Interstellar (2014)
Do not go gentle into that good night.
THE SUMMARY: An ex-NASA pilot turned humble farmer is accidentally recruited to fly a mission to save humanity from a decaying planet, transcending spacetime to return to the family that’s greater in scale than all of it. At first I thought I was in for three hours of globohomo propaganda, and there is some, but by the end, most of those themes were defeated with lessons of higher importance and fascinating concepts of the extra-dimensional possibilities of our world.
NO MOVIE-PICKER COMMENTARY: Interstellar is a randomly-selected IMDb top-rated movie, as last week the movie list was rejected by the vote. It currently ranks #27, just behind the recently-reviewed Green Mile at #26.
THE BEST:
Family transcends all: The fundamental message of the movie is a crucial one. It’s explained as cringe-inducingly as possible by Amelia, that ‘love is the one thing… that transcends dimensions of time and space,’ but it’s true - I’d just substitute ‘love’ for ‘family.’ Family is more important than the whims of the individual, it’s more important than technological advancement, it’s more important that the outer reaches of the universe itself. Without it, there is nothing to fight for, but with it, there’s motivation to conquer almost anything. And even if you fail to conquer and die trying, it’s through family that your legacy lives on.
The movie is a beautiful demonstration of that truth. Early, I thought the movie would go the other direction. Doyle lectures Cooper for being selfish by thinking of his own family first. Amelia challenges Cooper to think of all of humanity instead of his kids. But that’s not how the story ends and that’s not how the day is saved. The day is saved for everybody by Cooper’s commitment to his daughter personally, not his commitment to humanity at large.
That’s not to say that a good deed for your fellow man isn’t valuable. It is to say that by prioritizing your family first, you are doing a better deed, because you are managing what is within your capabilities and responsibilities. None of us are capable of saving everybody. We are certainly capable of saving our families and our homes, and if everyone focused their energies properly in those places, as Cooper does, the world would be a much better place. Or even the next world would be a much better place.
The Scientists™ lie and deceive to serve themselves: Dr. Brand lied about his gravitational equation and the true plan for carrying on the species in another world. Dr. Mann falsified data to attract a rescue party to serve his own survival. There are interesting ethical questions here, especially in the case of Brand. Yes, he lied - but his lie was vital to achieve the end of human survival.
Whether these are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ lies, however, is not the point. The point is that scientific ‘experts’ are still human beings, with all the same vulnerabilities to corruption, cowardice, and selfishness as any other rube, and ought to be vetted and challenged accordingly. To blindly ‘trust the science,’ as we’ve recently been urged to do, is to submit to al of those dangers inherent to humanity.
But while I certainly appreciate that this movie exposes the dishonesty of ‘the experts,’ it doesn’t do it as thoroughly as I’d like. Sure, trusting Mann is a nearly fatal mistake, but trusting Brand, despite his lies, is a species-saving submission. The lesson implicitly is to trust the right ‘experts,’ which 1) still grants the premise that there are these wise overlords who should govern us, even through immoral means, and 2) explains nothing about how to differentiate between the virtuous and the corrupt. The only way to make that distinction is to retain and exercise the right to think for yourself, always, and never submit yourself to the total ownership of someone else’s ‘expertise.’
A plausible explanation for ‘ghosts?’: The idea of communication from another dimension is fascinating, and many of us have had experiences similar to Cooper’s bookshelf and wristwatch communication with his daughter: a light flickering oddly, a certain unexplained sound, or, in my personal case, strangely-timed and hyper-realistic dreams. Maybe the idea of ‘ghosts’ in the ‘Halloween haunting’ sense is silly, but how silly is it to believe there are dimensions beyond our comprehension, from which communication is theoretically possible? Of course we don’t have reason to believe it necessarily looks like Interstellar’s trippy library of infinite moments in time all at once, but the movie was written with the consultation of Kip Thorne, a Nobel prize-winning theoretical physicist.
Yes, I just finished warning of the foolishness of ‘trusting the experts,’ but I don’t mean to say this theory is obviously correct on account of Thorne’s degrees or awards. I just mean to say no matter how smart we get, there are always things about our world beyond our comprehension, and this movie provides a fascinating and plausible consideration of what some of those things may be.
