What’s Not So Stellar About Nolan’s Interstellar

When the epicness of the struggle is so great, the lameness of its half-baked drama is usually so epic.

SPOILERS ALERT: DO NOT READ UNLESS YOU HAVE SEEN THE MOVIE OR YOU ARE WISE ENOUGH TO PLAN TO SKIP IT

Last Monday I went to watch Interstellar, having heard about it for the first time only 2 weeks ago. The ratings on both IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes were promising, and the reactions were mostly positive. I didn’t see the trailer and didn’t read any review, so I relied solely on my prior experiences with sci-fi movies in general and Christopher Nolan in particular to set my expectations, which weren’t so high. What I found is a movie that is acceptable, yet overhyped. Below, in no particular order, are the things that made my experience watching Interstellar a highly forgettable one:

1- No Sense of Space

A film about space with very few shots from dead angles showing tight spots of machinery with no sense of voidness or vastness and plenty of sounds that should not exist in vacuum, it is more like a sci-fi movie from the 70s, which would have been great if it was a low-budget documentary; but for a Hollywood blockbuster, at least one will naturally compare it to its spectacular predecessor — as far as scenery is concerned — Gravity.

2-Space Visualizations

Interstellar has been hailed as pioneering and courageous attempt to visualize the modern ideas of theoretical physics like they were never done before. Some renowned physicists have even jumped into the bandwagon of spreading praise about this aspect of the movie. Personally, I don’t share their over excitement about some visualizations that I have seen their likes before while listening to music on Windows Media Player. They were okay, and that’s it.

3-Angry Geeks

The movie is clearly targeting the informed crowd. Even though the concerned scientific information is basic and its depictions is kind of shallow, the highly pretentious dialogue accompanying it has gotten the attention of many scientists as well as geeks, and consequently causing an overhype. Just like Star Wars and other space-related films, it is a matter of time till the movie has its defending battalions of die hard fans. If a movie talks about modern physics is being ridiculed by someone who is seemingly uninformed about physics, it is easy for someone with superiority complex to lash him out. Conversely, it might be sometimes tempting to over ridicule the movie when it comes to scientific facts just for the same reason. Therefore, it might be difficult to find an objective opinion about the science of the movie. A good measurement however comes from the definition of the sci-fi genre, in which a scientific fact is bent a little for the sake of the drama or a projection is made into the future about a discovery not yet made. Interstellar has both of these elements, but its drawback is not the fantastical aspects of its science as it is rather their not-so-fantastic employment in its lousy drama.

4-Poetry in Space Motion

Nothing is wrong about using poetry as some sort of taglines for movies. Sometimes it works, other times not. In Interstellar Dylan Thomas’s poem is relevant, but the way it is put in the movie and its repetition is unnatural and superimposed, at least for me.

5-The Greatest, Best Country on the Face of the Earth

For some chauvinistic reasons, the US flag kept on popping in many scenes to declare again and again that the USA is the savior of humanity, in a manner not very dissimilar to Sean Hannity’s babbling on Fox News — if you are familiar with this buffoon. But there was something unrealistic about the flag on Dr. Mann’s planet. The wearing of the flag was so artificial that it doesn’t suit the situation of being waving in this extreme weather for many years. Unless of course the director wants it to be recognizable for some marketing reasons.

6-Godless Determinism

There are too many coincidences. In literary terms, these are usually called Deus Ex Machina, but since this movie has some existentialist overtones, one might need to find another term. The first coincidence is the arrival of Cooper to the hidden NASA premises just on time to take his role as the savior of mankind. NASA wasn’t waiting for him, and, seemingly, they didn’t know of his existence or something. He just stumbled there, and — you know — couldn’t say no to the offer to be a hero.

Another lame coincidence is shown when, based on nothing but her love instinct, Dr. Brand indicates that they should take their trip towards Dr. Edomond’s planet, despite the fact that Dr. Mann’s seemed very promising. Of course she turned out to be right in what the writer manifested as the cliché-ridden theme of “following one’s heart”.

The lamest coincidence, however,was yet to come before the end of the movie when Cooper, who was spending some good time inside the “gentle” black hole, found himself in a hospital after being found by the police in the middle of the seemingly narrow alleys of space.

