Interstellar

Interstellar

Director – Christopher Nolan

Writers – Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan

2014, USA-UK-Canada

Stars – Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain

 

‘Interstellar’ is ultimately more about parenting than space adventures. This is what they call the “heart” of the film. Perhaps this may interest you more than the hard science-fiction elements such as playing with time and wormholes that occur in the second act, or maybe not.  There is little doubt that this middle section, which involves visiting other planets in a search of a new home for mankind, can provoke genuine awe: it’s what special-effects companies were made for, to provide alien landscapes and giant waves and spaceships… But despite this, there is the nagging self-absorbed feeling that the film thinks that the human individual and his feelings trump this awe. There’s the sense that it’s a little strong on the “I am centre of the universe (and other dimensions)!” It’s the same issue that troubles ‘Arrival’, although ‘Arrival’, as Philip Challinor writes, fails dramatically by making the super-smarts of its female protagonist secondary to motherhood (be smart, girls, but don’t forget what you’re on the planet for!). Not that science-fiction can’t be moving,* but these films seem to foreground and broadcast their emotional arcs in such a mainstream fashion (“Hey, we’re going to be, you know, weepy!”) that their serious treatment of otherworldly ideas seem belittled consequently.

Perhaps this would not be so problematic if Matthew McConaughey (who is, you know, great) as Cooper was not such an all-round genius at everything: not only is he an accomplished farmer but he used to be a brilliant space-craft pilot too. He kind of excels at parenting too: he’ll happily drive through a field of presumably precious crops for an exhilarating parenting moment in pursuit of an errant old drone, for example.** This means his character doesn’t really offer friction, except where he might occasionally butt heads with others. But we know they’re wrong and he’s right anyway. He is perpetually in motion by quest, but when he finally makes his way back his daughter, the moment is more-or-less waved off and brief, leading the audience investment a little short-changed. For a film so hellbent on parenting-as-cosmic-quest, the daughter should not be a McGuffin.

‘Interstellar’ won the American Film Institute 2015 award, and the blurb says:

INTERSTELLAR is proof on earth that artists provide our strongest voice to rage against the dying of the light. Christopher Nolan illuminates the darkness of deepest space with the brilliance of his singular creative vision, while grounding the cosmos in a deeply emotional tale of fathers and daughters. This is cinema at its most ambitious, with Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain providing the beating heart to this awe-inspiring work that reaches across time and space to find meaning in the unexplainable.

 Well, it is a film that is heavy on explanations for its science-fiction – black holes, other dimensions, etc – and that’s what agreeably grounds it. This is where it shines: heady ideas and existential peril that bends time and space.

The imbalance is that the sentimentality outweighs the science-fiction. The aesthetic, effects and ideas are fascinating and wonderfully executed, because Nolan excels at this stuff; indeed, this middle section is apparently credited more to Christopher than his co-writer, Jonathan Nolan. But these strengths are mitigated by the human drama being routine and pedestrianly executed. Hans Zimmer will sweep and soar at the emotional bits, for example (but the score did win an Oscar). It’s very signposted and it is not nearly as smart as it should be; or rather it relationship drama could benefit from being as smart as its concepts. 

The ending is not so much gratuitous as a little unsatisfying. Via Entertainment Weekly:

Nolan’s early take on the ending, however, essentially cuts Cooper off inside the black hole. His script “had the Einstien-Rosen bridge [wormhole] collapse when Cooper tries to send the data back.”

Actually, Jonathan Nolan's original ending would have struck me as more tragic rather than sentimental, and therefore conceptually superior. Science would not necessarily give way to sentiment.

‘Ad Astra’ is more obvious pulpy fun because its flaws are more evident so you can just go along for the ride without thinking too hard. ‘2001: a space odyssey’ remains the pinnacle of Hard Sci-Fi cinema and doesn’t feel the need to explain itself or rely on routine human dramatics. ‘Interstellar’ is better than the former but doesn’t reach the heights of the latter.

When I watched ‘Interstellar’ for a second time, I enjoyed it more as pulp, as the kind of science-fiction I was reading as a teenager (Harry Harrison comes to mind). For me, in this example, “grounding the cosmos in a deeply emotional tale of fathers and daughters” is not respectful of and belittles the cosmos.

