We don't deserve Christopher Nolan. His career has been built upon giving us small character drama hidden amongst humongous genre flicks, which is exactly what Steven Spielberg used to do better than anybody. Christopher Nolan is the second coming of Steven Spielberg. And yet all we seem to want to do with him is pick apart the plot holes and logic jumps his movies seem prone to. Granted, when we start to analyse the logic and rules of Inception's dream theory and dream robbers, it begins to unravel on itself. But to do that, we have to neglect the fact that the movie is really about the much smaller issue of Leonardo Dicaprio's relationship insecurities that just so happens to be represented through this immense spectacle. We also love to tear apart his love for exposition; to explain his complicated concepts with lengthy dialogue. Granted, this is a storytelling technique often frowned upon for its tendency to grind the narrative to a halt and, depending on the density of the exposition, confuse and alienate the audience. But Christopher Nolan is all about the complete opposite of that. He actively refuses to let his films halt when delivering exposition, often having them occur while the event he's exposing is taking place. He understands that timeless reason we go to the movies: to escape. If you're sitting on a roller coaster and take time to really soak in your surroundings, you'll notice the machinery and how it's operating, and if you focus on that, a piece of you won't be able to enjoy the ride as much as if you just fucking went with it. People are already starting to pull apart Insterstellar's final act, claiming that it spends so much time establishing its science to eschew all of it for an emotional conclusion. Like there was ever any science to begin with. Interstellar doesn't have a science, it has a concept. It's a concept that has groundings in science, but ultimately its intent isn't to teach you about the inner machinations of inter-dimensional travel, but to use the idea of inter-dimensional travel to tell a very small story of why a human being is compelled to survive even in the most dire of odds. Just fucking go with it.
To be entirely fair, I wasn't expecting Intserstellar to be as minimal at its core as it was. Having done my best to avoid as much advertising for it as possible, all that I was aware of was that Earth was depleted of its natural resources and Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) was leaving his kids behind to search the universe for a new home. I was expecting the film to be focused more on the species than the individual. Because as much as I just hammered home the point that Christopher Nolan's films are always smaller than they appear, they're still generally focused on the big concept. And I wasn't entirely emotionally on board with this movie at first. I'm a very selfish person when it comes to environmental sustainability. I say that I don't give a shit because I know nothing monumentally devastating is going to happen in my lifetime, and I don't care enough about the species to give thought to who comes after me. The truth is I'm just scared. I'm scared to stop and research and potentially acknowledge the possibility that our planet is declining on a curve faster than we think; that a time might come when there simply isn't a contingency plan. But what I don't joke about, what I openly care about, are the people close to me. Their lives are important to me. I don't think I'm very alone in this, and Christopher Nolan seems to agree. Interstellar is about saving the human race second, and about Cooper saving his daughter first. It's literally represented in the film as Plan A and Plan B: Plan A is to find a sustainable planet in enough time to get Earth's dwindling population out of there immediately, and Plan B is to use the frozen embryos on board the ship to repopulate humanity. This attitude results in a film built upon countless immensely moving, tiny human moments. My personal favourite occurs about a third of the way through the movie. Cooper walks past the bedroom of one of his crew mates, Romilly (David Gyasi). Romilly is staring at the wall, having trouble comprehending the idea that there's only a few centimetres between him and a vast sea of nothing that can kill him in seconds. It's so decidedly unreal. Cooper gives him his earphones, and as Romilly puts them in his ears, rainfall and thunder fill the deathly quiet. Romilly closes his eyes and breathes deep, and Cooper leaves the room.
