In last year's Gravity, a freak accident in space forces astronauts Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) and Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) to attempt a number of trial-and-error scenarios that would enable them to return to earth. Only one of these possibilities plays itself out in the end, by when Kowalski is dead, or at least drifting in space to his death. When Stone finally lands on earth in the final scene, she is shown swimming in a dirt patch to reach for land - a nod both to man's evolution and his rightful place in the universal (both senses of the word) scheme.
Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, in cinemas currently, pointedly disagrees with Gravity's central premise. Matthew McConaughey plays Cooper, who starts the film as a farmer but subsequently turns out to be an ex-National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) astronaut. The world is coming to an end (as it must for interstellar travel of the kind Nolan envisages to make sense) and Professor Brand (Michael Caine), who runs a secret Nasa mission that searches for habitable planets, wants Cooper to lead the mission.
Critics have focused mainly on the science and possible plot loopholes in the film. Indeed the movie presupposes sufficient knowledge of higher physics on the viewer's part. Characters speak of quantum theory and relativity as if they were discussing breakfast. Wormholes and black holes pepper the conversation. Even so, for a normally educated viewer the movie is not too difficult to understand. It is the inexplicable villainy of certain characters, such as Matt Damon's Dr Mann, that jars.
Curiously, the reasons for seeking life on another planet are not even all that apocalyptic. Blight is damaging food crops and dust storms gather with rising frequency. One would hazard that at the time in which the film is based (it has to be the distant future because Indian drones excite the American heart), a new green revolution would have solved the former problem. As for the latter, to an audience raised on a diet of Judgement Day cinema, dust storms just do not cut it.
Interstellar does have its moments, especially towards the end when time truly bends - up until then we only hear versions of what Einstein has been telling us since childhood - and the plot returns to the beginning to provide a sort of cinematic closure. Having said that, the movie tries to achieve too much in its decidedly not-short span. Is it science fiction, with more science than fiction? Or is it just a thriller in the garb of post-apocalypse cinema, even though the apocalypse never truly arrives? Or is it, absurdly, a documentary, meant to teach the lay viewer about all the exciting science working our best imaginations? As has been commented elsewhere, the viewer, even while appreciating the film, is unable to make out what Interstellar stands for.
What it does not, definitely, stand for is a belief that the earth is the planet for us. While the science of space exploration in the film is sophisticated, one can't overlook a certain presumptuousness built into the film. Nolan is tapping into the general feeling of doom that pervades the zeitgeist. Even as evidence about climate change remains debatable at best, this generation has come to unambiguously accept that human action is destined to annihilate the planet.
It is rather puzzling then that one of our finest movie directors should trust the same selfish humans to colonise another planet and start afresh. What is to stop them from repeating their folly? Dylan Thomas' "Do not go gentle into the good night" is a recurrent motif in the film, serving as a source of inspiration to the men and women who risk their lives to discover new worlds. But in their, and Nolan's, so easily giving up on earth they seem to have already extinguished the light.
Alfonso Cuarón, the director of Gravity, also makes use of science to narrate a tale that ultimately showcases the discipline's failings. Let there be progress, he seems to say, but let humans not play God. When Stone returns to the International Space Station after having been "whirlwinded" in space due to satellite debris, the camera captures her for a moment, eyes closed, rotating in the comforting confines of the capsule, away from the dangers of outer space. Look closer and her posture resembles that of a baby inside the mother's womb. Cuarón is telling us that it is all very well to explore newer worlds, but it is earth and its ancient presence that will be our only saviour.
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