A trip down the wormhole

Rating: Null/10 (9 November 2014)

All of Christopher Nolan's films are obsessed with the mind. Memento is a fascinating exploration of memory, The Prestige is all about the mind being tricked, and of course Inception deals with dreams and the subconscious. What theme does Nolan tackle in Interstellar's three bold, ambitious hours? Surprisingly for a director often accused of being emotionally cold - maybe because - it's about love, the love for family and how it affects a parent. But it's also about the most fundamental human instinct, one that will always be entangled in family; the will to survive. Against the breathtaking backdrop of space, this is an intensely cinematic experience, flawed and sometimes frustrating, but engrossing all the way through.
In a dusty future Earth ravaged by blight and rapidly running out of food, humanity has, in the words of Matthew McConaughey's Cooper, stopped looking up at the stars to look down at the dirt. But there's salvation in the form of a wormhole that has opened near Saturn. Planets capable of supporting life lie on the other side. Cooper and a team of astronauts are now humanity's only hope for survival; go through the wormhole, find us a new home, and report back. The pressure is time. We will probably only survive two more generations on Earth, and relativity means that hours on the other side of the wormhole could mean years on Earth. This is an ingenious plot device to create tension in every action sequence. It's a similar concept to the dream-within-dream time scales in Inception, but whereas that came from Nolan's imagination, this is fiercely rooted in real science. The film visualises wormholes and black holes unlike anything before it, with the help of physicist Kip Thorne, and the effect is stunning. It lingers on the beauty of space, the endless darkness and the spaceships spinning through it covered in shadows. It demands to be seen on the biggest screen possible. My favourite part of the movie comes when the ship is on the two year trip to the wormhole; Cooper offers an astronaut headphones that are simply playing the sounds of nature. We see the Endurance floating serenely next to the rings of Saturn, accompanied by rain, distant thunder and the chirping of crickets. It's beautiful.
I mentioned earlier Nolan's often-criticised coldness, and the struggle audiences have in emotionally connecting to his characters. It seems like he's almost consciously reacting against this in Interstellar, with the father-daughter relationship between Cooper and his daughter Murphy - played by three great actresses at different points in her life - the central point of the film. Cooper is torn between leaving his family behind and ensuring their survival for the future. The urge to survive wills the crew of the Endurance to finish their mission, but Cooper is driven by a desire to return to Earth and keep the promise he made to his little girl. At times this works wonderfully well, and swells to a powerful, dimension-breaking climax, but thinking about it Nolan still shows some struggle with the emotional side of his stories. Cooper's agreement to take on the mission seems far too quick given how much he comes to miss his children; there needed to be more of an emotional conflict before the decision to go, and it was lacking. As his relationship with Murphy takes on greater plot significance his son Tom gets lost in the mix; the brilliant Casey Affleck is underused as the adult version of the character. The main barrier between Nolan and emotion is simply the unrelenting epic scale of his films; this is the fourth $100m+ 2.5hr+ film he's done in a row. He really needs a break, a middle budget film with a vibe more like The Prestige. What's also frustrating about the movie is that it suffers from what the main flaw in Inception, which is Nolan's clunky grasp of exposition. While a great deal of it is necessary to explain the complex plot, the way it's worked into the dialogue is grating. Right at the beginning, Murphy's teacher tells Cooper, a farmer in a rapidly starving world, that the world needs farmers because we ran out of food. When the wormhole is just about to be approached, after a two year voyage, an astronaut decides it's finally the time to explain what a wormhole is. Moments like this just take you out of the film and it's a shame that the intelligence of the plot is occasionally let down by stupid dialogue. But then, of course, another astounding image hits the screen and we forget all about the film's problems.
I think critics have been somewhat harsh on this, with only 73% on Rotten Tomatoes as I write this. Perhaps coming in with expectations too high or a desire not to follow the Christopher Nolan circlejerk, people are approaching it too analytically - too scientifically. I just love that this kind of film is getting made in mainstream Hollywood, original and intelligent and full of imagination and respectful to its audience. Nolan fanboys may be annoying, and they may overrate him as the best director of our time, but you can't deny that he is responsible for by far the most interesting blockbusters coming out of Hollywood. I'm excited to see what wormhole he'll take us down next.