The White Knight Rises

Rating: 6/10 (10 November 2014)

Matthew McConaughey's renaissance breaks the stratosphere with his role as would-be-world-saver Cooper, a failing farmer eking out an existence on a future Earth that's turned hostile as a result of The Blight. It's a bad one, folks – bad enough to necessitate humankind's exodus. Ex-pilot Cooper is one of those chosen to take a shuttle through a wormhole in search of a habitable planet. Trouble is, his daughter, Murphy (The Conjuring's luminous Mackenzie Foy), is desperate for her dad to stay. It's no spoiler to reveal that Cooper does not heed her protests. Theory of Relativity fans will be aware of the temporal discrepancy that means a few hours for Cooper could mean decades on Earth.
The film is broadly split into three sections: rural Earth; the interstellar journey; and finally what happens next. Suffice to say, the less you know the better. Plus it's fun playing a game of spot the famous face as new characters are introduced. The first section is pure Spielberg in the way it positions an idyllic family in the midst of an existential crisis. It's the best part of the film, full of smart dialogue and affecting relationships.
The problems start when Cooper and Murph find their way to the scientists, led by Michael Caine's Professor Brand, who have their sights set on deep space. It's a breeding ground for exposition, of course, and thus a breeding ground for the Nolans' worst screen writing impulses. Some explanation is necessary, one might argue, for the mission at hand. But it follows Cooper into space, resulting in the ludicrous spectacle of characters revealing stuff that would surely have been covered back at base before liftoff.
What could – should – have been an adventurous middle section of the movie, wherein Cooper and crew explore lost planets with mind-boggling physical anomalies, is fatally undermined by the decision to continually cut back to events on Earth, where those left behind grow old and argumentative. Nolan has often used the technique of showing multiple dramatic threads simultaneously. At its best this is effective, but it's only as gripping as its weakest thread – and parents bickering about coughing kids just isn't that exciting. Whatever sense of deep space isolation there might have been is virtually ruined by less immediate terrestrial concerns.
It's a weird decision because what happens 'out there' is more than dramatically sufficient. The places the team visit are not just dramatic and imaginative but eerily plausible. This is sci-fi of the harder variety. A pity, then, that the editing goes out of its way to kill any sense of clarity about where characters actually are in relation to each other. It's ironic, given how over-plotted and over-explained so much of the mid-section is, that Nolan chooses to render relative space itself a mystery. There are times when I assumed characters occupied the same room, only to discover through some panicked exclamation that they were in entirely separate spacecraft.
While it may be difficult to abide its structure, it's easy to admire Interstellar for its humanist message, not least because this represents a change of thematic direction for its director. This is no puzzle. It's more Signs than Inception. At times this does, however, leave one with the sense that Nolan is pulling himself in two directions. His Kubrickian technical precision, all hard lines and exact framing, is at war against that soft-hearted Spielbergian glow. Like Two-Face these impulses are never really reconciled.
The film that Interstellar most resembles is Robert Zemeckis's sci-fi masterpiece Contact – another work of epic sci-fi in which the galactic journey is mirrored against a journey into the heart. Love as a force beyond the reach of modern science is hardly a new concept. But Contact had a thematic ace up its sleeve in the form of Ellie Arroway's desperate 'search' for her dead father: grief incomprehensible and irreconcilable. Science and sentimentality wedded elegantly. Interstellar has a similar hook but overcomplicates matters by pushing the stakes beyond discovery, beyond the grief of loss, to the fate of the very species. Arroway said they should have sent a poet, but here we're reminded that there's no time for poetry or awe when the mission requires such haste. It's a matter of necessity, not curiosity. Humanity wasn't "meant" to make its survival back on Earth, we're told. No one ever counters this repeated assertion by asking whether humanity was "meant" to survive at all.
One could go on and name the other intelligent sci-fi movies referenced by Interstellar, from Solaris through Silent Running to The Right Stuff, but this would be to suggest that it doesn't have an identity of its own. While the relationships between Cooper and his human crew are frankly less convincing than the one between he and the friendly robot (Bill Irwin), the relationship between Cooper and his daughter is deeply affecting. The three best scenes in the movie involve these two characters, face-to-face, each time with a different emotional dynamic, each time with equal conviction. The sadness of time passed is portrayed movingly: proof of an emotional heft I've not witnessed in Nolan's work before, save for glimpses in the relationship between young Bruce Wayne and his father in Batman Begins.
With Interstellar, Nolan doesn't rewrite the rulebook on the genre but at times he does, as he did with his comic book trilogy, refine it. The visuals are sometimes stunning: a minute craft glinting in the shadow of Saturn; a thousand-foot ocean wave; a shapeless heavenly space, apparently adorned with every second of human existence. But at other times we're lumbered with chatter and narrative chaos, the script swinging from the simple and humorous to the cluttered and cumbersome in the blink of an eye, while HAL 9000 runs amok in the editing room. I'd like to call it a flawed masterpiece, but honestly it's just flawed. Likable, even lovable at times, but too frequently, frustratingly flawed.