Thoughts on: Interstellar

Interstellar is an interesting beast. It’s a movie of grand ideas squeezed as efficiently as possible into 3 hours. It’s a movie about space travel, but it’s also a movie about the human condition.

Too big for its shoes?

While watching the movie, I kept getting the niggling feeling that every scene had the edges shaved off, and was just slightly shorter than it really needed to be. Ideas were ever so slightly cut away from before finishing, perhaps missing a little bit of extra dialogue, or just some breathing room for the audience. It was never enough to cause problems, but the feeling never really went away that Nolan’s vision was slightly too big to fit into 3 hours. One specific situation that kept arising was the lack of establishing shots - it always seemed like we simply cut to the spaceship arriving at the next destination, without giving us a chance to see what the destination looked like from afar. When the destination is a black hole, that’s kind of a bummer. But again, it’s a small problem in the (very) grand scheme of things. And it certainly wasn't a problem when they reached Saturn - holy crap those visuals!

Space, time, and beyond

Interstellar is a sci-fi movie, no doubt about it. And whenever you’re mixing science and fiction, you sure as hell better know what you’re doing, or be ready to face the wrath of armchair scientists the world over. Personally, I was really impressed by how well they not only portrayed the physics of the universe, but also how they explained it to the average viewer. Knowing how much to bother explaining without turning it into a science lesson is extremely difficult – especially when your movie is already too big for its shoes – but Nolan balanced it well. In terms of the physics, the only controversial interpretations that I spotted were things we don’t even understand properly anyway. You know how black holes have event horizons? Turns out they don’t. Wait, maybe they do. Scientists will be the first to tell you that they remain an ENORMOUS mystery, so to poke holes in Nolan’s interpretation seems a little futile to me.* And in the end, is that really what’s important in a movie? Are we there for the science, or are we there for the art?

Exploring the human condition

The themes explored in Interstellar are really quite fascinating. While at first you might assume the main theme is love, due to a couple of pretty on-the-nose lines of dialogue that have the subtlety of a freight train, I don’t think that’s the case. Instead, the main theme was questioning the role of human emotion – when do our emotions aid our advancement and survival, and when do they prevent us from doing what’s objectively best? Do we want to volunteer to go to space to save the human race, or because it excites us? Do we want to go to Planet A because it’s the best option, or because we yearn for love lost? If we risk the survival of the species to save our own lives, can we be blamed for it? Will people only work together to save humanity if they think they and their loved ones will also be saved? Why can’t we empathize beyond people we know personally? These are really interesting questions, and ones that the movie explores really nicely. I'll be interested to see if there's ever a Director's Cut, with perhaps an extra 15-30 minutes to allow a deeper exploration of all the ideas Nolan squeezed into the movie.

9/10

* Believe it or not, but Cooper's 3D conceptualization of a 5D environment near the end of the movie was far less unreasonable than you might assume. As soon as you start dealing with higher dimensions, you're in for a real mind-fuck. It's best not to dwell on it unless it's something that interests you outside of the movie.