Review: Interstellar, its science, and the director behind Tenet
A dissection of the science behind Christopher Nolan’s space epic Interstellar and his stylistic approach to film-making, in light of Tenet’s ongoing release in theaters.
Disclaimer: While this article contains significant spoilers for the movie Interstellar, the explanations of them may help you better understand the movie on viewing. Unless you’re a theoretical physicist, of course.
“Do not go gentle into that good night; old age should burn and rave at close of day. Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” Professor Brand (Michael Caine) laments as the crew of the space expedition The Endurance exit Earth’s orbit on course towards a new galaxy, in search of humanity’s next home.
While Interstellar certainly had mixed reviews from audiences upon release, as is the case with many of Christopher Nolan’s films, it has aged rather well with time. The benefit of retrospect, a handful of rewatches, and research on the scientific foundations of the film allow for a visual and emotional experience that teaches you something new over and over again.
So what is Interstellar about? To get there, we have to begin with the intriguing director behind it.
Christopher Nolan
Interstellar is Christopher Nolan’s ambitious 2014 sci-fi blockbuster: his first original feature film since Inception (2010) and following the Batman trilogy that began with 2005’s Batman Begins and concluded with 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises.
The British-American director (auteur, really) is best known for the cerebral complexity of his films and his stylistic use of time as a narrative device — bending, stretching, and jumping through time with hard cuts between timelines to create suspense, before cohesively reconciling them in the climax with one cathartic swoop.
Nolan is an avid lover of photochemical film — plus its innate color grading attributes — and one of the few directors that prefer the IMAX format which uses much larger projectors and screens in theaters for a captivating cinematic experience. While studios like Marvel rely heavily on green-screen for visual effects, nearly all of Nolan’s pyrotechnic and visually imaginative elements in film are practically produced effects, shot in real life, including the Boeing 747 he flies into a hangar in Tenet.
It’s hard to imagine how such a staunch traditionalist would shoot a film partly set in space, but it turns out his methodical approach to film-making made him best suitable to helm this wonderful movie that ties love and science into one.
Interstellar
Interstellar is a film that transcends time and the very fabric of our reality itself, both literally and figuratively, anchored only by the central theme of a father’s love for his daughter.
Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is a widowed farmer raising two children, Murphy (Mackenzie Foy) and Tom (Timothee Chalamet), in an environmentally-wasted Earth suffering from a Blight that is killing the crops and depleting the atmosphere’s oxygen. As a result, the remaining quarter of humanity has regressed into merely trying to survive the apocalypse and abandoning the prospect of exploring the cosmos.
Cooper himself, who used to pilot spacecraft for NASA under Prof. Brand, was forced to quit when the space agency lost funding and public interest, much like how we went to the moon a few times and gave up on Mars and interstellar travel. When a ghost in Murphy’s room gives them the coordinates of a covert NASA facility, Cooper stumbles upon humanity’s last attempt to find a new home in the cosmos.
Desperate to save his species and children, he leads a team of astronauts to our next home, crossing a wormhole into a distant galaxy to assess prospective planets for their capability to sustain human life.
Unspecified events culminate in his descent into a black hole where he must find a way to transmit essential data to save the current population of Earth and ultimately return to his children. Unexpectedly, this colossal mission requires a specific form of love to scientifically transcend the space between them and save what’s (or who’s) left back home.
The Science
The lead astronaut of The Endurance mission, Cooper, traverses a wormhole, experiences a theoretical phenomenon of time dilation, peeks into a black hole, and finds a tesseract where he realizes he can influence the space-time continuum.
The NASA of Interstellar’s era discovers a wormhole near Saturn, which they postulate was created by higher beings called They. While we measure length in kilometers or miles, light-years are the unit of measurement in space; one light year being the distance that light can travel in a year. Outside our solar system, the nearest galaxy, Alpha Centauri, is 4.37 light-years away from the sun. Yet, humans can’t travel faster than any significant fraction of the speed of light, meaning our trip to Centauri would be more than thousands of years to reach with current technology.
Space itself consists of three dimensions — length, width, and height — all existing within the fourth dimension of time, which can only move forwards. Together, they form the space-time continuum, known as the brane by physicists. Think of our entire universe and its four dimensions of space-time as a piece of paper floating in mid-air. Simply put, that air our universe lies in is the fifth dimension. Wormholes, an unnaturally occurring phenomenon, allow us to use the fifth dimension, called the bulk, to travel long (brane) distances in a fraction of the time, as a portal across the universe.
A black hole, on the other hand, is formed by a star (like the Sun) that collapses under its own gravity and gets sucked into nothingness. Interstellar provides the most accurate imagination of what this may look like, using renowned scientist and scientific advisor to the film, Kip Thorne’s mathematical equations to visualize a realistic illustration of a black hole (called Gargantua in the film). The massive gravitational field around it sets the basis for the phenomenon called time dilation that is felt on a planet they visit, named Miller’s planet after the first astronaut who discovered it.
Miller’s Planet, in shallow orbit of Gargantua, experiences a dilation of time that means one hour spent there is equal to ten years in ‘normal time’, back on Earth! Hans Zimmer accentuates this perfectly in his elaborately crafted score: the composition, titled Mountains, that plays on their arrival with a tick-tock sound in 1.25-second intervals, symbolizing the passing of a day back home.
The most confounding scientific aspect of the film is undoubtedly the mind-bending labyrinth system Cooper finds in the final act. This is called a tesseract, which is a five-dimensional representation of a cube. The fictional device Nolan depicts in the movie uses gravity to influence matter across infinite time. Sounds complex and scientific right?
Nolan skillfully subverts our expectations with an emotional twist that requires Cooper’s love for Murph to solve the metaphoric riddle and save humanity, which makes Interstellar’s ending such a profound catharsis.
Anne Hathaway’s character, Dr. Brand, delivers a fitting monologue that encapsulates the essence of the movie:
“Love isn’t something we invented. It’s observable, powerful, it has to mean something. Love is the one thing we can perceive that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that, even if we don’t understand it yet.”
Tenet
The famed director has since released the war movie Dunkirk (2017) and thereafter, embarked on what critics are calling “his most audacious film yet, visually striking as a James Bond-esque action title with a palpable scientific premise only Nolan can conceive.”
Tenet was initially set for a July release before the COVID-19 outbreak shut the industry down. Warner Bros. Pictures has been adamant on the film pioneering the world’s return to theatres, changing the release date twice before settling on a worldwide August 26 release.
Tenet follows a spy who must learn how to manipulate time and stop a World War 3-level event before it’s too late. South African cinemas have re-opened this Friday and Tenet is screening right now.
