Climate Change

Interstellar is set some years in the future, after an unexplained phenomenon called the “blight” has destroyed much of the world’s food supply and evidently killed all animals, save humans. Dust coats everything. But there’s still time for Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper–once an astronaut, now a farmer–to have a parent-teacher conference at school. And what happens there? He is given a lecture about teaching his daughter politically incorrect twaddle, like that America went to the moon in 1969. The textbooks have been corrected, he is told, to say the space program was a hoax designed to bankrupt the Soviet Union.

What? Some might look at this and say that Nolan (and his cowriter brother Jonathan) are parodying conspiracy theorists. But for those of us sunk deep into the roots of American conservatism, the signs are all there: the crunchy-granola teacher, the politically doctored textbooks, the anti-American theory, even Cooper’s quietly enraged and knowing response. And what the signs say is this: Christopher Nolan reads The Weekly Standard.

Or if not The Weekly Standard, then National Review. Or Reason, even: The movie is anti-authority in a libertarian/Randian way. Government bureaucrats are bad; lionized experts are not deserving of their lionization. (There is one line about how it’s better that government is using metal to build a spaceship rather than to make bullets, but it’s a throwaway.) But—my God—he might even listen to Rush Limbaugh. Why do I say this? Well, Mark Steyn is one of Limbaugh’s key guest hosts. And the name of the movie’s villain is also the name of Mark Steyn’s antagonist in a libel-and-slander war over climate change. 

That might be a coincidence, but I just don’t know. It is notable that the terms “global warming” and “climate change” are not used to describe the environmental depredation of the Earth—notable because that would be the easiest cultural shorthand for Nolan to use. It feels like there’s a reason for their absence.

According to the New York Post’s Kyle Smith: 

It’s also the rare science-fiction movie that will make you cry, and trust me, it will. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house during the last five minutes, very much including my own. 

So I liked Interstellar. Very much. While I was watching it. Which is why I can justify recommending it to you. The problem is that, as you walk away from the theater, it begins to make less and less sense. The more of an impression it makes on you, the more it makes you think about it, the more it begins to fall apart.

It’s impossible to lay out the problems with Interstellar’s plot without, as they say, spoiling it, and I don’t want to do that. The most I can say is that there’s time-travel involved, and, as is always the case with time-travel movies, the question is: Why didn’t they go back further in time and stop the bad thing from happening before it really happens? Most of the movie’s problems stem from that.

Even worse, from a storytelling point of view, there is a character (Cooper’s son) whose presence is taken for granted in a very upsetting way at the movie’s beginning: Cooper appears consumed with love for his daughter but barely acknowledges his son. The boy seems to be there only to serve as a major plot point in the movie’s final act. But Interstellar’s initial cut must have run too long—as it is, the movie is 2 hours and 45 minutes—and Nolan must have had to eliminate the boy’s storyline. So when he suddenly emerges again as a player at a crucial moment, the film’s climax goes out of whack.

Nolan’s movies have a pleasing gravity and earnestness, and those qualities are beautifully represented here by McConaughey—the often annoying ham whose recent embrace of intense restraint, here and in the HBO show True Detective, is a very welcome acting development. 

So I liked Interstellar. I was thrilled by its politics. I loved Matthew McConaughey. I just wish I could have admired it more.

John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard’s movie critic.