On a long-haul flight I’ve finally found the time to watch Interstellar, and if you have not done it yet, I advise you to. It is an awesome movie, for many reasons, and I can mention here just a few of them, in order to avoid spoilers. Not that knowing the story including the end will take the pleasure away: after all, this is the story of a travel – across universe – and in any travel it is the journey, not the destination, that matters. But it will still deprive you of a couple of surprises, which are one of valuable things here.
I can only say one of them I had figured out, but not the other: and I’m so jaded after so much SF read and watched in my life that surprising me it’s not the easiest thing in the world. Therefore I will mention what you already guess by the trailer – which tells you anyway much of the plot: our Earth is dying and Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a badass NASA pilot turned farmer, embarks in a risky interstellar travel to find a new home for mankind. And when I say risky, I mean it: his starship uses a wormhole to reach the target star system, which is just orbiting a black hole called Gargantua. Yes, exactly. Now, that they made it over there you knew (again) by the trailer, because you see Cooper walking on a frozen, desolate world. So, everything is going to be fine, right? Things, as often are, proved to be more complicated than that.
What are you going to like in this movie? Photography, for a start: some of the images – for example, Saturn’s rings, or some glimpses of the exoplanets they visit – are so beautiful that make you remain speechless. You can tell the same about Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack, that made Nolan allegedly declare: “I believe that Hans’ score for Interstellar has the tightest bond between music and image that we’ve yet achieved.”
And let’s not forget (some bits of) physics accuracy: I have spoken about it in this post, and the involvement of Kip Thorne has made sure to give the most accurate and scientific plausible rendition of a black hole. Gargantua looks incredible (and scary).
Now, I have read some people questioned the overall believability of this movie. They have a point. Interstellar requires a huge suspension of disbelief, and not just for the now-famous sequence of the black hole (you can’t survive going into a black hole and so on) but for translating more in general what it is true at subatomic level to the world as we know it. Our life is not governed by quantum physics, and we can’t (yet) reconcile quantum mechanics with gravity.
Also, more dangerously, there is in Interstellar a sort of new-age pseudo-scientific approach that pervades the whole movie, which is best summarised by Annalee Newits on her I09 reviews of the movie: “Watching Interstellar is really like watching two movies slowly collide with each other. One is a masterpiece of space opera, whose vistas will fill you with wonder and give you hope for the future of humanity in space (and time). The other is a predictable, stale melodrama about how absent fathers are actually super great and women exist to channel love.”
Nonetheless, this movie is still something you don’t want to miss: if there’s something that sums up the spirit of Interstellar and its most valuable parts, it’s in the quote from Dylan Thomas you hear at the beginning of the travel, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Do not go gentle to that good night.” This is not a gentle story, and it asks fundamental questions about the future of our planet and the humanity itself, in that never-ending conflict between the superior interest of the species and the emotional, often flawed actions of the individuals. There are no good or bad decisions by themselves, and any one of them creates a different reality. In quantum physics, all these realities exists at the same time, in what is called multiverse. This has never been proved outside the theoretical realm, and what Chris Nolan has done here was assuming this theory was true, together with all it meant in practice. To paraphrase Cooper, he has done not what was possible, but what was necessary. It has not always worked as it was intended, and maybe the alternative ending Jonathan Nolan had originally written would have better suited the story: and yet, what remains with you when you watch the end credits are some magnificent images and painful longing for outer space. This movie is beautiful.