7-Headless Existentialism

The supposedly existentialist backdrop doesn’t make any sense no matter how hard I tried. So, I’m required to believe that the wormhole was put in its place in our galaxy to humankind find another place to live? Okay. So who has put it for us? Them? No? We? So if we did this, then we must have also chosen Cooper to do the mission to save humanity. Which means that we (of the future) wanted to save ourselves (of the past). But why would we need to do so if we are already safe in the future? Why would Cooper of the future show Cooper of the past the coordinates to NASA so that the latter would get there and go into the future? Isn’t he already there? And even if this could make some sense — I’m not sure how — how could this alteration not change the outcome of that which had caused the alteration in the first place? It’s a paradox that Nolan has happily ignored.

Some fans have offered fanciful explanations including lack of causality in the 4th dimension, as well as entanglement in the quantum level, but, as good as these explanations may sound to the geeky crowd, they don’t serve the movie’s shaky plot well, because the lack of causality was transgressed when Cooper communicated with his daughter from the non-causal 5th dimension, implying causation; while entanglement is only true on the quantum level and it’s absurd to apply its laws to the movie’s logic.

8-Problem? Solved

So, NASA was working secretly to send a very important mission to space, but they seemed lacking one essential piece to complete the puzzle: a good pilot. Of course serendipity plays its role to bring Cooper to them just in perfect time. Wait, it’s not only serendipity. I mean, it’s also the help from the future Cooper, or them, or whoever; the important thing is that now the puzzle is completed and they can go safely into space to save humanity. Problem solved.

It turns out that Cooper is not just the greatest pilot, but in the middle of a group of the smartest scientists on Earth, he’s the cleverest too. This is proven in the scene in which deliberation was taking place to decide how to go to the promising planets without losing time (we are talking about years due to relativity) and fuel. The scientists seem convinced that one way closer to a black hole is the only way, until Cooper flips a board and holds a marker pen to come up with the cleverest solution of drawing an alternate path around the planet, and farther from the black hole. See? It only took him a stroke of a marker pen in front of the amazed “scientists”. Problems of epic proportions are solved just like that in Interstellar.

9-Psychological Fluctuations

One of the strongest themes of Interstellar is the family bond. In fact, the relation between Cooper and his family, a corner stone of the story, is the only realistic relation in the movie. However, just like the movie itself, the strength in the depiction of this relation began disintegrating as things progressed. It is clear from the beginning that Murphy was the smarter child. Her relation with her dad as a child was a precursor for her future role. Her brother, on the other side, was the one to rely on, the one with the sense of responsibility. That’s why he was more patient with his father’s decision to leave, and that’s why he kept talking to his father for a long time through videos without getting back any answer. But all this suddenly changed, when we watch him becoming a control freak with his family, an unloving brother, and a somewhat menacing creature. One would start thinking that his emotional strength may have gotten the best of him, and that this might be a pretext for something bigger in the next scenes. But nah, he suddenly again comes back to his mind for the same non-apparent reason, hugging his sister and caring about his family. And that’s the last time we hear of him as he disappears completely from the consciousness of the writer and the eyes of the spectators as if he was sucked by an “ungentle” black hole.

The descent of Cooper’s son into oblivion was compensated for by the rise of his daughter into a state of overabundance. After we realize that Prof. Brand is a liar, she becomes at the helm of saving humanity by the help of her father who is stuck in a black hole sharing a wall with his home’s bookshelf! He communicates with her apparently through gravity, by pushing books, throwing dust, and moving a watch’s hands — as random as this may sound — without being able for whatever reason to make more obvious signs. So, Murphy’s ghost in her childhood is nothing but her father in the future, just as she realizes in the not-so-great reunion when he meets her as young man in his 40s while she’s an old woman on her deathbed in her 80s. The reunion lasts for a few awkward seconds when she asks him to leave for his next mission of finding the suitable planet for humans, and of course finding his future love, Dr. Brand.

10-For the Love of Physics

There’s no advice more stupid and less scientific than “follow your heart”. Yet, it is used several times in this sci-fi movie to show how love is the only thing that can transcend the dimensions of physics, the one thing that can be more powerful than gravity, blah blah blah. Dr. Brand’s love to Dr. Edmond makes her take the right choice. Cooper’s love of his daughter takes him inside a black hole — a “gentle” one just to remind you — into the past when they were together in the home’s library. Most probably, it is also what took him magically out of the black hole, across galaxies, into the hospital where she was dying in a space station. In a way, the physical attraction of gravity was juxtaposed with the spiritual attraction of love, with the latter being portrayed as more powerful. Now one is left wondering why they didn’t use the power of love to get into that new planet in the first place!

