Interstellar

I just watched Interstellar, the new movie by director Christopher Nolan (of The Dark Knight, Memento, and Inception fame). Interstellar is a good flick, well worth watching, but isn’t quite the action flick that Nolan’s previous movies have been. It is a very cerebral movie, but in that regard it may have bitten off a little more than it could chew, even at nearly three hours long. Due to the length, it is the kind of movie that probably will not have as much mass appeal and may leave the normal fans of Nolan’s other works disappointed (as a corollary, the type of fans that love dissecting every movie Nolan has made will love this film). There will be a few minor spoilers in this review, but I will try to keep out any of the major plot points.

Interstellar is primarily a story about survival and the drive within nearly all human beings to live for as long as possible despite all the odds. Having it set in a science fiction universe helps Nolan to craft his universe as he sees fit for the story. Indeed, this is one of the powerful aspects of science fiction. As Arthur C. Clarke’s third law states, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This enables a film maker to allow literally any possible universe by simply declaring that at some point in the future there will be technology that will enable it to be that way.

Because of this, we can capture a genuine glimpse of how Nolan views the world. When he creates his own universe, how do people behave in it? What does this show us of human nature in general? There is a scene early on in the film where the astronauts discuss whether or not nature itself is evil, and one of the characters (Amelia Brand, played by Anne Hathaway) concludes very strongly that nature is not evil—only man is. Cooper, played by Matthew McConaughey, disagrees. (This dispute actually leads toward one of the most on the nose metaphors of the movie involving a character named Dr. Mann, but I won’t put that spoiler in here. Believe me, if you watch the film you won’t miss the metaphor because it’s so obvious.)

While some reviewers have criticized Anne Hathaway’s acting, I actually thought she did a very good job with this movie. In fact, every actor in it was at least competent (there was no bad acting in it), and the leads turned in, pardon the pun, stellar performances. While the script could have allowed a little more breathing room (and probably should have cut about 10% of the material to get the movie to a more manageable time), there were only a few points that took me out of the suspension of disbelief. This is mainly because I’ve studied a lot of physics.

The first moment that broke the spell was when one of the characters claimed that in physics time couldn’t run backwards. This is actually the exact opposite of what the laws of physics state. Indeed, one of the conundrums of modern physics is trying to figure out precisely why time seems to have an “arrow” that consistently moves from past toward future. The laws of physics do not require this arrow of time.

The second moment that took me out of the film was when the astronauts wanted to fire a probe to skim just past the event horizon of a black hole in the hopes that, if the probe was moving fast enough, it would be able to transmit a little bit of the quantum information from inside the singularity out so people would know what to do with it. Of course, the event horizon is where photons cannot even escape the gravity of a black hole and they’re moving at the speed of light, so I wonder just how fast the filmmakers were thinking this probe would be going…

There was another glaring problem with the time distortion in relativity, but it would involve a couple of spoilers so I won’t get into that one here.

One final point that is quite interesting is Nolan’s take on love. Throughout the movie, love drives the main characters. Thankfully, it’s not so cliché that Cooper and Brand are in love with each other, but rather Cooper loves his children and Brand is in love with one of the scientists first sent to explore various planets for human habitability. At one point, Brand states how love is the one thing that can transcend space and time, since you can love someone after they have passed away with just as much intensity as when they were still living. And while Nolan never states anything about the existence of God, he does have the influences of love actually affect things in a way that is not scientifically verifiable. And of course, without knowing Nolan’s beliefs about God, it is interesting to note the emphasis on love given the Bible’s statement that God is love. I’m quite sure that Nolan was aware of that even though it was never discussed in the movie.

So for my final verdict, I would give the film overall an A-. I definitely plan on picking it up when it comes out on DVD, and would even watch it in the theaters a second time. If you like movies that involve a bit of thinking and some philosophical conundrums, Interstellar is well worth your time. And even if you don’t like that, the visual special effects are quite impressive.