Culture Shock 12.11.14: Nolan's 'Interstellar' doesn't trust its audience

Christopher Nolan aims so high, and does so with such skill, that often it's only as we're leaving the theater that we realize he's pulled another fast one on us.

Yet as Nolan becomes more confident in his craft, he becomes less confident in his audience. He is a smart filmmaker who treats his audience as if we're a bunch of dummies. More and more, his movies condescend to us. And the more they do so, the more they spoil the illusions essential to moviemaking.

Nolan's latest film, "Interstellar," is mesmerizing in every sense of the word. It's visually and emotionally gripping as it deals with Great Big Ideas. It wants very much to be the kind of science fiction that went out of vogue after "Star Wars," and which is seeing a kind of mini-renaissance now. Ideally, given how its plot unfolds, a better title for "Interstellar" would have been "Gravity." But that name was taken.

I've argued that "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" is underrated because almost no one sees it for what it is: a humanist retort to "2001: A Space Odyssey." But there is no mistaking the fact Nolan and his co-screenwriter brother, Jonathan, mean to boldly go down the same path. "Interstellar" is about humanity taking the next step in its evolution, yet while retaining its essential humanity. It is anti-"2001" even as it updates that film's aesthetic for the 21st century.

When it comes to inspiration, Nolan looks not just to Stanley Kubrick's sterile masterpiece but also to its overlooked sequel, Peter Hyams' "2010," borrowing a few of its ideas and one of its stars, the reliable and reassuring John Lithgow.

"Interstellar" begins in our near future, where a blight is wiping out grain crops one by one, threatening the world with starvation and worse. Much of the population is implied to have died already, and all resources are marshaled toward food production, to the point that even the world's armies have been disbanded, which seems the opposite of likely. Otherwise, apart from a jab at American science education, the Nolans are deliberately vague about the political and economic circumstances of their near-future America, which is for the best. It saves them further embarrassment, and it's all merely the backdrop for the premise: The Earth is dying, and humanity needs a new home.

Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), an astronaut-turned-farmer, ends up in the pilot seat for the mission to save humanity, which involves a breathtaking trip through a wormhole to another galaxy, where three planets orbiting the same star are the best candidates for a new world.

The trip, however, means leaving behind his children, son Tom (Timothée Chalamet) and daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy), who, thanks to the laws of physics, age into Casey Affleck and Jessica Chastain while Cooper stays the same age. (One suspects the irony would be lost on McConaughey's "Dazed and Confused" character.)

Rounding out the cast are Anne Hathaway (Audrey Hepburn in space), Michael Caine (her scientist father), David Gyasi (another astronaut) and Topher Grace (adult Murph's colleague).

As the movie goes on, the Nolans begin to over-explain everything. To the movie's detriment, the characters start to sound like Wikipedia articles on general relativity and evolutionary psychology.

On a practical level, "Interstellar" is a plea for more NASA funding to safeguard mankind's future. But such pleadings seem myopic when we're on the cusp of an explosion in space travel. NASA and the Soviets no longer monopolize space. It's open to all, from the European Space Agency to the Japanese to too many private concerns to name. People are already making space happen.

On a deeper level, "Interstellar" is about the resilience of the human spirit and the enduring power of love, even against the cold equations of relativity and the savage demands of Darwinian survival. Love, it turns out, is also a survival instinct.

Unfortunately, the Nolans don't trust us to figure this out on our own. Instead, they reduce everything to New Age gibberish no actor can portray convincingly and no one but Deepak Chopra can take seriously. "Interstellar" suffers for it, and so do we.

Culture Shock 12.04.14: 'Star Trek: The Motion Picture' turns 35

Kirk inspects the newly remodeled Enterprise in "Star Trek: The Motion Picture."
Director Robert Wise added the reflected Enterprise to this shot for his 2001
"director's edition" of the film.

Thirty-five years on, "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" remains one of the Trek franchise's most under-appreciated and misunderstood entries.

That's understandable. "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" — or "TMP," from here on out — was rushed into production, with a script that rehashes Season 2's "The Changeling." As released in theaters and aired on television, TMP seems only partly finished. In truth, that's because it was only partly finished.

Robert Wise's "director's edition," released on DVD in 2001, improves the pacing and completes some effects shots that remained rough in the race to meet TMP's locked-in Dec. 7, 1979, release date.

Yet with or without Wise's touch-ups, TMP deserves reappraisal.

Wise's operatic approach to "Star Trek" makes Alan Dean Foster's story more than "The Changeling, Part 2." In Wise's hands, TMP becomes a humanistic retort to Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke's "2001: A Space Odyssey."

In "2001" humanity has lost its sense of wonder, and in the process, its humanity. The most fully realized character is HAL (Douglas Rain), a self-aware computer, who becomes neurotic, then murderous. Emotions, when combined with big brains, are bad news.

While HAL is excited by the prospect of scientific discovery, the humans in "2001" are bored by space. It's simply where they work, as mundane and uninteresting to them as an office cubicle is to us.

Wise's TMP, building on Gene Roddenberry's hopeful vision of the future, flips Kubrick on his head. Harold Michelson's production design has much the same cool, antiseptic look as the production design of "2001," but here it's a setting where humans are still human, even when they're extraterrestrials.

In "2001," Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester) naps during his trip to the moon. In TMP, the Enterprise crew stare wide-eyed and mouths agape at the immense living starship V'Ger. Wise drives his point home with an extended scene of the Enterprise flying through the energy cloud that surrounds V'Ger, our point of view shifting between the breathtakingly rendered alien craft and the crew's awestruck faces.

Eventually, the crew learn the ship is, like HAL, a living machine. But unlike HAL, V'Ger is cold, emotionless and searching. Without feelings, V'Ger can find no meaning, even after having traveled the length and breadth of the known universe.

Emotion is at the heart of TMP. The first familiar character we see is Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy), who has returned to his home on Vulcan to undergo a ritual that purges all remaining emotions. But he forgoes the ritual in order to join the Enterprise for its rendezvous with V'Ger, whose powerful consciousness Spock senses across the light years. Later on, Spock, having learned to accept his human half, weeps for the barren V'Ger as he would for a lost brother.

Decker and Ilia finally unite, and in a literal sense, when Decker becomes one
with the living machine V'Ger.

When Admiral Kirk (William Shatner) first sees the newly refurbished USS Enterprise, it's like lovers spying one another from across a crowded room. Everyone and everything else disappears.

The scene depicting Kirk's approach to the Enterprise is the film's emotional high point, and Wise milks every second of it, accented by Jerry Goldsmith's sweeping score, making it the science fiction equivalent of the Bernard Herrmann-scored love scene in Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo."

For Kirk, TMP is a love story that sees him reunited with his one true love. For two new characters, however, TMP is a slightly more conventional romance.

Decker (Stephen Collins) and Ilia (Persis Khambatta) are star-crossed lovers who come together at the end only when Decker volunteers to join with V'Ger, giving V'Ger the emotional capacity it lacks. V'Ger, Decker and Ilia become one, and the emotions that were HAL's undoing become V'Ger's salvation. Love conquers all, and humanity prevails because of its humanity.

V'Ger, like Spock, learns to feel, and the crew of the Enterprise help give birth to a new life form, one that seems far more hopeful than the creepy, ambiguous "star child" at the end of "2001."

Thanks to some "foolish human emotions," the human adventure is still just beginning.