Mike Apps🍿’s review published on Letterboxd:
One of the most ambitious sci-fis of the century. Indeed some might even say its ambition exceeds its grasp. But the ambition the Nolan brothers were aiming for reflects so passionately in the narrative and its themes. Interstellar dares to be ambitious, dares its audience to engage with its lofty ambitions, even if it may be to a fault.
How do we as a species find out the answers to who we are and where we're going? Humans have tried to answer this through religion and spirituality. Interstellar has lots of talk about ghosts; the Lazarus project is a biblical reference, there were 12 astronauts exploring the wormhole no different from Christ's 12 disciples; Zimmer employs a church organ representing the metaphysical. Spirituality is embedded all throughout the film - sometimes subtle and not so subtly. It's very rare for science fiction to lean into questions of faith, and the ones that do often ridicule notions of God or higher beings.
I've seen this movie at least 17 times and I always heard that astronaut from American Beauty reference Gargantua as "a literal heart of darkness". I never gave his words much thought until now. Interstellar has a lot more in common with Apocalypse Now than I thought! Think about it: Cooper boards a vessel on a lofty journey just like Martin Sheen's; he meets Dr Mann who, just like Brando's Col Kurtz, has a reputation that precedes him as an exemplary figure tragically gone insane from isolation. Now Matt Damon is certainly no Marlon Brando, but I applaud the decision to keep his casting a secret. Dr Mann makes us question ourselves; whether we too would succumb to our instincts, to resist temptation of self-preservation over selflessness.
It's now a meme at this point, but Nolan is obsessed with time. The Endurance docking ship looks like a clock with its 12 compartments. When Mann opens that airlock creating that explosion (which never ceases to startle me), the Endurance spins uncontrollably. In tune with the movie's themes, time is spinning out of control so Cooper and Brand have to dock it, or else the mission will fail and they won't make time to see their loved ones back on earth. It's a visual metaphor that binds narrative and theme together. Cooper and his kids watch baseball in the first half of the film, as his father-in-law laments over how there were real baseball players in his day. Cut to the end where Cooper is rescued decades later, and he wakes up to kids playing baseball in a Space Habitat. Why do you think young Cooper and adult Murph wear the same brown jacket despite being apart?! Time, gravity, love, these are the things that connect us across dimensions.
"You know why we couldn't just send machines on these missions, don't you Cooper? A machine doesn't improvise well because you can't program a fear of death."
Everyone loves TARS and CASE, right? They may look like monoliths from 2001, but they're certainly no cold HAL 9000s. But there's still that difference between man and machine. A machine may outthink us but lacks the instinct for survival. That's why TARS can be nonchalant towards Cooper and Brand about entering a blackhole. All throughout the movie we see this intuition vs programming motif: from the opening where Cooper's ship crashes due to a robot taking control away from him; Cooper and his kids try to hack control over a hovering drone through the cornfields; Cooper wants to "feel the air" in order to land on the first planet since he trusts his pilot input and reflexes. Time and time again, the movie has characters fighting for control over autopilot. The fifth dimensional beings could have chosen a robot "T2 Judgment Day" style for the mission, but they chose Cooper as the best pilot - a human to save humanity.
The monologue about love is only bad if you don't believe it's true. I do believe it's true, and that's why I love it. The line works because the movie believes it and vindicates it in the end. The unapologetic optimism this film displays for mankind is much braver than the commonplace cynicism of modern times. Hathaway's Brand is a scientist drawn to her lover in a distant planet, trying to make sense of why she feels his planet is the right Planet. The movie posits that human connection transcends everything - time, gravity, even death. Cooper uses gravity to morse code a watch (an instrument to read time) he gave to his daughter with whom he connected with through love. Maybe human love combined with ethical science is what will get us through this pandemic.
Interstellar is proof that Nolan doesn't have a cynical molecule in his body. I think he might have been pessimistic in the past; broken antiheroes in Following, Memento, Insomnia and The Prestige who never escape their conditioning or find catharsis outside of their obsessions. I noticed a change in his films from Inception onwards. Nolan is choosing positive reinforcement - some might say happier endings. Maybe it's part of being a father and husband, but Nolan has chosen to look at the glass half full. Both Interstellar and Tenet have advanced human beings from the future who hold the lives of the present characters. Interstellar's fifth dimensional beings are us having evolved beyond linear time perceptions as we rescue our present selves from a dying dusty earth. Tenet's descendants are however angry at us for climate change - but the one scientist who realizes the horror of reverse entropy sacrifices herself so that present humankind won't be annihilated by her creation. This idea of future generations being our guardian angels is a fascination I want Nolan to continue exploring.
If Inception was Nolan letting us into his mind, then Interstellar is him letting us into his heart. What lies in Nolan's heart? Time....Family...... Parenthood....Faith.....Science....Posterity......all bound by Love. We are driven and motivated to push further because of love. We can fight the impossible and rage against dying light because we are human - and to be human is to love.
