There are SPOILERS throughout this review. – Editor
In some ways as the third person to write about Interstellar for Reel Spirituality, I find it difficult to contribute much that is new to the conversation. In other ways, though, I seem to be one of the only people that really, really liked this film! Never has a film caused me so much to seek out others who have seen it to talk to them about what I saw. Rarely do I come home after a movie and say, “I now want to read everything I can about this movie.” Interstellar demands and then rewards serious engagement on an intellectual and philosophical level.
Unlike in Inception, where the Nolan brothers had to invent a world with specific rules and then adventure within it, here they have chosen to set their adventure within contemporary quantum physics, which could arguably be considered more obscure than the made-up world of Inception. While I am no scientist myself and cannot defend the film’s use of science, I can confidently say that Nolan and his team got a lot more right than they got wrong. And at the point where we’re talking about portraying a fourth/fifth dimension on film, I think we might be asking too much from the medium – like asking a painter to invent a new color.
While Elijah Davidson has already written about this, I am compelled to explore further this film’s postulation about the place of love in intellectualism. About halfway through the film, the characters have to decide which of two planets to explore. Both offer data that looks conducive to human life, but either could also be a bust. The data on one is better, but an explorer with whom Anne Hathaway’s character is in love is on the other. McConaughey’s character contends that this as bias, and the crew votes against her, but not before Hathaway gives a compelling speech about the nature of love. To paraphrase, she states that love is a transcendent experience that somehow goes beyond space and time (we love those who are far and even those who have died). Rather than a biological weakness, Hathaway argues that love may actually be something beyond understood dimensions that we have just begun to achieve, and that to follow it may be the key to humanity’s future.
This is a profoundly counter-cultural sentiment. Objectivity is a value in any form of science, since bias can skew data. And we certainly should not give up on striving for objectivity, even if, as post-moderns, we reject that true, full objectivity is impossible. But Interstellar is perhaps arguing that love, in its true form, is not an emotional bias but a transcendent, true reality.
This is crucial because Nolan’s films are always firmly grounded in reality. His Batman films are famous for it, and even a fantastical world like Inception has clear rules. A fanciful, hippie, feel-good moral like “love is transcendent” would normally have no place in a Nolan film. But this may exactly be the point – love is not a fanciful, fleeting emotion or feeling, but a reality of an unknown substance or dimension that humans are somehow capable of tapping into. And as Elijah wrote, this may be a different way of imagining the most central Judeo-Christian truth: that God is love, and God has revealed Godself to us in order to establish relationship.
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Ultimately, the film sides with Hathaway’s theory on love. The crew chose the wrong planet, almost lost everything, and the future of humanity ends up being on the planet where Hathaway’s lover was. Additionally, it is only on realizing that she was right that McConaughey is able to communicate the necessary data to his daughter to save humanity.
Throughout the film, McConaughey’s daughter questions whether he truly loved her. Did he leave selfishly, or can he actually save her and everyone else? It is only when she chooses to believe that her father did love her and goes back for the watch he gave, and when he banks everything on her eventually forgiving him and coming back for it, that the message is transmitted through space and time. The watch is symbolic of the complicated but true love between father and daughter and becomes the medium through which communication happens. One could easily make an analogy here to prayer – through love of God we are somehow, sometimes able to communicate and receive messages from the source of Love itself.
While humans can be seen as the heroes of the film, they are only able to achieve anything when they encounter and are encountered by love, which still seems to be a transcendent Other and not something ever fully possessed or harnessed. Therefore, there is still room for God in Nolan’s universe, and perhaps this film can help us picture God in more beautiful and transcendent ways. This is almost certainly not Nolan’s intention. But any film or piece of art that communicates, like Jesus did, that to love and be loved is to be truly in touch with the highest of all things, and could save us from our present situation is okay in my book and begins a conversation that any Christian should be delighted to have.
You might also find these reviews of Interstellar helpful:
1 More Film Blog
Christianity Today
Decent Films Guide
Larsen on Film
Reel Gospel
Tinsel (Rebecca Cusey)
Tinsel (Andrew Spitznas)
