Go ahead, you make your comparisons between Interstellar and 2001: A Space Odyssey. I’ll be over here, comparing it to To Kill a Mockingbird.
Yes, Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi epic shares many qualities with Kubrick’s masterwork: A sense of the vastness and isolation of space travel, a couple of wise-cracking robots (those are a straight up homage to 2001’s HAL), an impressive (and sometimes daunting) use of astrophysicist jargon.
But the part of the film that resonated most for me—and the reason I’m ultimately going to recommend it—is the relationship between pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) and his daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy). Like Scout, Murph, is smart, inquisitive, stubborn, brave, and loves her father fiercely. Even her boyish name evokes Scout, but maybe that’s just a coincidence. Cooper has a son, too—a solid nice kid who wants to be a farmer, the job Coop was forced into when they shut down NASA, where he worked as a pilot. The son is relegated to the film’s background—exactly where the daughters are generally put in science fiction epics like this. Interstellar has a lot of faults: It’s overlong, overloud, overly expositional, and filled with sometimes impenetrable space jargon, but it’s also wonderfully empowering for young women. That part is going to stick with me.
Anyway, in the near future, blight has destroyed much of the earth’s food supply and covered the heartland in dust. After a windstorm, Coop and Murph decipher some strange lines of dust in her bedroom and realize they’re actually coordinates that lead them to a secret NASA space station. (I love when that happens!) Michael Caine plays the avuncular head astrophysicist who runs the station and explains to Coop that Earth is doomed: The food supply is going to run out, unbreathable levels of nitrogen are going to infect our air, gravity is going to do very bad things (or something). Bottom line: it’s not looking good for us humans. But there’s hope! Several years ago, a handful of NASA engineers were dispatched onto other galaxies to try to find habitable planets. Now Coop is being recruited to pilot a mission to recover those scientists and find the best place for humans to live. Along with him are three astrophysicists, including Anne Hathaway’s Amelia, who is saddled with the speech about how the most unknowable and possibly powerful force in the universe is…love. (Do directors hate her, or what?)
The physical recreations of the spaceship and space itself are impressive, as eye-popping as anything we saw in last year’s Gravity. But there’s also lots of talk of zero gravity and event horizons and wormholes that left me with my eyes glazed over. I had to have a 12-year-old explain the film’s final, quantum physics-y twist to me. (You know it’s complicated when you need a 12-year-old to explain it to you.)
The two trips to potential host planets worked brilliantly as standalone set pieces. One planet is almost entirely covered in water. (Watch out for those moving mountains!) Another planet is an icy and bleak landscape as depressing as a Lars von Trier film. That second planet featured a nifty bit of stunt casting that I won’t ruin here.
As for McConaughey, he brings his patented dude-philosopher, slow-drawl weirdness to the role and he’s affecting, especially in scenes where he watches video messages sent to him by his family on earth (he’s also the only one in his family who speaks with a Texas accent, but it would impolite to point that out). Jessica Chastain, projecting fierce intelligence, is perfect as the adult version of Murph.
I’ve heard that grown men wept during Interstellar. It didn’t quite affect me that way. I was enthralled at times, bored at times, but certainly impressed all the way through. Nolan has sort of found his own unique place in pop culture: He makes giant, brainy (often labyrinthine), populist movies that are ambitious, visionary, and entertaining. In this one, he added a girl hero for the ages. I approve.