Jeremy’s Tophunder №52: Interstellar

9 min readJun 17, 2020

The reasons I love Interstellar are actually pretty close to the reasons I love Tron: Legacy, which we talked about last week. From a visual standpoint, the movie is brilliant. The visual effects are spectacular, the cinematography is fantastic, as is the production design. It’s just a wonderful movie to watch because it’s a wonderful movie to see, completely independent of anything to do with story.

The music is also amazing. Hans Zimmer is one of my favorite film composers, and he’s well known for his collaborations with Christopher Nolan. If I were to pick the movie that represents his best work to date, I would either pick Interstellar or another Christopher Nolan movie that we’ll get to in a few days. There are plenty of movies that have phenomenal music, and plenty of movies that have music that just seems to fit perfectly with the tone of the story. But it’s rare for a movie to score as highly on both scales as Interstellar’s musical score does.

There are two scenes I want to highlight here for musical reasons. The first is on Miller’s planet, the first planet the team explores after traveling through the wormhole. Because it’s so close to the black hole and the time slippage involved, the team has to be very careful of how long they spend on the planet, as each hour they spend there represents several years on Earth. The music reinforces this emphatically, with the underlying percussion very obviously mimicking a ticking clock. It’s ominous music that becomes even more fraught as the team realizes how much danger they’re actually in.

The other scene I want to mention here is later in the movie, after Dr. Mann (played by Matt Damon in a semi-surprise cameo) attempts to maroon Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) and Brand (Anne Hathaway) on his uninhabitable planet. As he tries to dock a ship with Endurance (the main ship that allows for travel between planets), he fails to create a clean seal, and, well, chaos ensues. It’s an incredibly tense scene for a number of reasons, but just listen to the music.

Just about every piece of music in the movie serves one of two purposes. In both of these examples, it is designed to either ramp up or accentuate the tension of the scene. But most of the music in the movie, actually, is more designed to instill a sense of wonder and mysticism about space and exploration. For example, the main theme of the movie would probably fill me with thoughts of the cosmos even if I had never seen the movie before and was just listening to random music on Spotify.

And really, that’s one of the reasons that I think Interstellar stands out among science fiction movies. It’s kind of funny, when I wrote about Arrival about two weeks ago, I commented on how I was pleasantly surprised at how much it held its focus on plot and character rather than action, writing, “I certainly wasn’t expecting a Christopher Nolan-style action thriller within the Sci-Fi universe, but I certainly was expecting more action than I ended up getting.” I was probably thinking of Interstellar when I wrote that, but I guess it goes to show that I hadn’t really watched Interstellar recently. When I re-watched it this week, I came away thinking that there was a lot less “action” than I had remembered. There are obviously still high-tension moments (two are linked above), but the tension is stemming from the danger inherent to the unknown, and specifically in space.

Arrival and Interstellar are both representative of a trend in science fiction that I’m a really big fan of: the tension and conflict comes from placing ordinary people into an unfamiliar scenario, with any danger (real or imagined) stemming from the unpredictability and known unknowns of space. For years, science fiction movies were just Westerns in space. There were archetypal characters in archetypal stories, and there was one side of good guys and one side of bad guys, and everyone had lasers (and spaceships with lasers). Or maybe there are humans vs. aliens, and the aliens are here to kill all of us. Arrival and Interstellar (and several other science fiction movies of the last decade or so) shirk those norms and present a story where the central conflict is decidedly not a physical one, but one wrapped up in the excitement of exploration and the pursuit of knowledge.

The first time I saw Interstellar, I saw it on a giant IMAX screen with vibrating seats. The friends that I was seeing it with were slightly, well — I’m trying to be diplomatic here, in case kids ever read this — let’s just say that when we got to the theater, they were -very- impressed with the amount of popcorn they could buy. Does that get the point across? I wasn’t in that state of mind myself — I mean, I like popcorn as much as the next guy, but I my love for popcorn wasn’t artificially enhanced — but they very much were. After the movie, they told me that during the launch scene, the seats were vibrating so much that they thought the theater was lifting off. The funny part is, I kind of felt the same way, despite not, you know, being quite so excited about popcorn. I’ve gone to movies in IMAX with vibrating seats a few times, but Interstellar is really the only one that made it feel like it was worth it.

