Epic science fiction is notoriously hard to get right, and the temptations of hysteria and sentimentality have sucked in even great film-makers with all the force of a black hole. For every Moon you get an Event Horizon, where characters “travel to a place beyond the Universe!” and clichés go to die.
2001: A Space Odyssey remains the touchstone for directors grappling with deep space and The Big Questions. It is an influence Christopher Nolan readily admits for Interstellar and his own pic draws heavily on Stanley Kubrick‘s 1968 classic.
Unfortunately for Nolan, while he offers some memorable 70mm visuals, his screenplay creaks at its own self-importance, buckling under the sheer weight of duff exposition and on-the-nose dialogue like, “You were the best pilot we ever had!”
The tone is set early when Matthew McConaughey’s astronaut, Cooper, drawls “This world’s a treasure and it’s been telling us to leave for a while now.” Indeed, the best moment of Interstellar arrives when a character has a monologue rudely interrupted; the several worst moments are when others get to the end of their speeches.
Nolan’s eighth feature does not suffer for lack of ambition over its 166 minutes. Hans Zimmer’s score booms and clangs us through some big topics, from relativity and space travel to humanity’s ultimate fate, from Darwinian impulses to the nature of black holes and spacetime.
I’d say that that the central problem – without spoilers – is with the balance between science and what Nolan himself calls ‘entertaining speculation.’ Yet Interstellar’s pre-billing was all about the science, with theoretical physicist Kip Thorne the man who initiated the project and retained as a special adviser. Yet a pivotal moment hinges on the idea that ‘Love is the one thing that transcends time and space’.
If you have watched genre film or television much in the last 30 years, particularly anything with wormholes or time-travel, then you should be able to figure out the “big reveal” almost immediately; a device that’s as obvious as it is profoundly goofy. That’s Relativity Folks!
In 2001, we had a story based on scientific predictions from Arthur C. Clarke but which also featured elements of a quasi-religion. The difference there was that we never had characters trying to explain the monoliths or the helter-skelter journey into the cosmos. It was left as enigma. With Interstellar, the screenplay gives us those explanations, and with each mention of “quantum data” and the like, the audience are not thinking about the majesty of it all but that things have started to seem awfully like a Doctor Who episode, writ large.
It would also be good to find out what happened to the law of gravity being inverse to distance, a model that predicts how any human placed near the ‘horizon of a black hole would be reduced to spaghetti!
Comparisons are drawn naturally to Contact, which also had Kip Thorne and Mathew McConaughey in its credits and which tackled both the problem of space travel in a vast universe and higher intelligences. Bob Zemeckis’ film is less hysterical, it talks to you rather than honking, but it must be said, I also found that picture less of a thrill ride.
And there’s the rub. This is another one of Nolan’s big, bold blockbusters, fitted out with intelligent design. If it doesn’t hit the heights of Inception, or The Dark Knight, it is certainly no Transformers: Age of the Bang Bang. When it is good, Interstellar is very good – for example, few directors know how to use the scale of IMAX like Nolan. On the pure level of spectacle, it delivers several bits worthy of a ticket, including a colossal sequence where the spacecraft is a tiny spinning top in the middle of a vast tableau.
Hype now works against Nolan. His projects are built up by eager fans and critics alike to such an extent that almost all roads lead to a five-star rating and reams of adulation. This is simply not justified in the case of Interstellar, a long film of intermittent brilliance, but also possessed of the worst screenplay that Chris Nolan has yet taken into production.
Interstellar opens wide across the US and UK this Friday and is playing in previews now.