Nov 13, 2014
I found myself alone at the theatre Saturday afternoon watching Christopher Nolan’s new epic sci-fi film. Coincidentally, the last movie I watched alone was another Nolan movie – Inception. I emerged from both disorientated and exhausted. The two films have a lot in common though not on the face of things. Inception is about a thief who steals secrets from your mind by invading your dreams. Interstellar is about an engineer who travels in space to find a new world to replace a dying Earth.
A black hole as pictured in Christopher Nolan's Interstellar.
Many early reviews have criticized Interstellar for its bad science, its plot holes, and its melodrama. Similar criticisms are made of Inception. But to dwell on these particular shortcomings is to miss the point of both films.
Both Inception and Interstellar are about explorers, but in effect they are about nostalgia, about rediscovering feelings of mystery missing in today’s world. Early humankind would have found the Earth shrouded in mystery, but we have explored, we have studied and learned and unceasingly we have lifted that fog. To be sure there is much we don’t know, but there are no longer blank spaces at the edges of our maps. For romantics, like Nolan, this must be a profound loss. In Interstellar’s trailer, Matthew McConaughey laments, "We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt."
The cast of Christopher Nolan's Inception.
This dustbowl image of the Earth slowly dying is irrelevant – a mere plot device to send McConaughey off exploring. His character, if real, would utter the same lament today because our dreams did use to be hugely ambitious. But the Earth has shrunk and so too have our dreams. Not everyone had huge dreams, but the team that put people on the moon did. And the people who first crossed the world’s oceans did. As did Gilgamesh 4000 years ago – humanity’s first epic traveller – and these explorers captured our imaginations. But where oh where should today’s explorers dream of now that the last of humanity’s major explorations have been accomplished?
Nolan’s films provide his answer. Leonardo DiCaprio and Matthew McConaughey in turn explore the internal vastness of our minds and the external vastness of our universe. But the conveyances of both explorers posited by Nolan don’t exist – nor will they ever. This is soft sci-fi, not hard sci-fi. Make no mistake about it humans are stuck on this planet. Not just now, but forever. We will go to Mars within my lifetime. Eventually we may even get just beyond our solar system, but that will only leave us at the edge of space. Even at light speed it would take years to reach beyond our solar system and we can’t get close to that speed. Star Trek’s warp technology is nonsense (although I am a big TNG fan). Interstellar’s wormhole is theoretically possible, but would be unstable and humans couldn’t survive the trip anyway. We may have conquered Earth’s oceans, but now we find ourselves at the shore of a new more monstrous one.
And herein lies the tension of Nolan’s movies. His characters are confronted first with the wonder of exploration and mystery then with the dread of reaching beyond where humans are meant to go. These films are existential experiments. Characters are thrown into worlds they cannot fathom and yet must find their way. One reviewer, Peter Travers of Rolling Stone, summed up Nolan’s talent beautifully. His gift is “how gracefully [Nolan] blends the cosmic and the intimate, how deftly [he] explores the infinite in the smallest human details.” In one scene McConaughey returns from a disastrous side trip to a planet only to find time has slowed for him, but remained constant on Earth. Back on the mother ship he watches 23 years of video messages from his children as they grow up. In an instant, to him, he has lost the most important things. No human will ever have to experience this unique tragedy and yet we share in McConaughey’s grief.
It is these crazy, melodramatic impossible moments that define these two films. But to enjoy the ride you must first suspend your disbelief, difficult for many, and you must try and feel what he’s showing you.