At its core, Interstellar isn't about all the ways a human can survive, but all the reasons a human would want to survive. Cooper is easy to understand: if he doesn't live, then his family dies and he never sees his daughter again. It's simple, but it adds incredible weight to the film's more scientific moments. One of the three potentially viable planets previously visited by astronauts that could be their new home sits on the fringes of a black hole. The difference in gravitational pull means that every hour spent down there is seven years up here. Cooper, Brand (Anne Hathaway) and Doyle (Wes Bentley) touch down to assess the viability of the planet. As Brand gets closer to the information needed, Cooper realises that the landmass in the distance is actually a colossal approaching tidal wave (gravity and black holes, you see). Brand jeopardises the mission by refusing to leave without collecting the data, leaving them riding the wave. The crash kills Doyle and water logs their ship. I began to sweat as Cooper and Brand yelled at each other about whose fault it was. Every minute they spent waiting to leave was costing them days and months. When they get back to the space station, Romilly greets them. "It's been 23 years," he says almost too calmly. As if the crushingly devastating weight of that reality wasn't enough, Cooper proceeds immediately to watch all of the video messages his family had sent over the last two decades. Because in light of what just went down, this is the only thing he cares about. It's a glorious long take that focuses solely on Cooper's face as he runs the entire gamut of emotion: delirious laughter at seeing his children grow up to uncontrollable tears as he realises he wasn't there to see any of it. His son, Tom (Casey Affleck), grows up, gets married, starts having children and comes to terms with the fact that his dad must no longer be alive and that he has to let go. The consequence of human error is felt in overwhelming magnitude; mere minutes ago, Cooper and Brand were yelling about a waterlogged spaceship while Earth ticked on mercilessly. Tom says goodbye, the screen goes blank, and after a few seconds, switches back on. Cooper knows who it is immediately. "Hi Murph (Jessica Chastain)," he whispers, as he looks upon the adult face of the daughter whose heart he irreversibly broke when he left for the mission. "Today is a special day," Murph says. "Because you said that we might be the same age when you got back. And today, I'm the age that you were when you left me." Just let that sink in.
And that's only just Cooper. Interstellar has a bit of a weird conclusion to its second act, in which Matt Damon shows up and kind of fucks up everything for everyone. I was trying to reconcile the subplot's inclusion into the story, and at first, I saw it born from a feeling of necessity to give the film an easily-identifiable villain. But that's unfair and untrue. It may partly serve that purpose, but its grander goal is to explore the darker side of humanity's drive to survive. His inclusion in the film's cast was kept a secret (a move that I think has strengths and weaknesses), and his introductory scene involves him being awoken from suspended animation and breaking down in tears at the sight of another human face. "Pray you never know how good it feels," he says of that moment. It's after this that he briefs the team on the supposedly habitable planet he summoned them to. During this, the ship receives a transmission from Murph, who has just found out that Brand's father (Michael Caine), the man who convinced them to leave everything for this mission, the man who created Plan B only if Plan A didn't work, was a liar. On his deathbed, he admits that even if they can find another habitable planet, it's impossible to move Earth's population there. Plan B was the only option that there ever was. Cooper and Brand are stunned. But Dr. Mann knew. He knew that humanity would never band together to save their species if it didn't mean saving themselves too. I sure wouldn't. Professor Brand sacrificed a huge part of his humanity for the good of a species, if you choose to see it that way. In light of this new information, the mission changes for Cooper. This planet is supposedly habitable, so the job is done, and it's time to get the fuck back home to Murph. Only it isn't habitable, obviously. Dr. Mann lied, because the harsh reality that he was one of twelve people sent out to find a new home and that, through pure luck of the draw, he was sent to one giant, frozen cloud, was too much for him to bear. He didn't want to be alone, so he pressed the "This is a Good Planet. Come Here" button, knowing full well the degree to which such a decision could fuck up the mission. Because even in the face of extinction, he didn't want to be alone and forgotten. Could you blame him? It's such an ugly, raw human thing to do, and it's truly stomach-churning because it is no less human the the film's more beautiful scenes. It's showing us the other side of the same coin.
