These days, as a father of two, I see perhaps two movies
per year in theaters. Given the hype,
and the enthusiasm of friends whose taste I respect, I decided to throw in and
make one of those movies James Nolan’s INTERSTELLAR.
After 3 hours, I walked out with a definite sense of…meh.
I’ll try and unpack that “meh” below, with a warning that
there are more than a few spoilers here.
IT’S BEEN DONE BEFORE: I’ll just say I have to credit a
mainstream Hollywood film with going this highbrow with its plot and concept, although
for veteran Scifi show audiences (let ALONE Scifi readers), there was
absolutely nothing new here. Star Trek
TNG’s episodes “Cause and Effect” and “All Good Things,” or any given episode
of Doctor Who (particularly this season’s “The Time Heist”) have all tread
pretty much the same ground as the “surprise” revelations in INSTERSTELLAR. I
easily called the ending, and pretty much every significant plot twist, less
than a full hour into the film’s three hour run. For the initiated, this film gives us nothing
new. Yet still, as I left the theater, I
heard people arguing in confusion over what had happened…I guess I’ll have to
admit to being a scifi “snob.” :)
But whatever, King Solomon complained that “there is
nothing new under the sun,” so that alone isn’t a fatal fault for a film. In fact, none of the following observations
are fatal flaws, taken singularly, although I’ll start with my biggest
complaint:
MEN, MANLY MEN, BEHAVING BADLY: This is part of why I
just can’t bear to watch any mainstream action/adventure/scifi faire
anymore. Ever since the late 2000s, it
seems that every Hollywood scifi epic features the same cookie cutter “manly
man” bucking bronco of a hero, whose character flaw is “he’s too testosterone-filled
and risk-takey for a weak, girly, thinking-man’s world”…and while he might get
temporary comeuppance of some sort or other, in the end, his bellicose
grandstanding winds up being what saves the day, usually without any
consequences to him. It’s Avatar, it’s
Pacific Rim, it’s the new JJ Abrams’ Star Trek films, it’s Michael Bay’s
Transformers…it’s as if someone put Tom Cruise’s “Maverick” from Top Gun in the
clone-o-matic, and by now it’s kind of boring.
It’s also
kind of offensive, as, almost always, this gets paired with a world where women
serve only as temporary annoyances or window-dressing, and very seldom
competent – vis Uhura and Carol “I
undress for no reason, scream and rip wires out randomly, and try to outrun
transporter beams” Marcus, or Mako from Pacific Rim who seems so badass at
first but who basically devolves into an incompetent crying child when the
pressure is on, leaving Hunky McManHunk to save the day again. Anne Hathaway’s
character has potential – she is clearly the brains of the operation - but her character is as often as not
paralyzed by emotion, is more than once
shown to be incompetent (in fact winds up getting someone killed because of
it), and is sort of inexplicably shoehorned into “love interest” without any
evident chemistry, and ends up pretty much being “given” to Hunky as a “prize”
at the end.
Even Jessica
Chastain’s “Murphy,” the supergenius whose actions arguably matter most in the
whole film, only is able to do what she can do because her Hunky McManHunk
Daddy is feeding her the info…she even admits in her final scene that everyone
gave her all the credit, but that she deserved none of it. Seriously?
What I find so
strikingly ironic here is that I watched ALMOST THIS EXACT SAME MOVIE, when it
was called “Contact,” in 1997, and it ALSO had Matthew McConaughey in it, but
this time he was a sensitive, thoughtful intellectual sparring partner and
antagonist as well as love interest to the heroine, who most definitely had
agency, and whose actions most definitely drove the plot. Somewhere during the first decade of this
Millennium, we lost female characters like that, as well as men who were any
more complex than Zap Branningan vis a vi their relations with women.
Yes,
McConaughey’s character in INTERSTELLAR *does* get some complexity in his role
as a father, and yes, he loves his daughter, but he doesn’t ever LISTEN to her,
or really see his role as anything other than “protector” to his kids…which is
a PART of fatherhood, but far from the whole thing. Now, to be fair, he *does*
seem to come to regret how he chose the mission over her, and that family is
the most important thing to him…but I still never see him seriously consider
deviating from Dad-as-patriarch. By contrast, if you want to se a far more
complex father-child relationship in a Scifi/Action Movie setting, look again
to CONTACT (the father is dead, but you can see how he inspired and enabled his
daughter, and how that’s shaped her as an adult) or even at THE ROAD, where
caring for his child is the only thing that gives the protagonist’s absurd
existence any meaning – not only does he feel his goal is to protect his son,
but his love for his son has become all that sustains him, the sole definition
of his character, even though everyone he meets, his son included, detects on
some level how not-quite-sensical this is.