Cooper reunites with Murph
The survival instinct
Cooper in the Tesseract
THE WORST:
It’s still a secret society of wise ‘experts’ who save the world: Even though it is Cooper who ultimately transmits the data to Murph to solve the equation and save the world, the whole operation itself is still the product of a secret society of ‘experts’ who know better and can make better decisions than you. The only mitigation against the sort of scientific corruption discussed earlier is transparency, yet this movie in many ways still concludes the opposite - that public transparency is a threat to the all-knowing wisdom of the untouchable elite. Brand admits as much - he says to Cooper ‘public opinion won’t allow spending on space exploration. Not when we’re struggling to put food on the table,’ as though that’s somehow a foolish order of priorities.
In fact, this is Brand’s response to Cooper’s question about why this whole operation is a secret. If humanity truly faces existential threat, wouldn’t full transparency to mobilize every brain on planet Earth be beneficial? No, says Brand. Because you’re too stupid to properly prioritize problems. You need a smarter, wiser, more long-term oriented big brain like his.
And ultimately, Brand’s elitism is vital to the happy ending. Without his lies and disdain for the common man, we all die, apparently. As though he’s the only person in the world ordained to confront this problem. As an even wiser man once said, ‘I doubt it.’
I get it - women can do science too: Sorry - I won’t ever assume that Anne Hathaway isn’t a professor again. Sorry - I won’t ever assume that it would be Cooper’s son who would help him save the day again. I promise you, Hollywood - I understand that women can do stuff too, and they’re not just baby factories. Even though your movie ironically ends with Amelia’s task to get banged out perpetually to repopulate an entire colony. Congratulations to the feminist professor for proving everyone wrong by becoming the new Eve.
Cooper’s son saves the farm but is an afterthought: Speaking of, why is Cooper’s son Tom just an afterthought? Unlike his bitchy ungrateful sister Murph, Tom actually stays and maintains the family farm to do right by his father. Murph gives up on Cooper, hates Cooper, and even burns part of the family farm as a ‘distraction,’ but still becomes the celebrated heroine.
Tom, meanwhile, despite remaining faithful, gets no such recognition. He just disappears. He’s forgotten. Nobody knows what happened to him, and nobody cares, even though he did the right thing the entire time. But yeah, patriarchy dominates our society, or something.
Honorable mention to Tom for punching the doctor, too. Based.
The entire premise is somewhat silly: Apparently humanity can figure out how to adapt and manipulate environments in completely unknown stretches of the universe, but we can’t figure out how to survive on Earth? How would it possibly be easier to find a new hospitable planet, plus manage all the unknown hostilities that planet contains, than it would be to simply manage what challenges arise in our own familiar place?
And if this re-habitation project takes decades or even centuries of Earth time to achieve, how urgent is this emergency anyhow? We have to repopulate another planet, because if we don’t, we may have inconveniences 80 years from now?
Yeah, yeah - spacetime bending and such. If we can effectively time travel, then this misalignment of time may not be the obstacle I’m describing, but that’s a cop out and the point remains: there is no way it’s easier to build floating Earth-like space stations and repopulate intergalactic foreign planets than it would be to manage a plant disease here at home.
Cooper’s ghostly communication with Murph has some potential holes: Similarly, there are difficulties in following fifth-dimension Cooper’s interaction with Earthly Cooper. Why is Cooper simultaneously telling his Earthly self to ‘stay,’ but also giving himself the coordinates to the secret facility? Yes, that could be explained simply by Cooper having an emotional reaction, urging himself to stay, but upon contemplation realizing the importance of the mission, changing his mind, and delivering the coordinates to begin it, but in the Earthly chronology, the order is reversed. First he gives himself the coordinates, but then urges himself to stay.
Again, timespace bending and such. It’s not that I dispute the possibility as much as I view it as a crutch for the plot. Something doesn’t make sense? Timespace bending!
Brand’s virtuous lie
Look at all that womanly science
I guess ‘the blight’ has no effect on all that green baseball field grass.
THE RATING: 4/5 Wickies. Some undeniable glomo themes and a few possible plot holes acknowledged, but still a movie that gets its priorities generally correct, is beautifully presented, and has me still thinking about its dilemmas and implications days after watching.
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NEXT WEEK: The Patriot (2000)
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