In my opinion, this is far and away the best performance of Matt Damon's career. He projects a gut-wrenching image of a man truly at his wits end. He is pure and unrelenting determination from the moment he attacks Cooper, and totally ignorant to the futility of his actions. The two men wrestle and punch each other in astronaut suits in a fight scene that's pretty fucking ridiculous to watch, but don't mistake this for an unintentionally hilarious moment. It's supposed to look stupid. There is so much happening on a grander scale, so much at stake, and yet humanity is still just two guys in big suits awkwardly smacking the shit out of each other, because it's what one of them thinks he should be doing. Mann starts headbutting Cooper's helmet to crack it. Cooper pleads with him, "There's a 50-50 chance that your helmet will shatter too!" Mann pauses. "Those are the best odds I've had in years." There's no stopping a man who has seen the other side of the abyss. He steals a shuttle and heads back to the space station, with the intent of heading to the last potentially habitable planet and surviving his legacy. Cooper and Brand place overrides on the ship to prevent him from automatically docking. Mann does it manually. Of course, his human calculations are off, and the ship refuses to air lock. Matt Damon bears the face of a man who doesn't fucking care, because rational thought shit itself and died long ago. The air lock fails. The shuttle blows up. Dr. Mann's legacy dies. There's a point earlier in his plot where he recites a Dylan Thomas poem previously read by Professor Brand. As he spoke the words, "Rage, rage against the dying of the light", I desperately wanted him to stop. He was tainting the beauty of Professor Brand's recital. He was turning a rallying cry to fight to the dying breath for what you believe in to a...well, a rallying cry to fight to the dying breath for what you believe in. And then I realised the purpose of Dr. Mann leaving his employees with that piece of poetry was to leave them with their own interpretation of it. Accompanying Cooper, it's a mission statement to never forget who he's fighting for, and to never relent or compromise. But accompanying Mann, it's changes to an insensitive, cowardly endorsement to fight tooth and nail to save yourself, regardless of the consequences. Even accompanying Professor Brand himself, in light of his dishonesty, the poem changes shape once more, pushing him to leave what makes him human behind so that a species doesn't go extinct. And it's in this that Interstellar perhaps impresses most strongly the fact that Dr. Mann is not a villain. He's just the other side of our coin. "Do not go gentle into that good night."
So, I picked one of Interstellar's big twists really early on. Many of its early scenes involve young Murph talking about a ghost she believes is haunting the house, sending her messages. Particular books are falling off the shelf of their own accord, messages are being sent in Morse Code and eventually, coordinates are provided in dust that sets Cooper off to finding NASA and his mission. Later in the film, she speaks of her ghost and how her father always assumed she called it a ghost because she was scared, and how that was inaccurate. She called it a ghost because it felt like a person, and I immediately knew that somehow, Cooper was the ghost. What I couldn't work out was why he would send the message that Murph deciphers: "Stay." And I couldn't work it out because, even though the film had sold me on thinking small within a big situation, I was still thinking too big. I was trying to work out how "Stay" could be some sort of assurance that Earth would be okay in the end, when what it really was was Cooper begging with himself not to leave his daughter. And when that realisation came, so much more of the film came into focus. Earlier, Cooper and Brand are arguing because there's two planets left to explore and they only have fuel for one if they're to also get home. The aforementioned Dr. Mann is broadcasting a signal, a more favourable sign in Cooper's eyes. The up until now unmentioned Edmonds' planet stopped broadcasting a while back, but his planet showed much promise before that. It's a tricky choice to make, until Cooper throws into the mix that Brand was involved with Edmonds, and that love was clouding her judgement. "Yes Cooper, the thought of possibly seeing him again excites me," Brand says, after putting forth the idea that her heart knows Edmonds planet is habitable because love is a science that we simply haven't yet come to understand. It was what I initially thought to be a throwaway speech (knocked out of the fucking park by Anne Hathaway), until the film's revelation locked it firmly back into place. Cooper may be the biggest idiot out of everyone in this film. The final shot reveals that Brand was right. Though, for reasons unknown, Edmonds isn't alive (old age? Relativity rearing its cruel head once again), his planet is well and truly habitable. Adding to this is the fact that, to get back to the ghost, Cooper never believed Murph. He humoured her by telling her to apply scientific theory to her belief, but all she really needed to do was follow her heart. And she was right. You don't need a much bigger indicator that real science doesn't play a pivotal fucking role in the heart of this flick. I haven't gone into the hows or whys of Cooper being the ghost, and frankly, I don't want to. It works entirely within its own logic, and that's all that should matter. Earlier in the film, Romilly uses a pencil pushing through a folded up piece of paper to explain wormhole theory (yes, it's from Event Horizon. No, that shouldn't be seen as a bad thing). I'm dumb. The audience is dumb. I need the Event Horizon lesson. We need the science distilled into these simple analogies so that we can understand its context in the greater narrative. You know, the whole reason we're watching a movie in the first place. There's two ways a conclusion to this could go. The first is a half-hour lesson on how Nolan's fourth-dimensional time travel works. The second is Cooper simply saying, "They found a way," so that the film can focus on the idea of him spending what feels like two years in space to come home and have to say goodbye to your daughter who is now dying of old age, the same daughter he fucking promised he would see again. I know which one I want more.