·   * For example, that’s me as an adult on the bus trying not to cry as I’m finishing ‘Flowers for Algernon’; that’s me as a teenager wondering why Philip K Dick’s ‘Our Friends from Frolix 8’ has left me feeling so oddly emotional.

·   ** They grew the field for the film and sold the crops.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets

Luc Besson, 2017, 

France-China-Belgium-Germany-United Arab Emirates-USA

Despite the title, the scope is a handful of planets at best and the implied awe of the title is captured by an over-saturation of CGI. But it’s the weightless kind of CGI, the kind that thinks quantity dazzles itself out from the nodding requirements of realism or physics. There’s so much of it and it’s filmed with such a giddy plunging camera that it really doesn’t leave too much of a mark. There’s a stillness to ‘Blade Runner 2049’ that allows time for its CGI vistas to unlock your wonder, for example; there is even a pace to ‘Black Panther’ that allows Wakanda to make an impression with its utopian vision. Or ‘Solo’ is a decent example of a faux-realism, a credibility to give matter to the FX bonanza.Look to 'Avengers Infinity War' to see how such a saturation of fakery needs an alert script to capture interest as well as imagination. Luc Besson is very much style over substance but here, there’s the blight of inconsequentiality that comes with too much reliance on digital effects. 

But worse than this, although based on a long-running and influential pulp French comic series – even though I have not read ‘Valérian and Laureline’ by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières, going since the Sixties – the film feels like nothing but a superficial rendering with dialogue set around ‘Star Wars’ level but with less interesting characters. The bickering between Valerian  (Dane  DeHaan)and his lover Laureline (Cara Delevingne) is of the puerile and tedious kind – he is trying to make up for being a rat by marrying her why she is playing the difficult ice maiden that will give into his dubious charms eventually – so there isn’t much to take from that.

There’s the Rhianna impression showreel (reminiscent of Besson parading Natalie Portman in a variety of pop-culture personas in ‘Leon’, except with more shape-shifting), Clive Owen doing his best swishing villain, and Ethan Hawke, Rutger Hauer and Herbie Hancock cameos, but as Peter Bradshaw says, “- no actor is given much to work with in the Google Translate script.” Yes, there interesting details and incidents to distract but they ultimately add up to very little more than a cascade of diversions (the fishing episode, for example). When it uses Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ to win favour, it’s a little too close to Zack Snyder’s grab-bag mess, ‘Sucker Punch’. Worse, some of the aliens verge on the Jar Jar Binks side.

It often plays like a thin framework for the cut scenes of a console game you are watching someone else playing.The thin drama of a comic space opera is usually more evident in the transition to film and this does not have the same wit as, say, ‘Flash Gordon’ or ‘Barbarella’ to be much more than a vaguely pretty spectacle. 

Silent Running

Douglas Trumbull, 1972, USA

If there was ever a hippy science-fiction, this is it. But although it’s feel is quintessentially Seventies, its ecological message feels more contemporary that ever in an age of Global Warming. 

On a spaceship around Saturn, Lowell (Bruce Dern) and a team of ever-changing colleagues mind the cargo of samples of Earth’s terrain, now that Earth culture itself is apparently totally synthetic. Whilst Dern is thoroughly in love with these nature domes, his colleagues are less impressed, thoroughly immersed in the artificial world they have left behind. To them it’s a job; to him it’s a cause. The catalyst for this is when they are ordered to destroy the domes so that ship can be returned for more commercial use. Dern finds himself taking drastic action to preserve the last vestige of an Earth he doesn’t really care to return to.

Trumbull’s spaceship effects are exemplary, as you would expect from he who worked on ‘2001: a space odyssey’, and worth the price of admission alone. The model work is  The shot of the spaceship against the rings of Saturn is gorgeous. This is the kind of sci-fi that looks lived in, where the hardware is dirty and scuffed and all the more working class for it. The film starts with pretty pictures of plants and wildlife before revealing its all on a spaceship. Characterisation is straightforward: we know his colleagues are wrong’uns and probably doomed by the way they recklessly speed their buggies around inconsiderately. Dern kills his colleagues – more from the desperation of the moment than premeditated – and thinks he can survive alone on the space station with Huey. Dewy and Louie the maintenance robots. But humans are predominantly social and nature turns out to just simply not be enough. Then, if there’s any doubt of the film’s hippy-leanings, Joan Baez sings about children running free.  

