Interstellar (2014)

PG-13 almost exclusively for language.  It's not like there's a-lot-a-lot of language, but it's definitely not nothing.  (This is some top tier writing, guys.)  I'm pretty sure that I heard an f-bomb in there somewhere.  Because Christopher Nolan isn't exactly tailoring his films for younger audiences, it feels like this is a more rebellious movie than it is.  It's sense of scope is daunting and it's definitely anxiety inducing.  There's even a little bit of scuffle and death in the movie.  (Technically, there's a lot of death, but it's all off-screen.)  Still, PG-13 is probably the right call for this one.

DIRECTOR:  Christopher Nolan

I can't believe that I don't have a blog on Interstellar.  2014 was the year before I started this class, so it feels like this movie is new enough to be on this blog.  But I can safely say that I haven't seen this movie in twelve years.  And here's the thing, I have talked about this movie with borderline every film class ad nauseum.  Not because I brought it up.  Heck, no.  This is one of those situations where kids discover the movie and then that's the movie that is passed around the class.  

And I'll tell you what:  For a second (FOR A SECOND!) I thought my opinion on this movie was going to change.  The first time I watched it, I remember being thoroughly in awe of the scope of this film only to be disappointed by the end.  That's exactly how I feel now.  That's not being dismissive.  When I use the word "awe", I honestly mean "awe."  The lion's share of this movie is one of the most impressive feats of cinema that the 21st Century has produced.  Between the visuals, the characters, the themes, the imagery, the plot...it's all right there.  It's something to behold.  But the end?  Man, I really think that this movie doesn't stick the end.

And it's not that the end is bad.  It's just the weakest element in an incredible presentation.  I have to tell you, I was prepped to be a little bored.  I was watching this movie and I know that it kind of reeks of anticlimax.  (Again, not holding anything against anyone who loves the ending of this movie.  It's not for me.  I'll probably end up writing a thousand words on why the ending is meh.)  But I'm watching this movie and I'm thinking, "Was I wrong about this film?"  Like, there are threads that tease the end.  That's great.  I love that.  Then all of the emotional character stuff.  The stuff between Coop and Murph on Earth (heh, rhyme) is so intense.  Sure, I think "Why not take your kids to space?"  In my reality, it's safer on Earth.  But from an Interstellar perspective, it seems like space is the right call.  As likely to die here than there.)  Then there's the intense tension between Coop and Brand.  I mean, that's a whole movie in itself.  To pile on the fact that Coop and Brand have this deep respect for each other makes that conflict all the more palpable is something else I have to account for.  On top of that (!), we have the fact that Brand is almost a psychopath who had to make this unimaginable choice to let everyone on Earth die and the fact that he manipulated Coop to take off to the stars, knowing that Coop had no scenario that he'd ever see his kids again.  That's incredible.  To top it all off, I forgot that Matt Damon was in this movie.  (I mean, he's even almost got a nod to The Martian going with his spacesuit.) 

Then there was the scene that destroyed me.  Realize that I'm showing this to a class.  We had to watch in forty-five minute chunks.  There was one of those 45 minute chunks that was so painful.  I'm talking about the part where Coop and Brand get off the planet (and Brand is more than a little responsible for the death of their crewmate) and they have to confront the astronaut who lost 27 years.  On top of that (I KEEP HAVING TO WRITE THAT PHRASE AND IT IS FLIPPING KILLING ME AS AN ENGLISH TEACHER!) Coop gets a glut of messages from his now adult children and he witnesses the tragedy and fallout of his leaving.  I mean, this is all incredible stuff.  It's so good.  I was so overwhelmingly invested that I questioned my entire take on this movie.  If all of these beats are as solid as I felt that they were, I had to be wrong about the ending, right?

