OVP: Interstellar (2014)

Film: Interstellar (2014)
Stars: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Michael Caine, Bill Irwin, Casey Affleck, Ellen Burstyn, John Lithgow, and one more major star that is a huge surprise cameo, so we'll only mention him after the spoilers
Director: Christopher Nolan
Oscar History: 5 nominations/1 win (Best Original Score, Production Design, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, Visual Effects*)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Oh Christopher Nolan, he of the fanboy films and the larger-than-life productions.  There's really no other director working today who can rival Nolan in terms of gargantuan scale and divisiveness across the entire internet.  Spielberg makes too many historical epics to be included anymore, Scorsese generally gets too many films like Hugo to interrupt the random and controversial Wolf of Wall Streets, and J.J. Abrams always seems to be a producer, not a director.  Nolan combines incredible budget frequently with something interesting to say, and as a result, we get something truly worthy of our discussion.  And love it or hate it, and I managed to do both, Interstellar is definitely worthy of our discussion.

(Spoilers Ahead-and I'm not kidding here, I go into everything so see the movie beforehand if you're hoping to) The film starts in a similar fashion to where you expected in the trailers.  The movie, taking place in the not-so-distant-future (you get the sense that it's roughly 2050-that John Lithgow is a member of the Millennial generation, and you can do the math from there), shows Earth in the wreckage of a horrifying reaction to climate change.  We live in a world covered in dust, where crops are failing and the countries have largely depleted in size and the military and science no longer exist in a proper form, but instead we just focus on food production and...that's about it.  The first third of the film is pretty amazing in its politics-frequently when we get climate change style films, we see the world destroyed and suddenly everyone is rather wise about what to do with their lives, but here we see the opposite-we continue to focus exclusively on the short-term (surviving as of that day) rather than the long-term (funding more science and medical research so that we can move into the future).

For a society that relies lightly on science, Christopher Nolan relies heavily on it for his script, and we soon learn that a "ghost" is haunting our main character Cooper (McConaughey) and his daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy as a child, later Jessica Chastain and finally Ellen Burstyn), and thanks to an odd combination of Morse Code that is not initially questioned fully enough, in this author's humbled opinion, leads them to go to the NASA space station, where all hell is about to break loose.  Cooper meets an old mentor Dr. Brand (Michael Caine, making his requisite appearance, marking this as a Nolan picture), as well as his attractive daughter Amelia (Hathaway), and finds that this is kismet-they are in desperate need of a pilot (random plothole, amongst many of them-what would they have done if Cooper hadn't shown up?), and Cooper fits the bill better than any other options.  Cooper is then persuaded that there is a black hole near Saturn that is passable by human beings, and through which we can venture into another galaxy, where there are three theoretically viable planets for humanity to live in, thus saving the human species.  Cooper must abandon his family to try and save the human race, and of course his children, and so he goes where no man has gone before, along with Amelia, two ancillary astronauts that you know are just there to help the body count, and a wise-cracking robot named TARS (Irwin).

The following sequences are easily the best in the film, and are perhaps the only time in the movie that doesn't seem bogged down by Nolan's insistence to put in convoluted theories and/or emotional moments that ring more and more hollow as the film continues.  This period of the picture gives you some serious unrest, and you wonder what will happen on these planets, and whether or not we'll ever get back to Earth (for the record, we never really do), or whether any of these three planets are actually viable in terms of the human species' survival.  In particular, when they land on the first planet we get some of the most terrifying and spectacular effects of the film.  We land on a planet, seemingly in the middle of a shallow plane of water, with mountains in the distance, and are soon left to assume that this is a wasteland of only water, with all life constantly upheaved by gigantic, skyscraper-style tsunamis (if only this were a tuna expedition, they'd be set!).  The way that Nolan sounds out this period of the movie makes sense-we slowly realize that the idea of transporting an entire species, billions of people, into another part of the galaxy is utterly hopeless, particularly with a ticking clock back on Earth (the final crop, corn, will soon succumb to the blight that has destroyed wheat and okra as viable food sources), and we learn that really, the only option for these astronauts is the obvious-they will be charged with rebuilding civilization in the wilderness, using frozen embryos to continue the species on some distant rock.

However, Nolan insists on going back to the love of a father for his daughter (you have to feel bad for the son, who doesn't actually abandon his father when creating these videos, since he's largely forgotten by his dad), and then we go into a series of ludicrous, Contact-style plots where Cooper in the present communicates with Murphy in his past, protected by future generations of human beings who somehow can bend into the fifth dimension (never mind the serious temporal paradox problems going on there), and honestly, the last half hour is a major snore.  We have Dr. Mann, who has been brought up as the "best amongst us" so many times that you know he's going to be evil and played by a major Hollywood superstar (though even I was surprised that the Matt Damon cameo was kept so far under wraps-bravo to his team and the marketing team for not tipping their hand there), essentially blowing up the crew's principle way to get home, with Cooper floating around a random tesseract without getting torn to bits, and then suddenly finding himself greeting his 95-year-old daughter (now, finally Ellen Burstyn) and having her, after a two-minute reunion, dismissing him to go and save Amelia on her lonely planet.

