I asked around a bit before deciding to give this movie a shot. Originally, I hesitated after reading some poor reviews on IMDB but a few coworkers suggested for me to check this out. Needing a quick distraction, I decided to give Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar a spin. Oh boy.
The movie starts off with the premise that the earth will suffer in the near future from crop blights. We can assume that these blights are the result of environmental conditions that are caused by humans. But the point here for the film is that the earth is revolting against people so people essentially need to GTFO the earth to ensure the survival of the species.
Matthew McConaughey, playing Cooper, is a humble farmer and former NASA pilot who lives with his daugher, Murph, son and grandfather. His wife had died years before. On the side, Cooper has a knack for engineering and an interest for strange occurrences. Murph believes that her room is haunted as she finds some books scattered near her bookshelf. They eventually find an unmanned drone and salvage the craft after following it. Why no one bothers to go after them for stealing equipment is anyone’s guess.
At any rate, they determine that the “ghost” is some gravitational force that leads them to a secret NASA installation nearby where they get caught for trespassing. After they learn that the installation is being used for research for space travel, the people at NASA offer Cooper a chance to help save the world. Michael Caine, playing professor John Brand, reveals that this installation’s purpose is to send people beyond the galaxy to a wormhole where they are able to travel beyond and find hospitable worlds. Calmly, Brand somehow convinces Cooper that by the time they find the ideal world, Caine’s research to find the formula for saving the human species will be complete. Easy, right?
Cooper leaves his family behind where his daughter builds a huge resentment for abandoning them on what looks like a hopeless mission. Cooper along with three other researchers (one being Brand’s daughter Amelia played by Anne Hathaway) are sent into space on a ship where they’re placed into hibernation for a two year journey towards Saturn, where the wormhole is. While they’re in hibernation, robots TARS and CASE are in charge of the piloting efforts.
While entering the wormhole, they speed through the universe to another galaxy where they will eventually arrive near a supermassive blackhole called Gargantua, which have several orbiting worlds that seem capable of hosting life. These three worlds were previously explored by three other scientists, each of who were given the task of researching each and setting up small bases for future generations. As they shoot through the wormhole, Amelia encounters what she believes to be an alien life form attempting to communicate with her. Why she does not freak out or figure out what this life form is, is anyone’s guess.
At any rate, they arrive on the other side of the wormhole to the new galaxy where the three worlds are. They must choose to arrive at one of them. One of the planets is so close to the black hole that it causes time dilation where 1 hour of time spent on the planet translates to 7 years on earth. So naturally, they choose that one. The planet ends up being a ball of water with constant tidal waves that had destroyed the previous scientist’s efforts. But Amelia, in her attempt to retrieve the previous scientist’s data, makes a miscalculation and the crew end up getting stranded for a few hours when a tidal wave drenches their engines and kills fellow scientist Doyle. When they return to the main craft, they discover that 23 years have passed as Romilly has aged and talks about nearly losing hope.
Back on Earth, Cooper’s daughter Murph is now an adult and aiding Dr. Brand with his research on gravity. The situation with Brand seems futile with regards to his research efforts but Murph remains hopeful. However, Dr. Brand unveils that Plan B, which is to use embryos aboard the ship, will be humanity’s only true hope and that his life’s work was nothing more than a fraud. Eventually, he passes on and Murph communicates the message of Amelia’s father’s death back to the Endurance as well as showing her cynicism about the project.
On the Endurance, the crew have little fuel and can only choose one planet to visit of the two remaining that had been explored. Amelia’s instinct is to visit Edmund, whom she had a prior relationship with, whereas Cooper attempts to objectively vote for Dr. Mann, whose data shows more promise. The crew gamble on Dr. Mann’s planet and here’s where the narrative really begins to break down.
They find Dr. Mann’s planet a massive iceball and seems to contradict the data. However, when they recover Dr. Mann, we see….Matt Damon! No, I’m not kidding. At first, I wasn’t sure if that was Matt Damon or not because the guy looked fat, out of shape and disgusting. But the face was almost unmistakable. So I had to check Wikipedia to make sure.
Anyway, Dr. Mann is more than happy to see others in humanity as he had been in hibernation for sometime and was living in solitude. He had his own version of the twin robots, but his had malfunctioned a while back, thus making him use it as a backup source of power.
As Dr. Mann shows Cooper around his world, he begins a long exposition about survival, which is what makes us human. So at this point, we know something is about to go down. Cooper had already been having severe doubts over the mission and wanted to retreat back to earth. But before he could enact his plan, Dr. Mann decides to double cross him by cracking his visor and running back to the ship.
I suppose the idea here is that Dr. Mann’s character is to demonstrate the insanity of being isolated for so long given that type of circumstance. There’s a lot of talks regarding one way trips to places like Mars where we’d send an individual to setup a colony. I’m assuming that Dr. Mann’s sudden turn represents what most people probably feel is the reality of what might happen to such a person sent on a suicidal mission like that.
