Going where men and women have already gone before in better sci-fi movies

Interstellar ««
PG-13, 169m. 2014

Cast & Credits: Matthew McConaughey (Cooper), Anne Hathaway (Brand), Jessica Chastain (Murph), Wes Bentley (Doyle), Casey Affleck (Tom), Topher Grace (Getty), Matt Damon (Dr. Mann), Mackenzie Foy (Murph – 10 years), Ellen Burstyn (Murph – older), Michael Caine (Professor Brand), John Lithgow (Donald), Bill Irwin (TARS – voice), William Devane (Williams). Screenplay by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan. Directed by Christopher Nolan.

Interstellar combines a number of memorably better science fiction movies and scientific facts one likely learned in their astronomy and/or physical science courses in high school provided they paid any attention.

Take, for example, the scene where Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) and his small team of scientists (Anne Hathaway, Wes Bentley) venture to one of the worlds inside a wormhole near Saturn. The planet is believed to be one of several previous NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) astronauts flew to find another place for Earth’s inhabitants. We learn early on that Earth is no longer hospitable thanks to how we humans have destroyed Mother Nature’s environment with all sorts of chemicals.

Cooper is warned once they arrive on the planet that every hour they spend there will equal one year. Hence if they spend seven hours there, upon arriving back to the mother ship, it will be seven years later. As a result the crew aboard will not only have aged seven years, but when Cooper views the videos sent from his son and daughter on Earth, they will now be adults as played by Casey Affleck and Jessica Chastain.

This is similar to what I heard in my physical science and astronomy courses when the teachers discussed the speed of light. Whenever we see striking images from NASA of stars exploding, we are seeing pictures of a star that likely self destructed decades, if not centuries ago, and we are just now seeing it. Or consider the fact that in space one cannot hear the roar of the engines or the freak mishaps that occur. It would appear director Christopher, who also co-wrote the screenplay with brother, Jonathan Nolan, wants to be as scientifically factual about space travel as possible. Whenever the film switches to scenes outside Cooper’s ship, there is either dead silence or music composer Hans Zimmer’s score playing in the background. Such are the kinds of scenes director Stanley Kubrick incorporated in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) where classical music played while the futuristic spaceships floated above Earth.

Which brings me to how director Nolan incorporates scenes from films past and attempts to call such moments his own. The planet Saturn, for example, where the wormhole resides and was obviously created by aliens is an obvious nod to how the astronauts in Kubrick’s film journeyed to Jupiter on the spaceship, Discovery, and found the Monolith. When Cooper, in a dream sequence, sees himself lifting off into space, the scene reminded me of how the sound barrier was broken in The Right Stuff (1983).

Upon meeting up with NASA scientists led by Professor Brand (Michael Caine) Cooper is told how the wormhole near Saturn was created by aliens. I knew because we have yet to see any aliens make an appearance before us from those UFOs captured often on youtube.com, there is no way we’d ever see the aliens who created the wormhole before film’s end. Again, this is the same idea explored in 2001: A Space Odyssey as it’s never revealed who created the Monolith near Jupiter. Astronaut Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) found out off screen leaving viewers to believe Kubrick’s intention was to allow the audience to come up with their own imaginations as to what the aliens looked like. Again, this is practically similar to the scene in Contact (1996) where when Jodie Foster’s character finally does meet the alien(s) who sent the signal from space, the species is a talking image of her dead father.

Then there is the mission itself, which has Cooper and his crew journeying through the wormhole to find out what happened to the previous astronauts who, individually, landed on each world. I could not help but be reminded of the same plot in director Brian De Palma’s only science fiction film, Mission to Mars (2000), where by comparison, the astronauts’ arrival on the red planet was a rescue operation.

Director Nolan even borrows the dream sequences from Inception (2010) to describe what happens when Cooper ejects from his ship and floats out of the wormhole in deep space. We get a digital multi-layered three-dimensional world where Cooper can see into the past trying to reconcile with his 10-year-old daughter, Murph (Mackenzie Foy), before leaving on the mission.