11-Time Flies and So Does My Interest

The award of the most anti-climactic scene in the movie (and there are many) goes to the return of Cooper and Dr. Brand from the first candidate planet after escaping from the giant waves. They have lost a companion and they were returning to their mother ship to meet another who’s been waiting for them for, well, 23 years. The idea is that due to relativity, they have spent only a few hours, while he stayed alone in the ship for all this time. So, the guy had spent all this time alone and there should be something in his face showing just that, right? So, he’s given some white hair and sleepy eyes, that along with his slow attitude made him look like he was awaken from a nap of 23 minutes, not 23 years of solitude. Of course, in case you were wondering about the amount of supplies needed for all this time, it should be enough for you to know that hibernation did help a little, didn’t it? I am a little confused as he said that he didn’t like sleeping or something like that!

12-Selective Connectivity

A sci-fi movie may change some physical properties of reality, but it should not change anything when it come to logic; cause and effect should still hold for instance. So, one could accept that interstellar communications in the future would become easy and as clear as our local communications right now. But if the uplink from Earth to the spaceships in the other galaxy is working, what could be the reason for the downlink failure? The movie gives one unsatisfying answer when Prof. Brand says that “many things could go wrong”. Now, that’s a no answer. A more honest one would be like “to make the movie more dramatic” maybe.

Consistency is also a big constraint when it comes to believable sci-fi. Again, this is broken in the same issue of the previous paragraph, as Earth was receiving signals from the distant planets clearly, and so did the crew containing Cooper and Dr. Brand. They were also sending and receiving signals easily and clearly between each others, even inside a black hole — you know, the “gentle” one. So, as it seems, not many things could go wrong if you were at least consistent.

13-Twists, Twists, and More Twists

There are plenty of spinnings and twists of spaceships and bodies in the movie, yet the most unbelievable are those of the drama. Prof. Brand fools almost everybody in NASA by giving them hope that they can save their loved ones by working to get data from a black hole to be used when he finishes his gravitational theory that would help mankind escape from the dying Earth. His Plan A to save people is just a scam to get scientists working for the real Plan B of creating a new generation of humans in space. But for an unapparent reason, he tells the truth to his assistant Murphy, Cooper’s daughter, who naturally feels betrayed, just like Cooper and Prof. Brand’s daughter would do when they get the news many years later.

This twist is substantial in the plot as it is the reason Cooper suddenly decides to take the metaphorical roundabout and return home to save his family — sounds easy, no?. But then comes the other twist. Dr Mann, who was aware of Prof. Brand’s intentions, and who was hailed as the reason for the mission to take place, became a rascal because of his long solitude igniting his survival instinct, sending false info indicating a habitable planet, when it was cold and arid. What follows is a fist fighting scene and the subsequent death of Dr. Mann and escape of Cooper with Dr. Brand from the planet. Left with not much fuel for Cooper to return home and Dr. Brand to go to Edmond’s planet, Cooper comes with another super, duper idea of making use of the black hole’s edge to act as a slingshot to the ship and help them save some fuel. And to save even more fuel, the mother ship would ditch some of its ships to lessen the weight.

In a great act of self sacrifice, Cooper eventually decides to disengage with his ship from the mother ship leaving only Dr. Brand to continue her trip. And here comes yet another twist. Having disengaged a ship with TARS, their faithful robotic companion before his own, they both fall into a black hole, which turns out to be fully featured with intercommunication facilities and a one-way window to Cooper’s home with gravitational access to its bookshelf! This black hole, which gave Cooper some sort of omnitemporal abilities with its 5 dimensions, allowed him to alter the events of the past — which should have been already altered anyway — to get to the same future.

14-Happy Ending

Nolan’s determination to have a happy ending defied physics, logic, and the conventions of good movie making. I wouldn’t mind such a happy ending in a Disney movie, or a romantic comedy, but in action movies and many sci-fi movies like Interstellar, when the epicness of the struggle is so great, the lameness of a fairy-tale ending is usually so epic. Cooper comes out of the black hole, supposedly near Earth with two spaceships stumbling upon him serendipitously, bringing him to a hospital inside a space station, where his old daughter is dying, who asks him to leave for Edmond’s planet to help Dr. Brand, which he does just before the curtains fall leaving myself with no questions lingering at all about what might happen next. Instead, the only lingering question in my head was this: Who’s more overrated? Nolan the director or Nolan the writer?