If you’re sitting at the car dealer, ready to put money down on that snappy red sports car and another you walks in the door and tells you that he’s from the future and you should instead buy the gray sedan because that way you’ll invent a time machine, don’t you believe him. There’s been a mistake.
I mean, with quantum mechanics maybe there’s a very, very, very tiny chance that it could happen, but it’s like a one-in-ten-trillion chance.
You see, I just finished watching Interstellar, the Christopher Nolan film. Man, am I disappointed.
He got me the first time with that movie Dunkirk. A well made, handsomely crafted film right up to that scene where the pilot sets fire to his Spitfire fighter plane to keep it from falling into German hands.
It’s a beautiful scene, the plane blazing away on the twilight beach, the German soldiers running up, the pilot standing proud and defiant.
And then you see that there is no engine in the plane. It’s clearly a plywood mockup, featuring a length of pipe in the place where the engine should be!
Mister Nolan, you insult me, sir! Palming off such shoddy filmmaking as art!
You couldn’t spend fifty bucks and just put a piece of sheet metal in there? Surely you saw the missing engine during post? Did you think no one would notice? Not even airplane nerds?
And so back to Interstellar, an intriguing movie about the nature of time. There are some heart-rending scenes – “don’t leave me, Daddy!” and “you mean there IS no plan A?”
The film begins in a farmhouse on a clearly dying earth…
Stick with me here because this is a good writer’s story.
The house seems to have a poltergeist, except the unseen ghost isn’t scary and is leaving clues instead of breaking stuff. “It’s a code!” Cooper exclaims, and figures out that the waves of dust on the floor are binary coordinates which lead him and his 10-year-old daughter to a secret NASA installation. Believe me, I’m not revealing a thing so far.
Cooper takes off with three others, including pretty Anne Hathaway trying to broaden her audience appeal (I CAN do real drama), into a wormhole and another galaxy and eventually down the maw of an ancient and evidently not-so-violent black hole.
Inside – okay – here comes the revealing. Stop reading if you don’t want know what happens. We’ll wait while you decide…
Still with us? Cool. Thanks
Inside Cooper screams and whimpers a little bit – fine acting by Mr. McConaughey – and finds himself inside a beautifully rendered tesseract of unimaginable dimensions. I mean, seriously, here the filmmaking is beyond compare. It is stunning.
And then he finds himself inside the walls of that dusty farmhouse from two hours ago. There’s his 10-year-old daughter, and there’s him. He’s gone back in time. That’s cool.
We’re still okay.
Then he starts leaving clues.
Wait, you mean, HE was the poltergeist? HE left the binary clues that made farmhouse-him drive to the NASA installation in the first place?
So, current Cooper would not have gone to NASA if he hadn’t seen the binary signals future Cooper left for him in the dust.
Doesn’t that mean that future Cooper uses the time machine he’s created to go tell past Cooper to create a time machine?
You can’t do that! From a storytelling aspect, that’s cheating! That’s like Prince Charming knowing the glass slipper was Cinderella’s all along because he secretly told the fairy godmother to give it to her.
That’s a closed loop, with no entry point!
Every time loop must have a beginning, a point of entry.
But we humans, we like to close loops and tie things up. You can imagine the writers thinking “it’d be so cool if, like, it was Cooper leaving the code…” So poetic.
Mr. Nolan, you insult me again, sir!
More insulting are the people I’ve met who tell me that’Interstelallar is the best film ever. They’re so impressed by the pompous filmmaking they never even see the flaw in the story!
Granted, it is well made and breathtakingly beautiful. I can’t unsee the thousand-foot waves.
But your wiggly lights and gussied up dancing girls do not blind me to science, Mr. Nolan. Science!
So, the pretty and thunderous Interstellar is off my list of recommended movies. The Texas-sized plot hole cannot be explained away. Like the engine missing from the Spitfire, it’s too obvious to ignore.
And, Mr. Nolan is off my list of great directors. He makes a pretty film, surely, but I find his obvious disregard for the easily-fixed-but-clearly-flawed details quite insulting. It’s as if he’s saying “nobody will notice.”
Well I, sir, am that nobody.
John D Reinhart 