knew who he was) Timothee Chalamet all bring their characters to life even though they’re just supporting roles.
In terms of the bigger roles, I give special props to Anne Hathaway; I really disliked her performance in The Dark Knight Rises, but I think she’s really doing beautiful work here. Her character is one of Nolan’s best female characters, I think, a woman that carries the weight of the experiences she’s had in her life. Being a woman in her father’s world has made her rueful and uncertain and she communicates it with everything from her body language to her tone of voice. It’s a testament to both the writing and Hathaway’s performance that she’s able to be a scientist that gives the most earnest paean to love as the force that binds the universe together and yet the character isn’t underminded. Ellen Burstyn really knocks her brief appearance out of the park as well, unsurprisingly. And McConaughey is good as well; he does better than DiCaprio did in Inception at making us feel his emotional journey through the film. It occasionally slips into the kind of melodrama that DiCaprio indulged in, but for the most part, it’s more naturalistic and less forced. It’s has the easy charm that McConaughey basically brings to every role, but Nolan’s script pushes him in some interesting emotional directions and he nails a lot of them.
But, like I said, it delivers on the level of scale and scope as well. Nolan creates, in particular, three worlds that I find really compelling and fascinating. The first is the dying Earth where humanity struggles to survive in a harsh environment; I bought into that future reality in a big way and it has an incredible amount of atmosphere. I also love the shallow sea of Miller’s planet and, while the gigantic wave sequence might be a bit over the top, the film deals with the emotional fall-out of Brand’s decisions in a devastating way and it’s things like the silent shot of Doyle floating in the water, alone on an empty planet, that keep things on the scale of the human. Mann’s planet is also really gorgeous in a stark, haunting way with its frozen clouds and strange landscapes. I really like the character of Mann as well and Matt Damon is really fantastic in the part, making you feel both his pitiful brokenness and the moral loss he’s suffered over the years. I like Zimmer’s score a lot; it’s not perhaps top teir, but his usage of the organ is striking and powerful.
Anyway, are there problems? There are. I have to admit that the bookcase tesseract sequence is . . . um, well, it’s not bad, but neither does it have the transcendent emotional impact I suspect Nolan would like it to. That entire sequence kind of evokes more of a “well, that’s kinda clever,” and less of the emotional resolution I wish it had. At the end of the day, is it a bit too long? Maybe. I have to admit that I didn’t really feel the length of it the first time I saw it and I didn’t this time either. It strikes me as a very well-paced movie. The sound design thing is definitely a sporadic problem here. I understand the artistic decision of having natural sounds, like the giant wave, or the sounds of rockets be so loud that the characters are kind of shouting to be heard over them. When it’s two characters in a room on Earth and it’s the background score that’s too loud, that’s a little harder to justify.
The ending really knocks me out and, while, as I said, the whole tesseract sequence isn’t everything I wish it was, I walked out on a real high because of the way movie ends. I think it’s very smart and very satisfying to actually end on Brand and not Cooper. It’s still an optimistic ending, but with Cooper it would probably be too rousing; McConaughey feel-good, can-do attitude would probably make the ending feel too pat if it was his emotional beat we ended on. Instead it’s Brand’s emotional beat and so the hope feels more hard-won; she’s out there on the frontier and facing into the unknown, but there’s a sadness there that elevates the ending of the movie. It’s a heroic, hopeful ending, but there’s been a cost. I really do love this movie a lot; I was kind of afraid my rewatch might make the movie dip a bit in my estimation. But it really didn’t. It’s not a perfect movie, but I’ll stand by it: it is a great one. 4 stars.
tl;dr – sci-fi epic perfectly balances the scope and visuals of a grand adventure with the emotional beats of the characters; not perfect, but great, and a course correction for Nolan. 4 stars.