Interstellar

"We didn't run out of planes and television sets;
we ran out of front lighting."

The latest offering from Christopher Nolan - one of a handful of 'name' directors in the current generation (seriously; it feels as if this generation's Spielberg is still Spielberg and the last director to open movies like Nolan does was... what? Tarantino?) - is Interstellar, a grandly epic space opera on the themes of global catastrophe and survival.

Cooper (played by the increasingly impressive Matthew McConaughey) is the last astronaut on Earth. A global crop blight has forced most of the surviving population to return to the land, but Cooper's dreams of space are rekindled when a gravitational anomaly in his daughter's bedroom offers him the chance to lead a mission to find a new home for humanity in another galaxy. As he and his crew head out to contact a set of initial survey missions, his daughter (Jessica Chastain, once grown up, so they know thye have someone who can really look serious surrounded by dust) works with the project's originator to crack a gravitational equation which will allow humanity to follow the trail they are blazing.

"We didn't run out of astronauts; we ran out of plumbers."

"We didn't run out of planes and television sets; we ran out of
space heaters."

Interstellar is a film about hope, about endurance and about the will to survive, both the personal determination to persist and the drive to propagate personified in one's children. It is also a film quite literally about big pictures; the film plays out across an eighty year time frame and not just interstellar but intergalactic distances, for the fate not of a person or a people, but the entire human race. Its centrepieces are its lovingly crafted space landscapes and hostile alien worlds, not least among these the post-blight Earth.

On a more philosophical level, Professor Brand (Michael Caine), by embracing the possibilities of 'plan B' - the genetic reincarnation of humanity from embryo stocks - puts the general survival of the race above the specific survival of its extant members. Meanwhile Dr Mann (Matt Damon) represents the more absolutely selfish imperative of personal survival, and the Coopers a middle ground for whom life has a sanctity beyond the theoretical; a sanctity born not in faith but in the bonds that connect people.

* As any fule no, Newton's Zeroth Law states that when a
father makes a promise to his little girl, classical mechanics
and quantum theory can suck it.

As might be expected from Nolan, there is a lot of thinking involved in the film. It's mostly philosophical rather than scientific; the whole plot is enabled by a 'wormhole' provided by a sufficiently advanced sponsor, although the science isn't as bad as some make out*. It is perhaps the depth of consideration given to how one defines 'humanity' as something to be saved that makes it a little disappointing that there is only one major non-white character (Romily, played by David Gyasi.) Contextually, diversity feels important, although its absence is more telling for the overall quality of the movie.

In a lot of ways, the film pays homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey. There are some very similar visuals in parts, and the presence of the 'stargate' in Saturnine orbit matches the location from the book if not the film. Moreover, the mission's AI members, the robots TARS and CASE, owe a clear debt to HAL, even if they are rather more mobile and benign.

TARS: Best character in the movie.

As a final note, for me perhaps the most interesting aspect of the film is that, although overall its view of humanity is positive, the end of the movie shows the last survivors of Earth apparently operating some form of combatant air force. That the Nolans choose to show a persistence of military influence says a lot to me, and I can't believe that it's a complete throwaway.