And the movie's not done ripping every emotion out of me either. The film's conclusion left me feeling broken, and I couldn't quite pinpoint why. For all intents and purposes, it was a happy ending. Or at least, the happiest ending it could be. Earth hadn't found a new home, but it had found a way to get Earth's population into space and it's all within their power to take it from there. So why didn't I feel happy? A night's sleep brought the answer. Cooper spent the whole film adamant that his actions were for his daughter first and humanity second, a sentiment I was able to get behind immediately, but in the final act, he comes to realise he can't save his daughter without also saving humanity, sacrificing a literal lifetime in the process. Without initially realising it, Christopher Nolan had torn apart my apathy for our species. And as if that wasn't enough, Cooper's monumental sacrifice was just to get us off Earth. The problem isn't solved. It's up to us to finish the job. He gave up everything for us to have a second chance. And after saying goodbye to his old, dying daughter, he heads off to find Brand, wherever the fuck she is. He enters the film lamenting that humanity was once a proud explorer, and he leaves the film as its new generation. He has to search. As the final shot shows, Brand is alive and breathing the air of our new home. But the wormhole to her is now closed. There's no folded up piece of paper from Saturn to another galaxy now. Cooper let go of watching his daughter grow up so we could have the tools to save ourselves. Your opinion of Interstellar is your own, and I wouldn't even begin to think I had the ability to make you think differently of it. But personally, I'm so grateful there are still people that have the ability (read: money) to create films so full of ambition, and ideas, and love for the craft, and love for us, even if they're imperfect experiences. When the majority of Hollywood productions can't get much further than "What if, like, Dracula was, like, a superhero?", I'll more than happily take one film that shoots for the heavens with zero care for how far it falls short. It's just icing on the cake that it shatters the stratosphere. Stop getting stroppy about the science and just go see a movie. Christopher Nolan is one of the few people left making them.
P.S. I couldn't find a logical place to put this following thought:
1. Topher Grace getting a tyre iron out of his car as Casey Affleck's truck approached was another hilarious, yet overwhelmingly powerful human moment of someone standing so steadfast and strong in defence of something they think they should stand for, regardless of how silly they know their actions to be. Like, what is he really going to do with that thing?
There's a moment in Frank Miller's masterpiece The Dark Knight Returns where Jim Gordon is talking to the new police commissioner about being at Pearl Harbour. He talks of the perception the world had that the soldiers that day were heroes; men immediately ready to lay down their lives for their country. He follows that up with how untrue it was; how they were not an army, but a scared bunch of young men deathly afraid of dying. But then Roosevelt's voice came through the radio, talking of the immeasurable bravery that the American infantry were displaying in the face of such insurmountable odds. It was a declaration that couldn't be further from the truth, but that didn't matter. Because it projected an image that got those frightened young men on their feet to win the war. Fury opens with a stark image of a man on a horse slowly approaching from the horizon. If this were a Western, this would be our introduction to the stoic hero-of-few-words. But as the horse gets closer, the rider doesn't appear to be dressed in American gear. It's hard to fully discern, but he appears to be German. And sure enough, as his journey continues and the camera pans with him, we find that he's directing the horse through a graveyard of American tanks. It's an image that's hard to digest: the enemy is being framed as the hero moving through dead heroes framed as enemies. It becomes even harder to swallow when the All-American saviour moves silently off the top of one of the tanks to tackle the German to the ground and stab him repeatedly in the face. This is our real hero: a man who weakly slides back into his hidey-hole, where his subordinates yell and cry and curse for the unseen battle they were the only survivors of, bar one of their crew, half of whose face lies splattered on the floor. World War II is still almost universally painted as America's finest hour in our media, and it should. They did a bang-up job of upholding the ideal of freedom. But as the aforementioned Don 'Wardaddy' Collier (Brad Pitt) says, "Ideals are peaceful. History is violent." Fury seems to aim for a different goal than its peers. It highlights the fact that American tank operators were fiercely outmatched by superior German technology, and in doing so, suggests that our perception of them as heroes was false. It was important that they were seen as heroes, because it was an image that won the war, but the reality is that they were not heroic. They were human.
