Underwhelmed
THE latest film from Director Christopher Nolan is nearly a three-hour rumination on the same themes that fuelled the Carl Sagan-inspired movie Contact. While both maybe classified as science fictionfilms with their play on alien life forms, time travel, wormholes, and black holes, the new film, Interstellar also weaves these latest concepts from theoretical physics about the vast beyond as a platform to contemplate on the most intimate of human curiosities.
By the end of the film, the viewer realizes that the heart of the movie actually goes beyond the beautiful panoramas of spaceships travelling through new planets and galaxies. And despite the great distance that the viewer is transported to through wormholes and black holes, it is a movie that actually brings us home to Earth, back to each of our own existential realities as human beings dealing with the greatest of human experiences, that of love and grief.
From the strangeness of interstellar travel to the mysteries of human relations, that is the grand sweep that the movie offers us to consider. This is the film’s strength but at the same time it’s arrogance. By bravely providing a comprehensive vista of human beings’ place among the stars, this mapping of human existence also exposes the blank spaces or black holes, if you may, of the film’s imaginary.
The film begins with the premise that the planet is dying and there is barely any food left to sustain the remaining human population. Great sandstorms blow through the landscape indicating the desertification of the planetand our species is hard pressed to look for other planetary systems that will sustain our kind’s survival.
Curious is the fact that the film played down the revelation of the causes that led to these circumstances. Just like the nebulous concept of climate change, the film failed to map out the political economic conditions of global progress and inequality that led to this dystopic condition. If the film was meant to be a commentary on the future of humanity, then there is a glaring muteness regarding the genesis and evolution of such a condition.
Perhaps, the makers augur that such problematizations are self-explanatory or that it is not necessary to make a political commentary on these matters because of the timelessness of the themes. Which is my beef with the thesis of the film.
If there are ever any attempts to provide tangential responses to this point, the film falls into the trap of questioning human motivations. The weakness of humanity is in our polar natures as human beings — where some are greedy and more selfish than others.
This was displayed in the Manichean characterizations of the main protagonists — the astronaut-pilot whose strength and self-sacrifice was driven by his love for his children and their future as opposed to the weak and selfserving human space explorer who was marooned in that inhabitable planet waiting for rescue. The best and the worse of human dispositions have been exposed as we find ourselves in a harsh mode for survival — an allegory that need not wait for the future for it is here now. Which is why the resolution of the film regarding these big issues of existence feels forced and somewhat overreaching given the gravity of the human dilemmas it wishes to resolve.
Like Contact, the future of humanity and its place in the vast and wide interstellar context is reduced to the most basic and enduring of privatehumanemotions.First,isthedrama regarding the tyranny of space and time induced by interstellar travel.Theastronaut-pilotcomes back from a different dimension without having aged at all to see his daughter which he left behind already on her death-bed, having aged all of 120 plus years.
The ghosts that her young daughter refers to are revealed to be himself, crossing the time and space dimension when he entered the black hole. With all the dramatics that the father could muster, he figures out that it was human love that created that bridge between the world of death and the daughter he left behind. Familial love endures and is made more powerful by the film against the forces of the black hole, stronger than the force that could bend light and suck in matter, space, and time by its sheer mass.
It is always exciting to have the occasion to ponder on the geographies of human existence given the advancements in theoretical physics. But with films like this that reduce the big questions of existence to Hollywood-sanctioned neoliberal theatrics, one leaves the movie house feeling seriously underwhelmed.