In short,
complex Dads in scifi can be done. Even
if your hero likes punching people.
However, I
have to credit the movie with its weird and, I’ll argue, groundbreaking,
approach to…
A WORLD WITH A STAGGERING LACK OF VIOLENCE – This floored
me. The Planet Earth is on the edge of
apocalypse, apparently all nations’ militaries have been disbanded (which is a
great plot device, actually, to free up the heroes from having to be shoehorned
by a military agenda, ala Stargate, because in any other scenario this mission
would be a military project, no question)….I get the concept, survival now
depends on being able to grow food, that takes priority. I love it.
Except I don’t buy it. No petty
local gang bosses or dictators trying to hoard food and build their own
mini-empires through fear? No riots as
it becomes clear the world is done for? (Instead, people just sort of meekly
get in trucks and drive away) There is
not a single gun in the entire movie. Which again, I find bold and strangely
refreshing – there is simply no way for any character in the film to solve
their problems through violence, and the one fight scene we actually get,
between McConaughey and Matt Damon, is kind of pathetic, and definitely meant
to be seen as such.
The thing is,
I just don’t buy it. Especially not in a
world where crazy badass robots are apparently in no short supply.
Which I suppose
leads to my larger problem with the setting -
THE APOCALPYSE DOESN’T MAKE ENOUGH SENSE: Ok, so I’m willing – if barely – to forgive
the idea that somehow, at least 50+ years into the future, we’re all driving
2000s era pickup trucks and still using Dell laptops that look just like the
ones we have now, and somehow they can be maintenance and serviced still, fine.
Suspension of disbelief, I get it, human progress has slowed, and the
atmosphere of the film would have been totally hijacked if we saw too much
crazy future tech (as is, the robots are kind of ridiculous).
Still…life
seems to go on way too normally. School
seems unchanged. Hospitals seem
unchanged. Baseball is unchanged,
although apparently it sucks more (seriously?
No one can spare resources for bullets, but they’re using precious land
that could be purposed for farming to grow grass, useless grass, for
ballplaying? WTF?) The nuclear family still seems to function the same way.
Everything is just dustier. In short, social structures are apparently
unchanged by the Apocalypse, and that I’ll just never buy into. It’s bad enough
that the film expects us to believe the world will look anything other than
Mad-Max like (we do get references to a time when “everyone was fighting for
food” and the US government was seriously considering dropping bombs from the
stratosphere on protestors), but at the very least, we should be seeing
communes, or new kinds of community arrangements of some sort.
And…let’s spend
a moment on the specifics of this Apocalypse.
Food shortages, and dust. Lots of
dust. Seriously? That’s what does the world in? Dust?
What the hell
happened to climate change? Crazy
heat? Flooding? Insane storms? Is Michael Nolan a closet climate-change
denier? Did the studio fear that they’d
risk alienating conservative moviegoers if they made the nature of the
apocalypse too linked to global warming? (Don’t laugh…Republican lawmakers
brutally criticized “The Day After Tomorrow” for “spreading liberal
propaganda”). This alone threatened to shatter the believability of the movie
for me, and there was no need…if you want to make a compelling case for “the
Earth is doomed,” we have PLENTY of evidence now about EXACTLY what that would
look like and how it’s going to happen, and maybe if we see that on screen
enough it might galvanize us to do something about it…so thanks for shucking
that responsibility, Nolan. I’m not sure
that’s forgivable.
Finally, can
someone explain to me the whole “repopulate with embroys” strategy? Somehow humans now have technology to produce
live births, without a biological mother needed to carry and deliver the kids?
How has this not utterly reshaped the face of human civilization??? (Or…is Anne Hathaway supposed to be carrying
and giving birth to these hundreds of people all by herself? Better get
cracking!) Even if somehow a magic
machine can birth these babies, who the hell is going to raise them? I have enough trouble taking care of two kids
of my own…how is this team of astronauts, only one of whom has any parenting
experience of his own, supposed to raise several hundred babies? Is the robot programmed to be a nanny, too?
FORGETTABLE SUPPORTING CAST: If you’ve seen the film before, be honest –
do you remember the names of ANY of the other crew people? Did you really care, other than in an Agatha
Christine, “and then there was one” sort of way, when they got picked off? The
robot at least had personality…other than motion sickness, what the heck
distinguished these guys from one another?
Why don’t we get any backstory on them, on their families?
Matt Damon’s
character is at least somewhat interesting, although I’m still baffled as to
just what the hell his plan was in stealing the ship. Was he just supposed to be batshit
insane?
Hands-down,
favorite part of the movie – his death scene.
Nolan at his best.
Were there other things I liked about the film? Of course.
Visually stunning. Great music.
Suspenseful at the right moments. Topher Grace with a halfheartedly-held
crowbar. And despite how manipulative
they were, the scenes where we see Cooper’s agony at watching how much his kids
are aging before his eyes in their messages to him grabbed me in the gut and
made me weep. What parent WOULDN’T feel
that way? McConaughey’s acting here was
really excellent. And a semisentient
robot who actually DOESN’T go berserk, HAL style, and try to kill everyone
(although you could tell from the tension in the audience that EVERYONE was
waiting for it to happen)…repeatedly, we hear, “a robot has to do whatever it’s
told,” and whaddaya know, it’s true! :)
And as far as continuity goes, I’m remarkably forgiving
about the space/time stuff, but there is one annoying plothole sticking point
that I can’t get past Elderly Murph
tells Dad that Anne Hathaway is still out there on the planet waiting for her
Hunky McManhunk to come “claim” her, or whatever. I’m assuming she knows this
because we’re told signals DO get back out the wormhole every 7 years or so,
I’m assuming Anne sent a message saying, “yup, I’m here, I made it to the
planet,” but when did that message get back “home?” I’m also assuming that
message, and Cooper, arrive at Saturn at more or less the same time (it would
be hideous if the message had arrived, say, a year or two earlier, but Murph
issued some contravening order saying, “no, let her just sit there and rot on
that planet, I have a hunch my dad will reappear at some point and we need to
save her for him? And, oh, by the way,
don’t bother sending any colony ships out there, either, even though we control
gravity now, because we need to keep that whole freaking planet private for my
Dad and his chickie, and we’ll all just breathe recycled space station air
until then?”). Ok, benefit of the doubt,
say Murph isn’t a psycho and the message arrived the same day or at least the same
year as Cooper reappears.
So…what on
Earth makes Murph believe that Anne Hathaway is “waiting” for her Dad and ready
to shack up with him? Murph has had no
access to the scenes we saw, where there were even those few unconvincing
sparks of attraction between them. We
never saw Cooper send a message home saying, “um, by the way, this is
irrelevant to the mission, but I dig my co-pilot, and I think she digs me, even
though she claims to still be in love with this other guy, but I’m pretty sure
he’s dead, so I just might have a chance” – why would he have? And if he didn't, did Anne Hathaway send, in
her message, a note to the effect of ,“hey, it’s a shame Cooper got sucked into
a black hole, ‘cause I was secretly really hot for him”…? If neither of those
things happened, then WHY would Murph say, “she’s waiting for you?” Unless she just means, “she’s waiting for
someone to come pick her up, and you’ve got nothing better to do except sit
here and feel displaced in time, so why don’t you go hang out with her?”
I get the
feeling the studio shoehorned this scene in just so as to fulfill the
unbreakable formula that Hero Gets the Girl in the End.
So…overall…I give it a B, maybe a B+ if I squint.
- D
PS: I behaved, but it was really, really difficult to sit
on the urge to start screaming out quotes from TNG, circa 1987:
Wesley Crusher:
“You mean…space…and time…and thought…aren’t the separate things we think them
to be?”
Traveler: “Ssh,
boy! You are not yet ready for…such
dangerous nonsense.”
PPS: Saddest moment of the film…leaving the theater,
hearing a bunch of college guys complaining that the film “sucked” because
there were no lasers or battles and therefore the film “wasn’t really
scifi.” Sigh. The terrible cost of your passion going
“mainstream.”
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