Interstellar (2014) Review

Official trailer

Interstellar is a bad film that’s convinced a large number of people it’s a deep one. The misdirection is accomplished through scale: everything is so large, so loud, so visually ambitious, so heavily scored that the emptiness at the center is easy to miss on first viewing. The production values are strong. The ambition is visible and real. What’s missing is the thing that ambition and production values can’t provide: a story that honors the structure it establishes.

My rating: 1 out of 10. I hated it from start to finish. The failure, using scientific vocabulary to establish credibility and then abandoning scientific logic for mystical resolution, is one of the more dishonest things a science fiction film can do, and Nolan does it at maximum volume.

The Scientific Credibility Setup

The film works hard in its first two acts to establish scientific legitimacy. Kip Thorne served as scientific consultant and his influence is visible in the orbital mechanics, the time dilation effects, and the visual rendering of the black hole Gargantua.

It was the most scientifically accurate black hole depiction in cinema history at the time of release and directly influenced later scientific papers. The film shows its homework.

The time dilation sequences are the film’s real achievement.

An hour on Miller’s planet equals seven years on the Endurance. Cooper and Brand return to find twenty-three years have passed aboard the Endurance while they’ve barely changed. These moments carry real emotional weight because the physics generating them is real, this is what general relativity predicts, and Nolan shoots the implications with enough patience to let the audience feel the horror of time becoming asymmetric between people who care about each other.

The maddening part is that this stretch is good. I’d defend the Miller’s planet sequence on its own terms, and that only makes the rest of the film harder to forgive.

Matthew McConaughey’s performance in the departure scenes, the quality of a father’s grief at leaving, at the years that will pass differently for him and his daughter, at the mathematics of love rendered in relativity equations, is the best work in the film and possibly the best work of his career. Cooper watching his daughter’s video messages while his crewmates sleep, watching her age through years he hasn’t lived, is devastating because the physics making it possible is real.

Where the Film Loses Itself

The third act abandons the structure the film spent two hours building. Cooper falls into the black hole Gargantua and finds himself in a tesseract, a five-dimensional space constructed by future humans to allow communication across time. Inside this space, he discovers that the mysterious “ghost” that his daughter Murphy believed in was him, sending messages backward through time using gravity as a medium. He transmits the quantum data Murphy needs by manipulating a second hand through gravitational variation. She decodes it. Humanity is saved.

There are multiple catastrophic logical problems with this resolution.

The data Cooper transmits to Murphy is the data required to solve the equation that allows humanity to leave Earth. Murphy couldn’t solve that equation without the data. Cooper got the data inside the black hole. He got into the black hole because humanity launched the mission. Humanity launched the mission because Cooper had already transmitted the data. The causal loop requires the data to exist before Cooper transmitted it. Nolan doesn’t address this.

At a deeper level: the film’s scientific structure established gravity as a force operating across spacetime with defined constraints. The resolution requires gravity to carry quantum data from inside a black hole to a particular location in the past with enough precision to move individual clock hands. It’s a replacement of those physics with something that works like magic while being labeled as science.

The stated mechanism, that love is a force that transcends dimensions, that Cooper’s love for Murphy is the reason he can reach across time to her, is the film’s most explicit mystical statement.

Nolan means this literally. The film argues that love is a fundamental force of physics comparable to gravity. The scientific structure that the film spent two hours establishing is dissolved in favor of an argument that would be at home in a fantasy film wearing a spacesuit.

This is the point where the film loses me completely. I can accept a wormhole, a tesseract and future humans building rooms inside black holes. I can’t accept a script that spends two hours demanding I respect its physics and then hands the whole damn ending to love.

Hans Zimmer’s Score as Emotional Manipulation

Hans Zimmer’s score for Interstellar is the film’s most effective manipulation, and I use manipulation precisely instead of pejoratively, because what the score does is legitimate as a technique while being illegitimate as a substitution for story. The score tells you how to feel at every moment, loudly and insistently, filling in the emotional responses the story hasn’t earned on its own terms.

The organ-heavy compositions communicate: this is deep, this matters, something important is happening here. They communicate this regardless of whether what’s on screen is deep, regardless of whether the story has done the work to make it matter, regardless of whether the important thing happening is coherent. The score is doing the emotional labor the script should be doing.

Remove Zimmer’s score from the third act and watch the tesseract sequence. Cooper moving through a space made of library bookshelves, shouting at his daughter across time while manipulating books and clock hands, should be the most important scene in the film. Without the score telling you it’s transcendent, it’s a middle-aged man in a space made of bookshelves yelling at a kid.

The score is the difference between those two experiences. That tells you that the scene isn’t generating its own meaning but borrowing it from the music.

The Father-Daughter Relationship

The film’s central relationship, Cooper and Murphy, is its strongest element and its most honest emotion. McConaughey and Mackenzie Foy (young Murphy) have real chemistry in the early sequences. The grief of departure, the years of video messages, the adult Murphy’s anger at her father for leaving, these are emotionally real in ways that survive the film’s third-act failures.

The tragedy is that the film uses this real emotion as the vehicle for its mystical argument. Cooper’s love for Murphy is the mechanism by which he can reach back through time. The real feeling is instrumentalized, used to justify a resolution that the logic of the film doesn’t support. The emotional truth is real. The use the film makes of it is manipulative in ways that distinguish legitimate emotional storytelling from the manufactured kind.

That’s what makes me angriest. The Cooper and Murphy material is the one thing in the film I believe, and the script cashes it in to pay for a plot hole.

Should you skip Interstellar?

Interstellar gets its 1 because it got important things right, the time dilation sequences, McConaughey’s performance, the visual representation of Gargantua, and then threw away the structure those achievements were built on for a mystical resolution dressed in scientific language. An honest mess would get more from me than a film this polished that cheats this badly. Using scientific credibility to set up a climax that throws out scientific logic is the dishonesty the 1 reflects.

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