Honestly, there is so much to like about this film, and we're going to get into that first before I continue to tear the film to shreds.  The movie is beautiful-it's a nice change of pace for Nolan fans to have Hoyte van Hoytema rather than Wally Pfister, so we get an almost dreamlike wonder in the way he plays with different focus levels in the screen, occasionally mimicking the videos of the actual Apollo astronauts more than crystal-clear work that Pfister frequently favors.  The film's visual effects seem to be pretty heavily in the shadow of a film like last year's Gravity (there is never a moment that quite reaches what the Cuaron film does, though the wall of water sure comes close), but really, it's just inside the lines of that film's gargantuan leaps in technology, and I was left breathless multiple times.  And the cast is game, even if many of their parts are left underwritten-McConaughey, Hathaway, and Chastain are such wonderful movie stars that they can sell the big emotional moments, and hold us through when the film is a bit sketchy in its plot (I always chuckle though when three of our most beautiful citizens are the ones who have to save all of humanity-supermodels to the rescue!).

And there's something so sure about Nolan when he's got a particular vision in mind for his film.  The three planets seem distinctly beautiful, just south of hospitable for the first two and just north of hospitable for the third.  He's a very strong director, frequently finding new ways to shock the audience, but always in a popcorn-style way.  Think of the way that he bends Paris in Inception or the collapsing football field in The Dark Knight Rises, or best of all, the tick-tick-tick of the Joker robbing Gotham.  These are great, steady-handed moments from a director who knows how to build suspense, and we get them with Miller's watery planet here and the shifting through Saturn's blackhole-he knows how to create cinema as a director.

Unfortunately, he never manages to do this as a writer, and he is desperately in need of not writing his own scripts.  We saw this in the continued unraveling of the beautifully-shot Inception or the giant, continual plot holes that mar The Dark Knight Rises.  It's actually become a bit of a game when it comes to Nolan's films to discuss plot holes, but this film actually enters an M. Night Shyamalan-style level of absurdity (the Captain and Tennille were right-love is what is keeping us together!).  You feel like realism has slowly been peeled away by the end of the film, with McConaughey floating through a black hole, communicating with his past self.  It's absolutely absurd, and even if you try to make sense of the science, it never really holds water.  Nolan is the sort of writer who puts something spectacular on-screen to distract you (that kaleidoscope image of bookshelves is mesmerizing), but his films completely fall apart the minute you start to think about them.  About the only way that the film makes sense is if you borrow a page from Minority Report or Laura and assume Cooper dies the second he ejects from his ship.  And yet, there's not enough hints as to that this happened like there are in films like Minority Report and Laura (the clear shifts in tone in those films give more credence to the theory, and to be fair, those are two of the best films ever made in this writer's opinion).

There's also the sincere troubles of the character's motives.  It's hard to fathom that Chastain's Murphy in particular would spend a lifetime trying to track down her father, light years away in the cosmos, and that she took until her mid-thirties to actually forgive him despite working on a project related to his life essentially since he left.  The reality is that for a film that focuses on time, we never really get a proper crash course in such a thing-it makes sense for Cooper to still pine after his long-lost children, but Murphy was only ten when her father left-it's likely that her bitterness would have led to a cold, crystalized love for her long lost dad rather than something that consumed her every day.

We also get the problem that every character other than Cooper and Murphy is horribly underwritten.  Anne Hathaway's Amelia is at the top of this list.  Hathaway is an actress that knows how to dominate a screen, and she's very good at what she does here (this was the perfect film role for her to choose following Les Miz and the random Hathahate that followed), but this character is completely ancillary, and it's pretty condescending by the writers of the film that her romantic love for Edmunds is deemed less than the paternal love that Cooper experiences for Murphy.  Her character is entirely there to reflect Cooper's journey, as well (as is Murphy's), and quite frankly both are added to the long list of ways that Christopher Nolan cannot write women.

And we're going to leave it there, though with nearly three hours of cinema there's surely more to tackle in the comments if you're feeling like it.  What were your thoughts on Nolan's latest?  Do you think he'll finally score that Best Director nomination the entire internet is clamoring for him to have?  Do you agree with me that he is in desperate need of a better screenwriter?  Share your thoughts in the comments!