Murph: Jessica Chastain
Murph (10 Yrs.): Mackenzie Foy
Murph (older): Ellen Burstyn
Brand: Anne Hathaway
Professor Brand: Michael Caine
TARS (voice): Bill Irwin
Donald: John Lithgow
Tom: Casey Affleck
Tom (15 Yrs.): Timothée Chalamet
Doyle: Wes Bentley
Romilly: David Gyasi
Getty: Topher Grace
Dr. Mann: Matt Damon
Paramount Pictures and
Warner Bros. Pictures present a film directed by Christopher Nolan. Written by
Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan. Running time: 169 min. Rated PG-13 (for
some intense perilous action and brief strong language).
“You're familiar with the
phrase ‘man's reach exceeds his grasp’? It's a lie: man's grasp exceeds his
nerve.”
—Nikola
Tesla, “The Prestige”.
In 2006, Christopher Nolan
released a movie called “The Prestige”, about how magicians create their
illusions. Real life electrical engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla appeared as
a character in the fictional film as a mentor to one of the magicians. While
Tesla was a legitimate innovator in science, he gained a reputation as a “mad
scientist” through his showmanship and some of his more outlandish experiments
that never gained mainstream support. He provides a science-based version of the
magicians work in that movie in a way that somewhat bridges the gap between art
and science. This could describe much of what Nolan seems to do as a director.
His latest epic space adventure “Interstellar” could be his grandest work of
art and science yet.
The story takes place in a
future in which all of the crops of Earth have begun to disappear to blight.
War is a thing of the past as the people who have survived the plagues and
famine that accompanied the blight have banded together to farm for survival.
Corn is about the only viable crop left. Giant dust storms are a more common
occurrence than tornadoes. Dreams of exploring and space travel and anything
that doesn’t have something to do with cultivating food are things of the past.
Children are assessed in school to point them in the direction of the most
appropriate career before they’ve even finished high school. It is designed to
make the process of contributing to society more efficient, but it suppresses
certain personality types. There are layers of thematic elements here about
labeling in society, the trend in our education system toward shared success
and testing as the ultimate measure of our children’s worth, and the dangers of
turning away from science as a progressive tool, rather than simply a tool of
applied practicality.
We meet Cooper, a farmer, as
almost everyone is in this future, who used to be an astronaut before NASA was
shut down. It was believed that people wouldn’t support the exploration of
space when there was such need for resources to create food. Copper hates
farming, but it is something his father-in-law was good at and his son seems to
have the right skills for it as well. His daughter, Murph, is like him,
however, a dreamer and incredibly smart. Murph’s mother died of cancer when the
world could no longer be bothered by finding ways to heal the sick for keeping
the healthy alive.
Murph is obsessed with the
idea that a ghost haunts her room. Copper tries not to encourage such thinking,
preferring to rely on more scientific thought than paranormal. He does,
however, share Murph’s penchant for abstract thought. Eventually he discovers
that somehow coordinates are being communicated by whatever is behind the
disturbances. He and Murph follow the coordinates to a remote location.
It now becomes impossible to
explain any more of the plot without revealing a secret. As it turns out NASA
was never shut down, just kept secret. The man in charge, Professor Brand, has
been working on a plan to save the human race that involves searching for
another habitable planet. It is believed the same agents responsible for
providing the coordinates to Cooper and Murph have also provided a manufactured
black hole near the rings of Saturn through which the humans can travel to find
another suitable planet in another galaxy. He asks Cooper to return to NASA to
pilot a mission to find that planet while he works to solve the problem of
getting all the humans off our planet.
It occurs to me that this is
one of those movies where when you try to describe it, you lose all the
grandeur of it. Nolan’s camera is remarkable at finding the beauty and gravity
of a planet ravaged by dust storms and covered only by crops. Once he takes it
to space, his imagination really takes over and gives us planets made completely
out of ice and one covered in water and sacked by gigantic tidal waves. There
is a docking sequence late in the film involving a satellite which the crew has
lost control over that is one of the most intense sequences of suspense to be
found in a movie. Visually it recalls a similar scene in Stanley Kubrick’s
“2001: A Space Odyssey”, but it occurs at a much faster pace in this one.
The film—while visually
stunning—is very dialogue driven. Much of the theory presented here is very
technical, and it is obvious that Nolan and his co-screenwriter and brother
Jonathan have put in a great deal of research to get the details correct.
Despite its technical angle, the movie is at once very cerebral, which
represents science in a way most people don’t often think about it. Much of
science deals with the unknown and so must be theoretical. This movie
understands that very well. So much of the theory is speculative and yet Nolan
delivers his science lesson in such a literal manner that it plays very clearly
to the audience. The climactic sequence might be a little too literal for some
people looking to find holes in the plot. And yet, Nolan keeps the movie
totally engaging with a pacing that never feels like it stops to take a breath.
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