Interstellar movie review

Interstellar

Movie review by Zulfi

            ‘Interstellar’ is a movie that is as hard to watch as it is to make. It’s not because Nolan makes it tough and puzzling for the viewer, but what he does is exactly the opposite. It has never been his approach to make audience go bewildered. He tries to feed the audience his plot in a battered and suppler way. You must understand how much more complex his initial raw data is then. He thinks a ton and makes it into an ounce by his clever screenplay (also Jonathan Nolan) and very ordered and structured storytelling. As for the visual effects, he never tries to overachieve. His imagination speaks for itself in that foray. Interstellar is certainly not his best but it is one of cinema’s best.

            I have been trying to follow the movie closely since its inception, starting with the rights that have been bought after Spielberg bowed himself out. Kip thorne was probably one of the first crew members of the project. His inclusion was itself something revelating to me. The scientific input must have been so infused into the script penned by Nolan brothers, that Christopher Nolan decided to include the scientist’s name in screenplay and many other titles. But after seeing the movie one can understand the way Nolan himself was involved in the project. He visualized the equations and theories science had put forward for the explanation of concepts called black holes and wormholes. When a stellar novice like me can understand these basic things, I can only comprehend the celebration of bigwigs in these fields of science. The visual spectacle in his so called medium called IMAX just pays off. I want to go on dilate on his virtues regarding this movie, but first I must bridge my emotions and carry on in a Nolan way, which is called the perfect order.

            As much as a critic can speak about the movie as a visual feast, Nolan’s movies have always been about the heart, and strengths and frailties of human spirit. So is it here in ‘interstellar’. The plot starts in a dystopian world where space travel is frowned upon and human disasters in agriculture are taking humanity to the brink of existence. A widowed farmer and a former astronaut with his kids is having tough time both professionally and personally as agriculture is tough thanks to the climate change. His daughter is having problems with the school as they are bewildered by her advanced thoughts on a field, space travel, they think has no role in this hard era of human existence. Owing to his cosmic roots, cooper loves his daughter’s love for space dynamics and encourages her in scientific explorations of maths and physics. He sees binary messages in dust storms which leave behind a patterned form of duting in his daughter’s bedroom. They find out NASA’s hidden headquarters using gravity clues from the dust. NASA is a load on the back of the government and so, it exists unknown. It is headed by a very old physicist, professor Brand. Her daughter is an explorer. He plans a two way optional scheme of transporting humanity from earth to another life sustaining habitat, in the form of another planet. But what are the odds that you will get a planet which has the same environment as that of earth. He had already sent scouts and he has messages from them, too. Three men relay that they have landed on different planets where life is near similar to that of earth. But where are they? They are nowhere near. Sun is just a yard’s throw away, compared to where they are. They travel through wormholes, a shortcut in space which cuts distance by some millions of light years. These concepts are enough to soar your imagination higher than ever. But, Nolan doesn’t stop there.

            Professor is convinced that world will extinguish in few decades and spatial journey is the only option. He convinces cooper the emergent need for this longest journey of something called, being. The crew is chosen and with them, are a pair of AI robots. But cooper’s challenge as like the others is leaving his home and kids and especially his darling daughter. Here is what emotional logic comes to play the toughest role. Emotions and feelings are as complex in Nolan’s movies as his plots. Now, let’s consider the equations. A child, who is as smart to read gravity from a mere speck of dust, is intelligent to know that her father’s return from a wormhole is as certain as light returning from a black hole. A father who breathes his every gulp, enjoying the growth of his daughter is going on a certain one way mission, never to return, to face only danger unknown, is probably making the greatest sacrifice of what is rightly called the greater good.( I can’t think of anything greater). And does he reap the benefit of the voyage. He certainly won’t. Does he at least have the inkling of hope that his children will make it, out of his sacrifice? Far from it. But he does it. He goes on the hare brained scheme of an old physicist, probably satisfying his whim of equations and theories of space travel. This is absolutely the heart of the movie. The part which glues the whole story together.

            Before they breeze past the Saturn rings, the crew prepares for the cryogenic hibernation. Look, how simply I overlooked their taking off. Because there are far important things to say. Nolan does this all in a normal way, downplaying the grandiose. He doesn’t build grand music to showcase the Saturn rings or he doesn’t focus us on the hibernation procedure by some showing off gags. He does it professionally by showing us the minds of the explorers, who have bigger things on their mind. If what they are doing is worth what they are doing. Hope they are not just some schematic representations on touch screen gizmos. When the spaceship travels through the wormhole, it’s another outer world experience. It just needs to be seen. Probably Stanley Kubrick was the only director who can compete with Nolan. The crew lands on the first planet, they do it amidst water or water equivalent of that planet. Now, look at this speck of imagination. The planet has tidal waves, which are larger than the 40 storey buildings or even the tsunamis. Why are the waves so big? He doesn’t answer by telling that the planet’s moon is nearer or the pulls are stronger. He says it’s because of the black hole nearer to it. He doesn’t miss one beat. But what is spectacular during this snippet is TARS, the AI robot. When I looked at the design for the first time, I wasn’t sold on it. I hoped bigger things from Nolan. The robots since ‘star wars’ haven’t been worked upon so much. They are the same with very minor variations. During this tidal scene, Nolan shows the real utility of the robot and it’s mechanics behind the design. It shows the next step in the evolution of movie robots. But the best scene of the movie is the docking of their shuttle with the mother spaceship ‘Endurance’. The scene is a thrilling sequence where Nolan goes against belief and applies accurate and impossible physics in the docking of hero’s ranger. How the A I of CASE reads the rotations and applied retro thrusters looks all easy to talk but Nolan gets spot on in this amazing action set piece. The background score in this set piece is a different bit of composition with a slice of macabre and thrill behind the notes. It looks to be composed with church organs as that how it sounds. At the start of the movie, Nolan approached Hans Zimmer for the most different form of musical composition. He had been vexed with Hollywood’s repeated renderings of batman’s score. Zimmer isolated himself for this reason and composed very unearthly bit of sound, which matches the spirit of cosmos.

            After the departure from his previous collaborator, Wally Pfister, Nolan went for Hoyte Van Hoytema for cinematography, who had worked for ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’. Hoytema shows he has the chops by the way he picturizes space. This is in fact a cinematographer’s movie more than anybody. There is the five dimensional inside of blackhole, which can easily be guessed as Nolan’s brainchild. It is a tesseract, probably for the first time visualized in movies. It is tough to imagine and Hoytema succeeds in giving it shape. We like the planet of Mann, which is said to be shot in Iceland with its layered landscape. The travel through wormhole is another instant where we visualize the plastic feel of space and understand why wormhole is a shortcut through light-years of distance.

            As much as one can laud on the skills of the technical expertise, this is a movie laden with science and cosmic physics. Nolan just doesn’t scribble words in air. He proves his every point and they are very controversial to be explained in a short space of couple of hours. If there is undoing in this movie, it is this exact path of explaining every logic behind it. Kip thorne, on whose principles of gravitational physics, wormholes, time space continuum, the movie is based, conveyed the message to Nolan and Nolan simplified it for public viewing. But when you watch the movie, you would understand that the simplification was a very complex process. Though the movie can’t be as engaging as ‘Inception’, I vote the top thumbs up for the sheer courage of Nolan in helming such a tough challenge to fruition. The offshoots the movie will create will be easy and commercial but every time such a movie comes, you would fall back to ‘interstellar’ and realize how tough this was to make.