But it's mostly Dern's one-man show, and he does a fine job of articulating the regret beneath the fortitude. Mostly, it’s Dern’s relationship with the pet-like robots which he and we anthropomorphise that give the emotional charge. "Amazing companions on an incredible adventure" the poster blurb says. They are diminutive and just this side of cutesy, falling just short of R2D2 twittering – although at one point one nudges the other when the human is approaching. Even so, he can’t quite make them human enough; after all, they don’t talk. As a kid, I used to cry at the eventual perpetual oblivious solitude of the robot at the end. Its sentiment is on its sleeve and powered by emotion and human failing rather than swamping man with metaphysics and his smallness in the scheme of things; indeed, Trumbull apparently made this as reaction to Kubrick’s ‘2001’. It’s probably this sentiment that leads Mark Kermode to say it’s superior to ‘2001’, as that is more his taste. It certainly means this is a less questioning work when the answers are so clearly evident: nature good; business bad; robots cute; boorishness bad; anthropomorphising good; etc. But it is more morally complex than that – as John Kenneth Muir details - as Lowell cannot reconcile his actions with his morality and humanity. 

“Silent Running asks viewers to countenance a man who wants to save the last forest of Earth, and does, but pays too a high a personal and moral price to achieve that noble end.” 

(But more than that, I wonder how it takes Lowell, as an ecologist, so long to realise that sunlight might be important to the growth of the forest. After all, the ultraviolet lights are right there.)

Nevertheless, that its agenda is so emotionally transparent and achieves its effect with a little anthropomorphising blunts its edge and – as a retort to ‘2001’ – leaves mankind foolhardy, desperate and emotionally fallible. In that sense, it's more of the Ray Bradbury strain of sci-fi. As a comparison, ‘2001’ is the more optimistic vision – one of transcendence – and ‘Silent Running’ as a riposte is left wanting by reducing humanity to self-destruction. Nevertheless, as a science-fiction vision and cautionary tale about man’s casual indifference to nature, it’s vivid and highly enjoyable and earns its place as a Seventies genre classic.

Life

Daniel Espinosa, 2017, USA

Surely it was obvious from the trailer that this was going to be an unambitious ‘Alien’ derivative – and it is. It starts with a long, single take that takes in the entire first scene and gives us a guided tour of the spaceship and crew/victims. This moment and the subsequent “in space” views follow the precedent set by ‘Gravity’. They take onboard a sample of Martian soil and find in a living organism. It’s named “Calvin” by kids back on Earth and soon does what we expect: whilst the humans are falling for it, it starts growing and learning and we just wait for it to turn the tables. Perhaps inevitably, these opening scenes are where the alien is most fascinating, showing its cunning in making a scalpel to wield and then scrambling around the room to make its escape. Then it begins to work its way through the crew, full of actors who are much better than the material but having fun anyhow. There is nothing new here but if you came for the alien, its displays state-of-the-art effects and, perhaps more importantly, “Calvin” is mostly great and fearsome.

In conversation, I was recently in full-flow when berating ‘Kong: Skull Island’ when my friend said, “I think you’re over-thinking it. It’s a film about a giant ape hitting things.” And guilty as charged - that's what I'm here for - but that was because I felt insulted at how it was served up and that meant I didn't feel like enjoying myself so much. It wasn’t the monster stuff I had a problem with – I could even overlook the fact that the island didn’t display at all the wear-and-tear of behemoths and other failures in internal logic – but everything else seemed lazy and weaker. Talking about the original ‘King Kong’ with another friend and I was saying that maybe we overlooked the “Monsters Good/Script Bad” rule that besets these things because that was old, but in the end we agreed that the original ‘Kong’ classic had archetypes that didn’t insult us in the same way. We expect new films to know better, I guess. 

All this to say that even if ‘Life’ is derivative, it serves up a good monster and has a decent script, and therefore is genuinely fun. It doesn’t deliver more than it promises but it entertains.

Pictures from Mars! (really)

It's Mars!!!

Fantastic.