Perhaps the best example of this occurs after one of the film's many skirmishes. Wardaddy has made multiple attempts at instilling in the new blood, Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman), that if he intends to survive, and to uphold his promise to keep his crew mates alive, he needs to kill. Norman's in the deep end, though. He was drafted from a desk job, and killing another human being is not a concept he can even begin to grasp. Why should he? But under Wardaddy's watch, that will not do. A surviving German soldier is found, and brought out in the open to be beaten, tortured and executed. Wardaddy calls it off, and demands that Ellison shoot the man in the back, for he cannot know that he will uphold his promise until he sees him kill. Ellison refuses. "You kill him, or he kills you!" Wardaddy shouts in Ellison's face, as he circles and slaps him. Eventually, he puts him in a choke hold, and forces his hand to grip the six-shooter, a cowboy's weapon of choice. Ellison pleads for Wardaddy to let him go, tears running down his face. A shot rings out, the German drops face first to the ground, Wardaddy lets him go and walks away. The image we're seeing is the hard and strong Sergeant dropping a necessary truth on the green-faced rookie. But the reality comes when Wardaddy walks away from the crowd. He crouches low to the ground, his hands begin to shake and tears well in his eyes, and he has to take a few deep breaths before he can compose himself and get back up. Killing that man hit him just as hard as it hit Ellison. But that doesn't matter, because as far as Ellison and everyone else is concerned, Wardaddy is the hero who kills to keep everyone else alive. And it works. When Ellison next sees German infantry, he doesn't hesitate to pull the trigger, shouting "Die, you motherfuckers!" as he plugs the men with lead. It's false courage, but that doesn't matter, because as far as everyone else is concerned, he's now the hero that they all are. There's what one does when in front of others, and what one does when nobody is watching. Both are crucial to one's identity.
Further illustrating this is a very long scene in the middle of the film, where the American infantry take occupancy of a small town. Wardaddy and Ellison find a woman and her teenage daughter hiding in their home, and Wardaddy takes the opportunity to show some kindness and offer some eggs, so that he and Ellison may have a brief moment of reprieve from the horrors waiting outside. As the woman makes breakfast, Ellison and the young girl share a moment of mutual enjoyment in the bedroom ("They are young, and they are alive," Wardaddy says). The whole thing is taken one step too far though, turning into a warped, hollow and, from the outside looking in, false family portrait. Eventually, the rest of the crew bomb in to crash the party they weren't invited to. Bible (Shia LaBeouf), Gordo (Michael Pena) and Grady (Jon Bernthal) take deliberate and disgusting measures to ensure that Wardaddy's attempt at a small memory of home is ruined. They abuse and humiliate Ellison and the young girl, and recount the actions they had to take during a particularly horrific mission that brought them closer together, concluding by pointing out that Ellison, seemingly Wardaddy's new favourite, wasn't there. Eventually, Wardaddy has had enough, and reacts violently. Gordo is ashamed and says as his voice breaks from the tears, "I'm sorry...I'm just drunk." The alcohol was the only thing that let him project the image of who he really was in that moment, and it's not until much later, when the young girl has lost her life to a German bombardment and Grady and Ellison are alone, that Grady can muster the courage to apologise for his behaviour. "You're a good man. We may not be...but you are." The film regularly takes time to show us behind the curtain, and above all else, I have a strong respect for its courage to suggest that these heroic figures we hold up aren't who we think they are, especially because of the fury (come on, Aaron) that such a suggestion could bring. But what really resonates is the suggestion that follows this, which I'll get to in a moment.
