Ten years on, here I take a look at one of Christopher Nolan’s more striking pieces, and one that I consider perhaps my favorite from his—breaking across time and space, here’s my take on Interstellar.
Nolan essentially seemed to be doing his own take on 2001: A Space Odyssey, forty-five-odd years after Kubrick—not the first director to try and do so, but whereas others simply tried to ape a slow pace and surreal visuals, here we having something more focused on more direct elements than sweeping depictions of man’s evolution. Of course, Nolan can be rather on the nose when it comes to such things—so how did it all pan out, looking back?
First of all, it’s definitely a film best seen in a theater—as I saw not too long ago for an anniversary screening. From dust-choked cornfields of an ecocide-hit future to the void itself, the visual side of the film is spot on, and perhaps arguably, something that gets you thinking much more so than some of the scientific musings we see in the script. We only get clues of what the wider world for our characters centered around former pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), but military drone flights over farmland while anti-intellectualism goes rife in schools doesn’t spell something too good. This, however, is all just a taster for what comes later.
The story is straightforward enough—recruited by Michael Caine, Cooper ends up on a deep space mission to slip through a black hole in order to find a new habitation for humanity, with things naturally getting more complicated than that. Between camera angles simulating actual fixed shots from real spacecraft to some bleak long shots of our vehicle in the black of space—with physical models and controlled lighting involved—making it feel that much more real than the CG toys whizzing around as in many other flicks now.
Of course the highlight comes down to the black hole itself—with the sequence of our leads orbiting it being something that stuck with me when I first saw it in an IMAX screening. Entirely new software was written just to depict something that comes as close to an actual eldritch violation of the very fabric of our reality that exists—something that bends and consumes light, even time, itself. The human brain literally isn’t capable of really perceiving the true nature of such a thing—even technology can’t really, for data itself is consumed in such a thing. So as we see space bend once we curve around the phenomena here, as the sheer scale gets put on display—it left me at thinking on all sorts of matters going all the way around how terrifying and fascinating every cosmic twist of nature truly is, and what a mote mankind might be before it. Not that many science fiction films can actually do that.
But the rest of the film? Jessica Chastain remains a highlight as Cooper’s daughter growing up to match his own age through gravitic time dilation, with David Gyasi being the most memorable crew member in deep space besides TARS (one of the most interesting robot designs in recent cinema, and done all with animatronics to boot). One weak point I guess may be the subplot involving the discovery of an astronaut played by Matt Damon, which looking back didn’t feel like the film’s most memorable moment and something of a shoehorn.
Some also gave flack to one end sequence back on release, something spanning across the timeline itself—the dialogue is, as mentioned, rather Nolan in being very on the nose, but peel that back and there is something to be said about human altruism being something that can lead to something so much bigger than just concern between individuals.
Overall though, while not perfect, the visual scale, detail, and the general story still perfectly able to carry things, it’s not hard to see why Interstellar seems to have stood the test of time in the ten years since for many. There’s much more to be said about the sense of detail adding to painting the scale of the universe just beyond a mere firmament above, like continent-sized lightning storms on gas giants, or indeed mile-high tidal waves hypothesized to exist beyond. And in times where ignorance feels too readily embraced by some, the message of not striking from discovery in the name of petty politics rings truer now arguably—from minerals extracted without damaging Earth environs to bounties of unrestricted solar power, I could go on a polemic about what a little more will and effort could bring…but for the most part, this one speaks to that well enough. If you haven’t seen it in a while, it’s certainly worth the rewatch—it’s still quite a trip…
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