Cold comfort: Matthew McConaughey as Cooper in Nolan's space opera

Show Hide image

6 November 2014

Home from home: Christopher Nolan’s space movie Interstellar fails to launch

It’s hard to care about the future of civilisation when we meet so few members of it worth saving and most of those behave like they know they’re in a movie.

Interstellar (12A)
dir: Christopher Nolan

Love letters reveal more about the sender than the recipient and Interstellar is no exception. There is sincerity in the homage paid by its writer-director, Christopher Nolan, to two masterpieces of science-fiction cinema, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: a Space Odyssey and Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. What isn’t certain is that Nolan understands why the objects of his desire are so profound. A person who doesn’t realise that the scenes of quotidian domestic disarray in Close Encounters are as vital to that picture as any UFO should arrange a repeat viewing. And we should be in no hurry to trust the judgement of somebody who thinks 2001 would be better if its mysteries were spelled out at length. Interstellar suggests that Nolan is guilty of both misreadings.

His film is set in the US during earth’s dying days. Technological advance has been halted by poverty and environmental decline. Austerity extends into the past: history books are rewritten to portray the moon landings as fake. The country needs farmers now, not astronauts. None of which is good news for Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), who knows first-hand that space travel is real and doesn’t want his two children to stop dreaming about the enormity of the universe.

Starved of its budget, Nasa has been forced underground. Now a mission is afoot to find habitable alternative planets. A benevolent alien race has sent hints about possible replacements, much in the manner of chums emailing promising links from Rightmove. It seems there’s a des res north of the wormhole: good transport connections, only eight months to Saturn, slightly longer in rush hour. Pop round for a viewing at Tuesday teatime, three years from now.

Cooper is invited to head an expedition that includes Amelia (Anne Hathaway) and two low-tech robots that resemble a cross between 1970s executive toys and sentient filing cabinets. The shabbiness of this frugal future is one of Interstellar’s assets. There are blackboards but few computers. The scuffed glass, listless metal and dull fabrics have a lived-in earthiness lacking in the screenplay (by Nolan and his brother Jonathan). One of the neatest ideas involves giving the robots a sense of humour that can be modulated, along with other qualities such as honesty and discretion. If the film has such a feature, the humour dial is stuck close to zero. Hubris, on the other hand, must be nudging 100 per cent.

It’s hard to care about the future of civilisation when we meet so few members of it worth saving and most of those behave like they know they’re in a movie. Only McConaughey has a shambolic ease that survives the film’s extremes of tone – its portentousness and its gushing sentimentality. Credit must also go to Mary Zophres’s bargain-basement costume design, Hans Zimmer’s textured score and the invisible hairdresser who keeps Hathaway’s pixie cut consistent throughout many years in transit.

Nolan’s most appealing films, Memento and The Prestige, articulated philosophical ideas with wit and elegance. His biggest hits (the Dark Knight series and Inception) have put paid to all that. He has some claim on being both a visual and cerebral director but he has lost any ability to reconcile the two. Actual ideas, such as the part played in science by love, sit on the surface of the drama, discussed but never integrated successfully. They call out: “Hello. We’re ideas. Could somebody do something with us, please?”

Interstellar includes impressive set pieces and makes strong use of location. Iceland stands in for a frozen planet where the days are more than 60 hours long. After this and Prometheus, the country is in danger of becoming to science-fiction cinema what abandoned quarries were to mid-period Doctor Who.

The most impressive effect involves a distant tidal wave the length of the horizon. Caught up in its tremendous momentum, the marooned spacecraft could pass for a speck of foam. The sequence plays like a game of one-upmanship with Gravity, which featured the sublime joke of having its protagonist almost drown on earth after surviving all manner of hazards in space.

If Nolan were as deft a director when the action dies down, Interstellar might be a formidable work. But his film has a lot of dialogue, pages of the stuff, explanations and exposition, none of it overlapping with recognisable human speech. “We used to look up and wonder about our place in the stars,” says Cooper. “Now we just look down and wonder about our place in the dirt.” Oscar Wilde could have put it only slightly better.

Everything else sounds like it has been stitched together from movie-poster copy: “Mankind was born on earth but it was never meant to die here . . .”; “Out in space, we face great odds but not evil . . .”; “I’m not afraid of death, I’m afraid of time . . .”; “We’re not meant to save the world. We’re meant to leave it . . .” There is no small talk in the future and no medium talk, either. Conversation only ever pertains to plot. Settling down for their eight-month hibernation, the astronauts don’t say to one another “Sweet dreams” or “Sleep tight” or even: “Are you sure you set the alarm?”

