Earth to Christopher Nolan: “There’s no crying in outer space!”
Roger that. Houston would have a real problem with the British director’s latest magnum opus, Interstellar, which shoots high to put the science–and big ideas–back into the science-fiction movie.
Unpleasantly earthbound after his Oscar-earning turn in Dallas Buyers Club, Matthew McConaughey dimly stars as an astronaut given the lofty mission of saving humanity from imminent doom. Yes, In a World … choked by killer sandstorms and dying agriculture, humanity has no hope but to seek out another home in the cosmos. As a corn farmer and former space pilot, McConaughey’s Cooper fatefully lands in the driver’s seat, prodded on by his feisty young daughter (Mackenzie Foy).
The helmsman behind a galaxy of pop-corn blockbusters including Inception and the Christian Bale Batman reboots, Nolan and co-writer and brother Christopher Nolan launch their multi-stage, multi-hour vehicle designed to reach the rarefied atmosphere of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and other sci-fi classics. The dramatic payload is heavy, often crushing, and the payoff will leave many gasping for air, and not in a good, Space Mountain way. You might say that Interstellar is the anti-Gravity, if it didn’t implode soon after lift-off.
Sketchily post-apocalyptic, Nolan’s star-crossed epic theorizes that the truth is out there–or at least a new Earth potentially is on the far side of a mysterious wormhole spinning off Saturn. A brain trust of stealthy NASA scientists drafts Cooper for the mission, along with a small crew that includes a young scientist (the anti-Sally Ride, Anne Hathaway) who’s the daughter of the project’s weary mission controller (a weary Michael Caine).
A weightless hero, McConaughey delivers his lines in a mumbled, over-naturalistic monotone that’s the wrong stuff in a spacey movie that comes equipped with the pace of suspended animation. Nolan overloads the script with so many clunky scientific terms (“singularity,” “time-shift,” ad infinitum.) that they might even make Stephen Hawking’s head spin. When Nolan needs a melodramatic booster, he has his actors jettison Kubrickian coolness and lurch into hyper-crying, including Hathaway, the Les Miz Oscar winner who’s miserably cast in a retro female role beamed back from 1950s B-grade sci-fi. Where have you gone, Sigourney Weaver?
For all its modern trappings, yawning length and astronomical pretensions, Interstellar is a dismal, fizzling blast from the past–George Pal’s When Worlds Collide bogged down with cornball philosophy and an extra hour of unfunny outtakes and overwrought suspense. Rather than 2001, Nolan should have explored the grim fate of Disney’s 1979 The Black Hole, which charted nebulously similar territory and quickly vanished into box-office hell.