Unfortunately, what threatens to derail this stark and brutally honest portrayal of humanity in war is how "movie" much of the narrative is. The idea that this humongous series of events and character arcs occur over the space of 24 hours is really hard to believe. Let's go through a few. It's 1945, and the Allied Forces are well and truly on their way to victory, and a desk clerk who has never seen combat has been drafted to co-pilot a tank. Within the space of an hour or two, that desk clerk goes from vomiting after seeing half of a man's face plastered to a wall to running and gunning with the best of them. In less than 12 hours, a tank crew is the sole survivor of a battalion after a skirmish, move into another battalion, and become the sole survivor of that battalion after another skirmish. Minutes later, they roll over a lone landmine in the middle of a crossroads, where there just so happens to be a group of 300 SS soldiers making their way towards them. It's simultaneously frustrating and satisfying that everything in between these awkward story beats is so good, and this final act is no exception. It's already being misinterpreted by many, which is a shame, because it makes the film's point better than any other moment. 300 SS are on the march towards them, and the tank's tread is busted. Up until now, every action they've taken has had survival, however brutal, or cowardly, or necessary, at its core. But as they're trying to work out where they can hide, Wardaddy has a change of heart. "I'm staying," he declares, and after a moment of protest, his crew decide to stay as well. It's so uncharacteristically heroic of them that many have seen it as the film back-peddling on its point to deliver a traditional, heroic, Hollywood climax. I humbly disagree. There's no denying that the decision to stay and man a doomed assault outnumbered and outgunned projects a decidedly heroic image, but don't forget everything the film has said up until this point. In this moment, Wardaddy hears his own version of Roosevelt's Pearl Harbour speech, and sees an opportunity to be the hero that the world sees him as. He's not a hero. He's trying to be one. And in his crew's eyes, they see Roosevelt, and they stand up in support of the fact that in this moment, reality is secondary.
Fury's final image gave me much pause for thought. The camera gives us a top-down view of the titular tank, starting with an extreme close-up and gradually receding until we can see the carnage that these "brave few" wrought. Innumerable German bodies lie in a ring around one battered American tank. What a great photo for the papers. What an image it sends. But it's only that: an image. The crew of Fury held their ground well, and in that they had a brief moment of heroism, but eventually the reality of their situation circled around them and one by one they were picked off. Grady catches a rocket with his stomach. Bible pokes his head out of the hatch, weapon and battle cry at the ready, but gets shot in the eye before he can get a single word out. A grenade falls into the tank and goes unnoticed for a second too long, and Gordo reflexively hugs it to protect his crew. Wardaddy catches three sniper bullets in the chest and arms, and falls back into the tank as the remaining SS advance. Ellison knows death approaches - literally, in this case. "I want to surrender," he says. "Please don't," Wardaddy replies. "They'll torture you bad and they'll kill you bad." Ellison begins to cry. "I'm scared." Wardaddy looks at him with empathy. "I'm scared, too." He tells Ellison to get out of the tank through the bottom hatch and hide. As far as the SS are aware, Wardaddy is the only man left. Ellison gets out just as the Germans throw two grenades through the top hatch, digs a hole for himself beside the tread and waits. As the Germans celebrate their victory, a light is shone on Ellison. Up until now, the German army has mostly gone faceless: the obscured, hidden evil hiding in the grass, or behind a window, or inside of a tank. In this moment however, we see a face in full profile, and it's a young German soldier, roughly the same age as Ellison. The two stare at each other for a long moment, both looking incredibly fearful, before the soldier switches his light off and walks away. The two shared a moment. They were both projecting false images of bravery for the sake of their men, and in that shared recognition, they allowed a shred of true humanity. When the coast is clear, Ellison crawls back into the tank to say goodbye to his crew. Eventually, some American infantry find him and he's on his way home. "You're a hero," one soldier says to him as he pats him on the back. But we know that's not true. Ellison isn't a hero. He just looks like one. But that's what matters. We were in the tank with those men; we know how it really went down. But the world doesn't, and it's here that I get back to the film's subsequent suggestion that I held off on earlier. The world only sees that final image: pure evil stood up against to its dying breath by the righteous good, and the lone war hero who survived the ordeal. And though it may seem that Fury is humanising these people in order to say that they aren't heroes, in reality, it's humanising these people in order to accentuate their heroism. The crew of Fury stared death in the eye with fear in their hearts, to show the world that they were brave, and sure, and true. It may not be true, but for all the world knows, it is. That is all. Oh, and Fury's really good and you should go see it.
