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?
No comments:
Post a Comment