Thanks, I Hate It: Interstellar

“What if Kubrick had made 2001 as a Lifetime original movie?” isn’t a question I think needed answering, but in 2014 Christopher Nolan stepped boldly forward to do just that with his sweepingly sentimental sci-fi flick Interstellar. It’s an ambitious movie, to be sure, and in the anxious vastness of its water planet and Matt Damon’s wild-eyed performance as an astronaut left alone at the ass-end of the universe for just a little too long you can see hints of something smarter peeping through, but Nolan’s lack of imagination—his most pronounced weakness as a director, and if you disagree I suggest you rewatch Inception and explain why a movie set almost entirely inside dreams has virtually no fantasy or sexual elements of any kind—throttles it all in the end. 

To Nolan, the unexplored enormity of space is a puzzle to be solved. His characters react to it, sure, but mostly they talk about time dilation and orbital slingshotting and the precise nature of wormholes. While the wormhole itself is an astounding visual, the film neglects to support it or any of its other sci-fi spectacles with the emotion and character work requisite to make them truly pop. The sense we get isn’t of a voyage of discovery, but of a long, irritating afternoon spent running errands. Go here, do this, check that. The few character elements we get along the way—Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) bravely believing in the Apollo missions in a post-truth world, Brand (Anne Hathaway) revealing her integrity is compromised because one of the lost space explorers is her boyfriend—are not just rote, but treated as afterthoughts. 

Comparisons to Kubrick’s work are seldom flattering, and if Interstellar weren’t so clearly courting them I think I could hold off, but set the endings of the two films side by side and you couldn’t ask for a clearer illustration of why Nolan’s vision is so deeply and profoundly boring. Hurled into a tesseract, a gigantic matrix of lightforms which connect across time and space to, like, bookshelves and watches and shit, Cooper transmits some vital scientific information to his daughter via Morse code. Then she saves the human race and he wakes up in time to hold her hand on a white, antiseptic space station as she dies of old age and he goes off to bone Anne Hathaway, who I guess is still alive and still young. I don’t really think Nolan has any ability whatsoever to convey eroticism. 

The larger point here, though, is that Interstellar takes the vast unknown and boils it down to a text message. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. McConaughey’s character solves an equation from inside some kind of giant space computer from the future and that fixes everything. Neither is the film’s big emotional crux, his relationship with his daughter, anything to write home about. He cries when you’d think he cry and it’s forgotten when you’d think it would be, and then she dies so he can go do his own thing. Where 2001 embraces the unknown, hurtling head-first into its stunning depths, Interstellar offers up the idea that actually it’s not that hard to figure it all out. If you’ve never seen one of those videos where a Russian kid solves a Rubiks Cube in under twenty seconds, this is definitely the movie for you.