However, the problem with this turn is that we’ve seen it before. So far, this movie resembles both 2001 and The Black Hole and we can look at Dr. Mann’s character as either a Dr. Reinhardt, Harry Booth (from The Black Hole) or even HAL from 2001. For me it was cheap drama to once again blame humanism for fucking everything up. When it came to Amelia’s attempt at rescuing the data, I felt it was a little more forgivable, even though we just saw the same thing in another similar science fiction movie in Prometheus where Elizabeth Shaw pulled a desperation move to retrieve an alien head as a massive sand storm was about to hit the ship. In that situation, it was man vs environment which seemed to be the primary theme of the movie thus far.
However, with Matt Damon’s character it was just expected and unexpected at the same time. Maybe I should state that it was expected to be unexpected which is why the situation felt so cheap. We had to eliminate Romilly (because hey, he isn’t white) and we now can just focus on Cooper, Amelia and Murph. Was all that really necessary? Why even bring Romilly or even Matt Damon into the picture? Was the only lesson here “mankind bad!” ??? I mean if that’s the case, why not just eliminate everyone right now?
That’s how I pretty much felt after that scene. But it doesn’t stop there. Cooper and Amelia get back into space and chase Dr. Mann who believes he can save mankind by docking with the Endurance, despite it supposedly having no fuel left. See where these things just don’t add up? So he can’t dock because somehow CASE (i.e. Vincent/Bob 2 from the Black Hole) has a paranoid level 100% and figured ahead of time what the audience probably already knew going into this and had made it impossible to dock. So Dr. Mann, despite being told not to go through with his plan and dock, of course, tries to dock. He gets blown out the airlock in a scene that reminded me of both 2001 (with David trying to get back aboard his ship) and Michael Beihn tragically getting smooshed by the pressure of the ocean.
Yet here comes to the good part. With the Endurance flying out of control, Cooper figures he’s going to try and dock the escape ship. And it works! How much more Hollywood can this movie get at this point? He fucking docked a spinning space deck then managing to pull away from the planet, which also is hovering near a black hole. How many other fucking plot holes does this shit have?
So as if to destroy any remaining sense of credibility that the movie wanted to establish, Cooper, being the typical rodeo cowboy character, flings Amelia off while entering into the black hole. Yes. He fucking went in. Again, which movie(s) have we seen this from before? Why yes, if you answered The Black Hole you win a brain cell. Note that my tone went from somewhat respectable to downright infuriated once we met Matt Damon. And this has nothing to do with Matt Damon himself. Just meeting him.
So Cooper, in all of his engineering brilliance, sling shots himself through a black hole. Maybe he thought that Dr. Reinhardt gave his ship the same coordinates and math/physics stuff from his probe ship because HOW THE FUCK DO YOU NOT GET FUCKED UP GOING THROUGH A FUCKING BLACK HOLE!??!!?!?!
At this point, rather than having the Dante’s Inferno interpretation of entering a black hole as Disney’s version, we get the Stanley Kubrick semi-psychedelic vision with this bizarro time/space warp. Yet with Kubrick it was an artistic display, left up for the mind to interpret. But in the case of Christopher Nolan, he figures that the audience is dumber than the apes shown from Kubrick’s 2001 that he has to fucking verbalize everything. And even then nothing makes sense because the story has essentially fucked itself over by this point in the number of plot holes and contrivances to try to race to the finish.
Cooper now has somehow jettisoned himself from his ship (why the fuck would you ever do that type of thing inside a Black Hole?!?!?!?! or even space!?!?!!?!) and is aimlessly floating around time/space. Somehow he’s managed to track down the point where he sees little Amelia in her room so he tries to communicate with her by knocking a few books over.
So let me switch over a bit since I totally have left Amelia out of the conversation up until this point. So she’s still on earth trying to figure out what the hell the formula is. Wherever she is, we see massive tornadoes/dust storms that supposedly are blighting the crops. So she goes back to their family home where she gets into a fight with her brother, who apparently is dumber than saw dust, and fights over treating his children (maybe one of those “god will cure my son of cancer” types). Either way, she tries to distract him by setting fire to his crops (what a nice sister!) so that she can return to her room and piece together the last little bits of clues.
Here, both Cooper and Murph’s stories now intersect firmly where he tries to communicate over time and space using gravity and the watch he gave her to send Morse Code of the information that they received from the study of the planets and black hole. And of course, this all occurs because love traverses time and space, which explicitly is stated.
The time/space chamber Cooper found himself disappears as Back to the Future laws of time/space appear to be laws here and he wakes up in a bizarro hospital. Outside we see the landscape bent and he’s on some distant space station which resembles his hometown and turned into a museum. He sits back on his rocking chair, beer in hand like a stereotypical hick rather than heroic NASA engineer/astronaut and he’s informed that his daughter has come to visit him with her family.
So finally they reunite, all is finally forgiven between them and we can assume she dies in peace (pieces) as an older woman, whereas he’s still the same age. She does impel him to search for Amelia who supposedly landed on Edmund’s planet (how, I have no fucking clue since the main ship was again out of fuel) and lonely, setting up colony. We get a Batman style end movie dialog that tells rather than shows and I want a vodka to keep my head from making sense.
Okay, so this movie was a fucking horrible mess. Like I said, right when Matt Damon enters, the movie essentially shatters apart. As with so many Hollywood movies these days, the movie starts off fairly strong with an interesting premise but loses it once the romance/Hollywood drama rule factors unnecessarily kick in. A lot of people shit on The Black Hole because of similar reasons in that Reinhardt’s sudden revelation of insanity and the shoot out scenes were nothing more than contrivances for Disney to compete against Star Wars for the sci-fi market. However, the same drama used to stimulate those fight scenes are at the basis of Interstellar.
Many people felt that The Black Hole also started fairly strong in having good scientific roots in exploring a topic that is fascinating and theoretical. However, once the movie deviated away from the science and moved into space opera, The Black Hole would lose a ton of credibility and fall into typical Hollywood good guys vs evil guys mentality. Interstellar is similar in that regard. There’s a lot of epic assumptions being made about the science such as the crop blights. Should people be scared of not having corn? I mean, that’s what it sounds like. Oh no! I guess I should rush out and start planting my own corn!
Also, why are the blight problems happening in “the near future?” They pointed out two types of crops and only one zone being affected. If that was the case, why not tell the world to cut down on chemicals or whatever effects crops? And if the world isn’t capable of cooperating to fix a critical problem like crops, why even bother having a Plan A, which is to save all these idiots who can’t work together to begin with? Why not just go with Plan B and tell people to fuck off and die? And who are going to play the role of educators to this new civilization? Matt Damon?
Next let’s talk about a SUPER MASSIVE BLACK HOLE WITH PLANETS ORBITING THEM FOR PEOPLE TO LIVE ON. WTF? How can any planet orbiting a black hole be safe for civilization at all? How the fuck does the planet get any sun light? You would think that eventually dumping people on an uncolonized planet in the hope of the regrowth of civilization right next to a SUPER MASSIVE BLACK HOLE would be the last thing any sane scientist would do. You’re better off sticking people on the moon. I mean, what about Europa, Ganymede, Mars, Titan, etc.? Those are far fucking closer. Maybe not with the perfect conditions for life but wouldn’t it be easier to just figure out more efficient fuel and put people on one those spots? I mean, it’s just our crops are fucked not our sun going super nova right this minute.
If you think about things, Michael Caine’s character is a fucking dick. Seriously. He fucking sends his daughter and a bunch of people to their deaths because he thinks he’s that much of a goddamn genius. Why put your hopes on an unknown value like a wormhole and a distant galaxy? Why not work on the basics like using what’s around us or even near us instead? Then the bastard has a stroke and dies and tells Murph that he was lying to her. What an asshole! Seriously, fuck that guy. He doesn’t have to worry about life, he’s fucking going to die before shit goes down. Geeze some people…
Next that whole “love traverses time and space” bullshit. Come on Hollywood! Give us a new bone to bite. How utterly shallow is that statement! If you get caught in a super massive black hole, you ain’t gonna be thinking about love. You ain’t gonna be thinking. You might not even be atoms or particles or whatever. You’ll be whatever happens to things at the end of a black hole. Certainly, no motherfucker is going to get you out of one.
And that ending. If Cooper woke up and realized that the most important thing was his daughter Murph and hugged her, I could’ve accepted that ending. Instead, he’s rescued in a futuristic setting. We just accept that shit? Suddenly, it takes only a few minutes to transmit complex ideas through fucking Morse code and the world and mankind are saved? Better yet he’s intact and Anne Hathaway still looks good so he can bone her in a future movie (which obviously is what the ending is supposed to setup) since his daughter no longer is an issue. Man, this guy is a fucking jackoff.
Okay, so here’s the things. Christopher Nolan: Stick to fucking Batman. Seriously. Just do Batman. That’s all you’re good at. And only because super hero movies have generally been terrible all this time so our expectations were in the gutter. But if you venture outside of your little one dimensional world that fortunately has been pre-defined for you such that you just have to hire a bunch of camera friendly faces and put a budget in front of the thing, you’re better off putting your balls in the Arctic waters.
The problem is that this movie was just horribly frustrating. It’s messy and the things that needed to be explained are rushed and oversimplified like everything else in Hollywood. We aren’t left for moments to digest important aspects and the most obvious things are revealed insultingly as lengthy, pointless dialogs rather than allowing the audience to infer what’s going on. The ending dialog was standard Nolan trying to make some obscure statement; at least in the Batman series there was some kind of point, even though it was stupid. Here, it just was stupid and made me hope that Nolan finds himself a nice island with a volcano that he can buy with all the millions of dollars he has conned audiences into handing over, but not yet realizing that the volcano is active and that the minute he steps onto that island, the thing erupts and his millions of dollars of investments are buried in lava along with his nutsack so he cannot produce more offspring and that his most useful assets, which is him as fertilizer, can be employed for something like a flower garden in a hundred years. Cya!