As I mentioned up at the top, I think the movie has a lot in common with Tron: Legacy, for good reasons and bad reasons. The visual and auditory experience that the movie provides is absolutely amazing and really can’t be praised enough. But the story is certainly lacking. I actually really enjoy the in-depth discussion of advanced topics in theoretical physics (because I’m a huge dork), but the characters and the personal stories in the movie left me wanting a little bit more. There really aren’t any characters that resonate with me once the movie is over, except for maybe the older version of Murph (played by Jessica Chastain), who really isn’t in the movie for all that long. In fact, as I’m trying to think of the most entertaining characters in the movie, the first ones that come to mind are TARS and CASE, the two robots specifically programmed to be sarcastic in order to make him a better-suited companion for the crew of Endurance. I’m not what it says about your movie when the most memorable characters are monolithic metal robots, but I don’t think it says anything all that great.

Really, the only part of the character story that I like is the repeated use of Dylan Thomas’ poem “Do not go gentle into that good night.” I’m not a big fan of poetry, for the most part. If anything, I actively dislike poetry. I always hated studying poetry in school, and I can’t think of any poems that I genuinely like and think about on a regular basis — except this one. I’m not sure why, but it’s always resonated with me in a way that no other poem ever has. Here, it fits for a number of reasons. There’s the obvious first layer of the poem being about death being on the horizon (mirrored by the seemingly imminent decline of the human race depicted in the movie), and a rousing call to fight against it (mirrored by NASA fighting to find options to save humanity). But beyond that, the poem is almost certainly about Thomas’ relationship with his father, who was in poor health when he wrote it, and the movie features two very prominent father figures — Cooper (to Murph), and Michael Caine’s character Professor Brand (to his daughter, Anne Hathaway’s Amelia Brand, and later, also to Murph). Both characters have huge impacts on their daughter or surrogate daughter, and both characters either die (Brand) or are presumed dead (Cooper) in key moments of the movie. Again, I’m not a big poetry guy, but I really like its inclusion here, not only because it’s one of the few (if not only) poems I can stand, but more, I really think it fits well into the movie.

The element of the story that I really enjoy and take with me, though, is the movie’s concept of time. It introduced a theory that I hadn’t really been aware of before — that for some beings, time might be a physical dimension. For us, it obviously isn’t, but it’s still an important component to how we operate. If I wanted to meet you on the northeast corner of the top floor of the Empire State Building, there are actually four different pieces of information that we need. We already have three — our X (North-South), Y (East-West), and Z (Height/Elevation) coordinates — but we also need to know what time. Right now? Tomorrow? Noon on Thanksgiving? In order for the two of us to meet there, we need to be there at the same time. But we can’t move through time the way that we can move through our X and Y and Z dimensions. I can walk across a room or climb a flight of stairs, but I can’t move myself into the past or the future. Interstellar introduced me to the idea that we, as humans, move around in three dimensions, but are restricted by a fourth — time. A 5th-dimensional being, as Brand says, might be able to descend into a valley of the past, or climb a mountain of the future. For them, asking “when did you learn to ride a bike?” would be the similar to asking us “when is the kitchen?” To them, with time as a physical dimension, they could just walk over to the moment where they learned to ride a bike, the same way that we can just walk over to the kitchen. I had never thought about “time travel” through that prism before, and if there’s anything about the movie that I still think about today other than the visual and the music, that’s what it is.

All in all, Interstellar has a lot going for it. It has a thought-provoking and exciting (if not all that emotionally compelling) story, with great visual sequences and a great musical score. On the list of criteria I normally hold for what I’ll call “movies that try to be good movies on purpose,” those elements are pretty important to me. It’s not exactly a “fun” movie to watch (it’s pretty long and palpably tense throughout), but it’s a technical masterpiece and very worth the time. It’s not my favorite Christopher Nolan movie (I have five Nolan movies on my list, and this one is the 4th-highest), but I love Christopher Nolan movies more than most, I would guess. While it’s not my favorite of his movies, I do think it might be his most impressive one, based on how complex the story is, the science behind it, and the visual effects necessary to make everything look real. For me, it’s my 52nd-favorite movie of all time.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

2. A Few Good Men

3. The Social Network

4. Dazed and Confused

5. The Shawshank Redemption

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

8. The Departed

9. Saving Private Ryan

10. Inglourious Basterds

11. The Big Short