Interstellar is not without its share of astounding out of this world shots. I loved the oceanic scenery of one planet where there is nothing but water and build up to over thirty foot waves and the snowy ice planet whose mountainous landscapes seem more threatening than any of the ones explorers have attempted to climb here on Earth.

Just as he did with The Dark Knight (2008) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012) from how the country’s law enforcement agencies went after terrorists following 9/11 to the occupy Wall Street movement, Nolan incorporates scenes in Interstellar like when alarms sound alerting everyone at a local baseball game to take cover from a fast moving dust storm. The image brings to mind the dust storms farming communities encountered in the early 20th century and still happen today. In this era of how the skies are now being occupied by small pilotless military planes to watch our every move there is a scene early on where a runaway drone appears out of nowhere.

The best moment, however, is when Cooper meets Murph’s school teacher (Collette Wolf) who tells him how Murph should not be bringing books to class about how we went to the Moon.

“You don’t believe we went to moon,” Cooper asks her.

“I believe it was a brilliant piece of propaganda, that the Soviets bankrupted themselves pouring resources into rockets and other useless machines...and if we don't want to repeat of the excess and wastefulness of the 20th Century then we need to teach our kids about this planet, not tales of leaving it,” she tells him.

The scene brought to mind how conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh negatively refers to today’s education system as “skrool” and not school because grade school and high school teachers bypass such history subjects like the Holocaust as a means to keep students from learning what really happened.

“You know, one of those useless machines they used to make was called an MRI, and if we had one of those left the doctors would have been able to find the cyst in my wife's brain, before she died instead of afterwards, and then she would've been the one sitting here, listening to this instead of me which would've been a good thing because she was always the... calmer one,” Cooper retorts back.

Interstellar does boast some great dialogue like Cooper’s brief speech comparing the achievements the country accomplished back from the mid-20th century to now.

“We've always defined ourselves by the ability to overcome the impossible. And we count these moments,” he says. “These moments when we dare to aim higher, to break barriers, to reach for the stars, to make the unknown known. We count these moments as our proudest achievements. But we lost all that. Or perhaps we've just forgotten that we are still pioneers. And we've barely begun. And that our greatest accomplishments cannot be behind us, because our destiny lies above us.”

The problem with Interstellar is it doesn’t know which message to convey. Does the film want to promote space exploration or does it suggest we’re better off here on Earth fixing the planet’s environmental problems and we should keep things on the ground? In a time where we can no longer rely on NASA to continue with a new manned space program thanks in part to the country’s current administration under President Obama that does not want to be spending money on manned space missions and millionaires like Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson develop experimental ways of space travel in the future, I kept hoping the film’s message would be how we need to look to the stars. For every inspirational moment I saw especially in the film’s first hour, however, I was again brought back to Earth, so to speak, of what Murph’s teacher told Cooper in that brief parent/teacher conference.

Unlike most everyone else, I paid almost zero attention to the needless coverage a number of entertainment magazines wrote about Interstellar as the opening date approached. I did not read the blurbs from movie critics, many of whom I never heard of, and whose comments about the film were mostly positive but not glowing reviews. (Not that movie critics matter anymore because if they did, there would be no Transformers movies). I paid no attention to all the “spoiler” articles that either revealed or attempted to explain the ending. For me trying to figure out the climax and the “ghost” connection between Cooper and his daughter played later on in the film by Jessica Chastain, I’d have to go to a blackboard, much like Chastain’s character does on Earth, and erase all those formulas she came up with at NASA on how to save humanity and do a rundown of the film’s events in an attempt to tie everything together.

I went into Interstellar hoping to be surprised. The only reservation I had about this film was judging from the trailer I saw was this might be yet, another vehicle for the liberal pro-Obama leftist environmentalist wackos to use as a warning about the way we continue to mistreat Mother Earth ruining the world’s natural environment. In the end I got the impression the film’s message was if we are not careful, space exploration will not be just an attempt, to quote the original Star Trek (1966-1969) television series “to seek out new life and new civilizations” but to find another place to live on as the film suggests.

As much time as the characters spend in space, Interstellar is more interested in leaving us on Earth where as Cooper says, instead of looking up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.

©11/22/14