As penned by Nolan and his brother Jonathan, both the intimate and the cosmic narrative threads are absolutely essential to each other. Here, in contrast to most science-fiction action films, the personal dramas of the main characters do not function merely to humanize-and provide occasional relief from-the genre’s primary emphasis on scientific exposition a depopulated, if spectacular, outer space and the technological operations of a completely unrelated mission. However, these are not merely parallel narratives in which one thread is substantially unnecessary and subordinated to the other. Again accomplished in the film’s last third, this reconciliation occurs not in theory but through experience, and resolves fundamental incompatibilities between Einstein’s geometrical description of the relative structure of space-time and quantum physics’ mathematical description of the particle- and wave-like behavior of both subatomic and macroscopic physical matter. Central to the plot, with humanity’s future hanging in the balance, the cosmic thread is also about reconciliation, and the desperate need for a unified theory of quantum gravity. Immense in its intensity, the personal thread ultimately reconciles a widowed father, Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), the eventual leader of the interstellar mission, and his earth-bound daughter, Murphy (played at different ages by Mackenzie Foy, Jessica Chastain, and Ellen Burstyn), after a decades-long and emotionally fraught separation in both space and time. Simultaneously, all three play out the tension between “intimate” and “exterior” space-time and, in the film’s moving final third, resolve-by unifying-their different immensities and seemingly incompatible values.Īt the narrative level, this resolution occurs in two plot threads-one personal, the other cosmic. Fully aware that cinema is, itself, a time machine, he has expanded-and compounded-the relativity of space-time and its effects by layering them in the multiple dimensions not only of Interstellar’s narrative but also of the film’s overall structure and its immersive mise en scène. Nolan, however, makes this familiar trajectory wonderfully strange and intellectually compelling by imaginatively directing it into and through a wormhole of his own design. In the crew’s search, there are, of course, increasing complications-both cosmic and human. It is then fueled by a decimated NASA’s exploratory and obstacle-filled mission into deep space and through a wormhole that, folding space in on itself, will, it is hoped, also become a “time machine,” making it possible to find a habitable new home planet in an otherwise unreachable distant galaxy. Set in the near future, Interstellar’s action is motivated by the exhaustion of an Earth that is rapidly turning into a polluted dust-bowl incapable of sustaining its slowly starving and increasingly ill population. Indeed, it weaves an intricate fabric of three-dimensional space, fourth-dimensional time, and a cross-dimensional gravity that enfolds-and blends-cosmic and intimate immensity to transform what, in other hands than Nolan’s, would have likely been a comfortably predictable variation of a long-familiar science-fiction plot about our-and our planet’s-impending extinction. Interstellar, however, is full of ideas as well as wondrous imagery. In sum, suggesting just another science-fiction blockbuster set in outer space and full of special effects rather than ideas, the title is an annunciation hardly worthy of the complex multidimensionality of the film itself. Finally, given its empirically neutral tone, it conveys nothing of the film’s heart-rending affect and moral gravity, which, “encouraging each other in their growth,” expand individual anxieties about the future of one’s own children into collective responsibility for the future of others. Outwardly focused only on the immensity of the cosmos, it also ignores the film’s inward focus on the immensity of intimate space as it is lived in intense love and irrevocable loss by an earthly-and time-bound-human family. Pointing only to exterior space and distant stars, it obscures the film’s more urgent interest in the fourth dimension of time and the foreshortened future of life on our own planet. The title of Christopher Nolan’s extraordinarily ambitious science-fiction film Interstellar is three-dimensionally flat and far less descriptive than it should be. It is through their “immensity” that these two kinds of space. Intimate space and exterior space keep encouraging each other, as it were, in their growth.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |