Some months ago I re-watched a film that was released five years ago: Interstellar. Director Christopher Nolan’s film is about hope, love, and transcendence. Amid a broader film culture that celebrates decadence and meaninglessness, this film’s vision is refreshing. Interstellar released in 2014, earning approximately $677.5 million worldwide and receiving five Academy Award nominations. Since I first viewed the film, I’ve continued to think about its rich story and themes. In this post, I will first summarize its plot, then analyze its themes, and finally comment briefly on its filmmaking techniques.
Please note that this analysis contains spoilers.
Summary
Written by brothers Christopher and Jonathan Nolan, Interstellar begins at a future time when earth’s resources are spent. Humanity will die out unless someone saves them, a fate that, for the most part, they have accepted—well, excepting the film’s protagonist, Cooper (Matthew McConaughey).
Cooper is a former NASA pilot who now lives on a farm with his daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy, Jessica Chastain, Ellen Burstyn), his son Tom (Timothée Chalamet, Casey Affleck), and his father-in-law Donald (John Lithgow). Through a series of events that he does not fully understand but that he comes to grasp by the end of his narrative arc, Cooper discovers an underground NASA facility, headed by Professor Brand (Michael Caine).
Brand convinces Cooper to join a crew of astronauts on the Endurance mission to seek a new home amid the stars. The team consists of Drs. Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway), who is Professor Brand’s daughter, Romilly (David Gyasi), and Doyle (Wes Bentley), as well as two robots, TARS and CASE (Bill Irwin). A former crew of the Lazarus missions had preceded them on this journey years earlier, attempting but failing to identify viable planets for colonization. Through the remainder of the film, the expedition confronts both a wormhole and a black hole, interacts with the challenges created by unfamiliar gravity and relative time, and visits several planets dissimilar to earth.
Themes
The Nolans, who also co-wrote The Dark Knight Rises, The Dark Knight,and The Prestige, have learned how to craft a film with popular, blockbuster appeal that is nonetheless intelligent and refuses to cater to the audience. Interstellar contemplates the big worldview questions that humankind has asked for thousands of years, including but not limited to those concerning good versus evil, truth versus falsehood, rootedness and transcendence, hope and salvation, heritage, and love
Good versus Evil
Interstellar explores the theme of good and evil through the character of Dr. Mann (Matt Damon), the lone surviving member of the Lazarus missions. Mann, as indicated by his name, represents mankind; in fact, he symbolizes the best of humankind. Prior to finding him, Dr. Brand describes him as one of the “bravest humans ever to live” and “remarkable.”
Yet as Mann’s story unfolds, his bravery is revealed as cowardice; his goodness has given way to corruption. Thematically, Mann is not unlike Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz in The Heart of Darkness (1899). Interstellar teaches that man is capable of great good but is also subject to serious evil if he exhibits pride and lacks humility. On the other hand, Cooper, who is admittedly flawed, emerges as a hero who saves mankind, whereas Mann does not. Interstellar warns viewers against pride and corruption but also inspires them to humility and goodness.
Truth versus Falsehood
A second question the film asks concerns truth and falsehood. Before piloting the Endurance, Cooper visits his children’s school. The administration explains that his daughter Murphy (named after Murphy’s Law) is causing trouble. She is showing other students pictures from an old textbook that is not government approved. Specifically, the pictures show man landing on the moon.
The educational system reminds the viewer of George Orwell’s 1984 (1949): Truth is constructed; propaganda is taught; man did not go to the moon. The administration of this future school system teaches that the U.S. government faked the Apollo missions to bankrupt the Soviets. “You don’t believe we went to the Moon?” asks Cooper, the retired NASA pilot, in disbelief.
Interstellar presents a world where truth is on trial. However, propagandists do not win the day. Truth triumphs as the film’s protagonists launch into space, see the moon, and much more. The film takes truth, and consequently good education, seriously. To demonstrate, one of the memorable images in the film is that of Murphy’s bedroom where an entire wall is occupied by bookshelves with hundreds upon hundreds of books on them.
Rootedness and Transcendence
A third theme of importance in Interstellar is that of simultaneous rootedness and transcendence. During the film’s scenes on earth, the motifs of family, agriculture, and food are prominent. Not only does the viewer observe the family eating together around the table but also planting, growing, and harvesting their own food. Interstellar is pro-agrarian and pro-family, but it aims to understand these themes in light of transcendence. Cooper is a farmer but one who is interested in education, books, history, and the stars. He respects the earth, and yet he looks to the heavens. “We used to look up at the sky and wonder about our place in the stars; now we just look down and wonder about our place in the dirt.” He longs for transcendence. “We’re still pioneers.”
Interstellar teaches the viewer to take rootedness seriously, which is manifested in a commitment to the earth and to the family. There’s something right and good about man’s working in the dirt. And yet he should not make an idol of these good things; it leads to death. He should instead understand his rootedness in light of transcendence. Thus there’s also something right and good about man’s looking to the heavens.