› Lord Lawson's parallel world where global warming is not a concern

Ryan Gilbey is the New Statesman's film critic. He is also the author of It Don't Worry Me (Faber), about 1970s US cinema, and a study of Groundhog Day in the "Modern Classics" series (BFI Publishing). He was named reviewer of the year in the 2007 Press Gazette awards.

This article first appeared in the 06 November 2014 issue of the New Statesman, Running out of Time

PHYLLIS CHRISTOPHER/WRITER PICTURES

Show Hide image

Books

20 November 2016

What would happen if women ruled the world?

Naomi Alderman's The Power imagines how women would behave if they, not men, were the dominant gender.

Feminism has done a thorough job of establishing the existence of sex-based inequality, but less so of explaining where this gross unfairness came from. Instead, feminist engagement with evolutionary theories has been mostly of the debunking kind: Simon Baron-Cohen tells us that women are adapted to nurture while men are adapted for conquest; Cordelia Fine patiently explains why this isn’t true; and everyone resumes his or her place to repeat the same debate in another five years’ time.

Naomi Alderman takes a look at this depressing situation, grasps the whole lot in her fist and crushes it down to a new beginning. The Power starts with a simple question: what if women got the edge? What if, somehow, nature placed a thumb on the scale so that women’s tendency to be smaller and weaker than men no longer mattered? This edge, whatever it is, would have to be more significant than physical parity, because it would have to overcome more than bodily difference: something sufficient to upturn millennia of male dominance and all the traditions that sustain it.

At the start of The Power, that something has already happened. The narrative is framed by an exchange of letters thousands of years in the future between a character called Naomi Alderman and her anagrammatic counterpart Neil Adam Armon, who pleads for patronage from an address at the “Men Writers Association”. Even that casual use of “Men” as an adjective is shocking, so unfamiliar that it feels like a breach of grammar. It isn’t, however: it’s just an explosion of the male default. The Power places us in a world where woman is the “one” and man is the “other”.

Neil is trying to cajole Naomi into supporting his manuscript, which tells the story of how that world was made. “I think I’d rather enjoy this ‘world run by men’ you’ve been talking about,” she tells him. “Surely a kinder, more caring and – dare I say it? – more sexy world than the one we live in.” She does dare to say it; or rather, there is no daring at all in a woman venturing her opinion and talking smuttily to a man if women have become the superior sex class. Because Naomi has something that Neil doesn’t: she has the Power.

Some time around the early 21st century, according to Neil’s research, women developed a new organ: under the skin, in the curve of a collarbone, a muscle that allowed them to deliver vicious electrical shocks and even, in the most skilled cases, to control the bodies and minds of their victims. This organ, called the skein, is a response to male violence – we first see it in action when a teenager fights back against the gangland goons sent to murder her mother – but it can also be a source of sexual pleasure. With it, women can inflict as much violence as men can with their penises, and then some. “The power to hurt is a kind of wealth,” realises Margot, an aspiring politician, as her skein starts to flicker. The question is: what would women choose to do with such riches?

If Baron-Cohen were right, the violent potential of the skein would be countered by inherent feminine gentleness. In Alderman’s imagination, no such moderating influence exists. All of the signifiers in the sexual caste system are upended: “Boys dressing as girls to seem more powerful. Girls dressing as boys to shake off the meaning of the power, or to leap on the unsuspecting, wolf in sheep’s clothing.” But what starts as cathartic retaliation – and it really is a pleasure to see women zapping gropers and rapists with a touch of their hands – becomes first gratuitous, and then a holocaust.

The slide from tweaked normality to plausible horror is realised here as perfectly as in the best of John Wyndham or Margaret Atwood. The only thing missing, perhaps, is some acknowledgement of that uniquely female ability that Atwood identified in The Handmaid’s Tale as the reason men want to possess women: the ability to make babies.

Alderman cannot tell us how we got to where we are. Yet this thrilling, spark-throwing version of the future detonates almost everything that seems normal about gender in the present.

The Power by Naomi Alderman is published by Viking (341pp, £12.99)

Sarah Ditum is a journalist who writes regularly for the Guardian, New Statesman and others. Her website is here.