2014 science fiction epic
Rating: 17/20
Plot: Some guy who really likes driving Lincolns leaves his children behind to fly into a wormhole and try to save humanity.
Here’s what I’m really happy about: People still might say “Say it; don’t spray it” in whatever-the-hell-year-this-takes-place-in. That’s a phrase I always assumed would survive.
Seriously, it’s impossible to watch this without thinking of those Lincoln commercials since McConaughey is pretty much playing a space cadet in that one, too. He’s a man who can’t close his mouth when he drives a car or flies a spaceship close to black holes. There’s one of those Lincoln commercials where he’s talking about “coming back to see where you came from,” and I could have sworn that same bunch of pseudo-philosophical mumbo-jumbo was in this movie verbatim. At least he doesn’t do that weird thing with his fingers. McConaughey does what McConaughey does and almost passes as a hot-shot pilot, at least as much as Jake Lloyd in Star Wars Episode I. He does pass as an actual human being in this movie–barely–and is about as Everyman as he’s ever going to get.
I sometimes wonder if I don’t appreciate Christopher Nolan as much as I should. Nolan could make the worst movie ever, and it’s still going to be worth watching because of how ambitious he is. He’s a guy who doesn’t dive into any projects with small ideas, and he doesn’t dumb things down for the masses. A Nolan-directed complete failure is going to be more interesting than probably every blockbuster out there. I like the future he created here, one filled with all these subtle but terrifying little differences. The daily sandstorms seem anachronistic, but I dug the stuff about the Apollo space missions and moon landings being as rejected in educational institutions as creationism, the idea that there has to be a very limited number of college students, the need for farmers, the lack of a need for a military. Like Nolan’s other movies, I think you could watch this and enjoy it viscerally, but you could also intensely scrutinize the thing, strangle it until more meaning and more ideas start leaking out, bounce ideas about it off your friends. If what ends up happening with McConaughey’s character was supposed to be a surprise, I surprisingly saw it about two hours ahead of the big reveal. But that’s not an issue because the journey still matters. And what a journey it is! Part-2001/part-Lucas, this movie is a visual thrill. There are things in here that you’ve never seen before, and while I’m not usually one to be swayed by special effects and all the fixings, the practical effects, surreal imagery, and space swirlies that I in no way understood were, as the kids are saying these days, sick. I was fully convinced that I was actually seeing Saturn. I was fully convinced that McConaughey and his peeps were on a water planet with improbably tall waves. I’ve got no idea what a black hole looks like, but I was fully convinced that a camera crew had been taken into the farthest reaches of space in McConaughey’s magic Lincoln so that they could get footage of one. Earth’s pretty in this, too, but space hasn’t wowed me since I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time. The music fits perfectly and is probably my favorite Hans Zimmer score. It’s cold and minimalistic and matches the atmosphere or lack of atmosphere perfectly. At times, I thought I was listening to Philip Glass, and that’s never a bad thing. There’s one moment in this where Nolan juxtaposes McConaughey’s issues on an ice planet with Matt Damon and Matt Damon’s head and some stuff on Earth with Jessica Chastain (a pet peeve), and the music there is just so good. So much intensity throughout this, but it’s a quiet intensity.
This covers a lot of ground thematically. At first, I wondered to myself about what’s love, what’s love got to do, got to do with it. Do I need love in my science fiction movies? There’s a depth to the physics and scientific stuff that made me feel pretty dumb; this is often a little dense. Or I’m pretty dense. So I guess I should feel lucky that the emotional layer of this was there because I definitely felt that. This sprawls, but it does so majestically, in an epic way. And I’m shocked that it couldn’t edge out one of those biopics or that awful movie about that kid getting older to get a best picture nomination. Do the Academy Awards people hate science fiction or something?
Time travel nitpickers and hole-punchers! Eviscerate this one if you want. Everybody else–slurp it like the last of a vanilla milkshake.