Hope and Salvation
Also significant in Interstellar are the themes of hope and salvation. Initially, NASA attempted the Lazarus missions, named after the biblical figure that Jesus resurrected (Jn. 11:1-46). Ten years later, they launched the Endurance mission. With blight destroying the last remaining viable crops on earth, humankind is as good as dead. And yet in the end, man experiences resurrection, and he endures. His salvation comes from the heavens.
However, according to Interstellar, hope is not from God but from a man of the future who has learned how to reach backwards across space and time to extend the hand of salvation. To that extent, Interstellar boasts a problematic humanism. And yet it rightly leaves room for mystery and for wonder. It also rightly points to the heavens for hope and salvation, except that we as Christians believe that this hope comes not from man but rather from the God-man Jesus Christ.
Heritage
Although Interstellar is a film about hope for the future, it is also a film that honors and respects the past. Perhaps the most explicit example of this theme is a line from a poem by Dylan Thomas, “Do not go gentle into that good night” (1951), spoken and echoed numerous times through the film. Other instances include those implicit references to the warnings of Conrad and Orwell (discussed above).
The Nolans also revere the past by their allusions to numerous significant films of the past. For example, Interstellar honors Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), demonstrated in its subject matter (space), monoliths (TARS and CASE), camera angles (especially of the space ship), editing (e.g., its quick cuts from earth to space and from space to a bed). They also pay homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) in the cornfield scene, to Phil Alden Robinson’s Field of Dreams (1989) in the baseball field scene, and to Steven Spielberg Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), George Lucas’s Star Wars trilogy (1977, 1980, 1983), and Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff (1983) in its subject matter and/or tone. Interstellar teaches viewers to look to the past to make sense of the present and the future.
Love
Perhaps the most important theme that Interstellar considers is love. The heart of the film is the father-daughter relationship between Cooper and Murphy. Their love for one another is sometimes selfish and stubborn. For example, Murphy must overcome her frustration with her father for his leaving and find forgiveness instead. And yet their love is also sacrificial, evidenced by Cooper’s agreeing to pilot the Endurance and leave his family for the sake of humankind, a decision that will cost them more than they know. Underneath the science and the space travel, Interstellar is a study in relationships.
Interstellar doesn’t promote a utilitarian love bound by the presumptions of rationality and science. It is more than “social unity, social bonding, [and] child rearing,” as Cooper suggests. Instead, it imagines that love is “some artifact of a higher dimension that we can’t consciously perceive,” as Dr. Brand explains. “Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that, even if we can’t understand it.” She’s right.
Interstellar deeply respects rationality and science, as exhibited by its exploration of black holes, the fifth dimension, singularity, relativity theory, and wormholes. However, it also honors the spiritual qualities of man that scientists cannot test or humankind fully understand. It respects knowledge, but it also dares to honor the mystery of love.
Techniques
Space doesn’t permit much analysis of Interstellar’s film techniques, but I will mention two of them. Perhaps most notable of the techniques are its visual and auditory elements. Visually the film is stunning: from its cinematography (Hoyte van Hoytema) to its production design (Nathan Crowley, Gary Fettis) to its visual effects (Paul Franklin, Andrew Lockley, Ian Hunter, Scott Fisher). It is contained and yet sweeping, beautiful and yet sublime. Filming locations included Alberta, Canada, and Iceland. Many of the scenes remind the viewer of paintings by personages such as Casper David Friedrich or the Hudson River School painters, except that they are often of space.
Additionally, Hans Zimmer’s score, who is renowned for his work with The Lion King, Gladiator, The Pirates of the Caribbean series, The Dark Knight Trilogy, and Inception, is an integral, powerful component to the film. It is inspiring, introspective, mysterious, and hopeful, if at times minimalistic in form. The sound mixing (Gary A. Rizzo, Gregg Landaker, Mark Weingarten) of the score immerses the viewer in a film experience that is intense and exhausting but nonetheless rewarding. Readers who did not experience the film in the theater will need a good home entertainment system to do justice to Zimmer’s score. Somewhat unique to the score is its ample use of the pipe organ, which is surprisingly fitting with its sense of grandeur and majesty.
Conclusion
In the final analysis, Interstellar is an intelligent and compelling film. It is not perfect—for example, its dialogue is not always superb—but it takes respectable risks, and it engages hard questions. Not all of its conclusions are right, such as its blatant humanism, but its themes are refreshing. Interstellar refuses to submit to the temptation of existential nihilism. Instead, it affirms meaning in life and purpose in love. It respects knowledge, but it does not presume away mystery. It takes seriously the challenges of the present, but it also recommends hope for the future. It proposes that mankind’s best days lie before him and above him. As Christians we can find encouragement in these messages, all the while remembering that our final telos is not the heavens but rather a New Jerusalem on a renewed earth.
April 3, 2019
Great analysis! I do believe it is a great film primarily because it tries to ask the big questions. It doesn’t always have the right answers but I give them a lot of credit for trying.
The film does lose something on home video – unless you have a top-of-the-line audio/video system. This was one of my favorite theatrical experiences of the last ten years. The music is otherworldly and incredibly powerful.
April 3, 2019
Thanks, Phill, for your comment. I agree with your two remarks here. And like you, I like it because it asks big questions, even if its answers aren’t always right. Blessings!