Reminder: the ending is not an abomination.  It's just the weakest element of this film.  There's a lot of balls in the air in this movie.  Nevermind, we're changing it to plates.  Nolan has too many plates spinning and it is wildly impressive.  The finale of the film is meant to tie-up more than its fair share of threads.  So the end of the movie is meant to give an answer to Murph's ghosts.  Murph's ghosts are a choice.  They are a heck of a choice.  While most of the real raw stuff in the film is character based, Murph's ghosts are a plot beat tied to character drama.  It's a very risky puzzle box that needs to have a top tier answer.  Because Interstellar has so many plates in the air, I'm sure Nolan became aware that there is no way to end this story in a way that matches the scope of the other beats.  He's also a litlte bit of a magician, very much in vibe of M. Night Shyamalan.  He's a guy who cut his teeth on the twist ending.  He's the Memento guy.  I will say that he's normally very good at pulling the rug out from under us, to introduce yet another mixed metaphor.  But the scope of this film almost demanded that the film had to have a moment of unpacking.  Nolan loves what he loves.  He loves time and manipulating what we're seeing.  I, too, love time.  I love messing with time.  I love time travel.  Nolan and I tend to be copacetic on wanting to talk about time.  But his love of time also makes me more critical of conventions that don't really work.  I think that the end of Interstellar is almost the seed that ended up messing up Tenet.  

See, Murphy's ghosts almost don't make sense.  Murph, in the first act, begs her dad to stay on Earth.  That's a character beat that is important.  Her pleas go beyond just a child trying to hold onto her dad.  Literally, the universe (or, in this case, ghosts) are demanding that Coop stays with Murph on Earth.  (It will never not make me giggle.) There needed to be something outside selfishness that makes Coop sin.  In some ways, it's God.  (For the sake of shorthand, I'm just going to talk about the fifth-dimensional beings from this point.)  The third act shows that Coop made a mistake by leaving his family and he tries --in a very stupid way --to undo it.  Nolan is introducing the notion of the closed loop.  Whatever Coop does, it's going to be what he's always done.  When he realizes how he's going to communicate with Murph, he writes the phrase "Stay", realizing that Murph once identified the lines in the gravity and dust as binary code / morse code.  (He says "Morse" at the end, for some reason.)  He remembers to do that because he knows that Murph will figure out what the ghost is trying to say.  But for some reason, he doesn't remember that the phrase "Stay" doesn't cause him to stay.  It's a weird thing that he remembers Murph's ability to understand the ghost, but not the fact that Coop doesn't stay when commanded to.  

In a thematic attempt to tie the whole thing together, implying that Coop is the product of fate, not will, we discover that the fifth-dimensional beings is humanity in a late stage of evolution.  Coop is the product of a Bootstrap Paradox (sorry, Lauren.  I will always point out a Bootstrap Paradox when I can).  Because Coop was fated to save humanity by interacting with the fifth-dimensional beings, the fifth-dimensional beings pulled him to this point in time.  The second problem I have with this is the fact that the fifth-dimensional beings...are kind of an afterthought.  This is not a story of fifth-dimensional beings.  There's a throwaway line about the potentiality of some creatures inside this black hole.  It's not quite a Chekhov's gun.  The camera isn't lingering on the gun.  The camera is panning quickly past a gun and we're asked to invest in something that is intentionally hidden.  Nolan doesn't want us unpacking the fifth-dimensional beings until we're actually interacting with them.   

Also, the movie plays really fast and loose with the stakes of this movie.  Why doesn't Coop die in a black hole?  Because these magic fifth-dimensional beings meant him to survive.  It feels all a bit "plot-armory".  He survives because the movie needs him to survive.  Fate says he can't die so he doesn't die.  How did humanity find him?  The fifth-dimensional beings let humanity know where to find him. There's almost a silly conceit that these all powerful gods / fifth dimensional beings needed Coop to just exist when it seems like they could have handled all of this misery on their own.  Coop seems both super important and arbitrary at the same time.  (Also, does Coop do a lot of math from the inside of a black hole because that second hand on the watch gave a lot of data.

The thing is, in a lesser movie, I could accept a lot of the end.  It just feels like the bulk of the film feels so crafted and so detailed that the end seems more like an emotional resolution, but not a tonal resolution.  It doesn't make the movie bad.  It just makes the movie flawed.  So much of this is so good so that when the end doesn't quite live up, I get bummed.  Do I respect when people make this their favorite movie?  Absolutely.  Is it ever going to make my list?  Nope.  That end keeps on leaving me a little let down. 

And there's my thousand words about the end of this film.