Interstellar has been on every cinema-goer’s mind and on every critic’s blog or any other social media ever since its release two days ago, on 7 November 2014. As in the case of any Box Office or Opening Movie, opinions are shared, some mumbled, others poignantly stated into the cinematic universe. Christopher Nolan’s epic (thought by some critics to be A Preposterous Epic, but an epic, nonetheless) has all the reasons to trigger antagonist reactions among viewers, as the challenge to label the movie into a single category is bound to undergo a chimeric process.
The opening of Interstellar already hints at the idea of an opposition-based production: although the theme is a top choice in the case of science fiction genre (we deal with space travel and about half of the time we find the characters traveling into space), the viewer is welcomed into the movie by statements of elderly people in a countryside America and who have witnessed the smothering of their homes by dust: thick, lingering, in the air and on the tables dust. Such environment perils crops and implicitly human life. It is by this time obvious that the Earth itself is suffocating, along with its suffering inhabitants. Natural disaster is a rather common plotting choice for a science fiction movie, but specifics might transcend Nolan’s creation beyond the horizon.
In a countryside area where the public belief is that people have limited their existence to agriculture (as it is the only perceivable goal of any local who does not wish to pursue an educational path somewhere outside the black dusty hole), Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a former NASA pilot, reasons: ‘’We’ve forgotten who we are: explorers, adventurers, not caretakers,’’ and draws a biblical conclusion about human existence on Earth: ‘’We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars, now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt’’.
The former pilot lives together with his two children: 10-year-old Murph (Mackenzie Foy) – who has been named after the famous Murphy Laws – and teenage Tom (Timothée Chalamet) plus his father-in-law Donald, interpreted by a charismatic and right-down sarcastic John Lithgow. Critics who chose to praise the production emphasize on its very much established relationships between characters, with special highlight over the relationship between Murph and Coop – the first being the spitting image of the latter. The issue leaves, though, a pending question: How much of Coop’s decision of going into outer space (someone had to do so, and who else would be better at such a task if not a former NASA pilot?) was based on his wish to save his children and the entire humanity and how much on his personal desire to reach the stars? The apparition of a secret organization led by Professor Brand (Michael Caine) and his crew, including his daughter (Anne Hathaway) – whose character was quite poorly built and sustained by rather flat acting – propels the plot into outer space and Interstellar into the Sci-Fi genre.
A pertinent argument on the issue of an impossible to categorize Interstellar is a video entitled Interstellar Belongs To What Genre which shares the opinion on the issue of both actors in the movie and director/ writer Christopher Nolan, an Epix video. According to lead actor Matthew McConaughey, Interstellar is definitely a Sci-Fi one, but one which must not pertain solely to that category. Anne Hathaway considers it to be an action/ adventure movie, whereas Jessica Chastain sees it as a heartily message of ‘’powerful bonds of love’’. The one who seems to chase the ambiguity of the picture is Mister Nolan: ‘’ I’m hoping that the people come to it for the thrill-ride that it is but they get something more out of it on an emotional level’’, quote which underlines that a science based production is not necessarily devoid of its humanistic significances.
A recurrent piece in Interstellar, a light motif or a chorus, if you wish, is Dylan Thomas’ poem Do not go gentle into that good night, recited by Michael Caine:
‘’Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’’ (Dylan Thomas poem, first stanza)
The matter of the poem in the movie is highly controversial and critics tend to condemn Nolan for having made such a choice (whereas others consider Caine’s reciting boring). Nonetheless, the director’s selection of such a literary piece cannot be insignificant for the theme and motifs in Interstellar, considering that it is recurrent and that it deals with a widely human concern: the impermanence of life and man’s reaction towards it. In the essay entitled On Transience, Sigmund Freud deals with the same debate encountered in Dylan Thomas’ poem, and states that there are two ways of facing transiency, of which the latter ‘’leads to rebellion against the fact asserted’’. The message of the psychoanalyst is in accordance with the Interstellar epic, as forwards the following message: ‘’it is impossible that all this loveliness of Nature and Art, of the world of our sensations and of the world outside, will really fade away into nothing. It would be too senseless and too presumptuous to believe it. Somehow or other this loveliness must be able to persist and to escape all the powers of destruction’’.