Interstellar

Interstellar rolls on like a long crescendoing symphony: Adagio movement – the dying earth, Allegro – space, and Scherzo – the black hole. And although the planets and the void provide a gorgeous and fascinating (if not confusing) structure to the opus, this song has as much to do with sentiment as it does with outer space. It’s an ambitious composition with big themes. Both the heart and head parts of Interstellar are complex and large-scale things, and you’ll need to stay frosty to hang in if you see it.

Interstellar’s space-time anthem takes place in an earth time – maybe not too far in the future it seems – when the world has turned against its inhabitants. Blight and global famine have reduced mankind and its governments down to a single focus on survival. Society is dotted with advanced technology – relics of what was. But the little that is left is not maintained, given up on for the more basic cause of putting food on the table. Technology is almost shunned as if maybe it were the cause of earth’s current challenges. This makes Cooper, our protagonist played by Matthew McConaughey, an anachronism on his rapidly changing earth – he’s an engineer and space pilot with no more ships to fly. He farms now, like most others do, and rages against the blight and the dust hoping, like most others do, that the next year and the next crop will be better… but it wont be better. 

Peculiar circumstances guide Cooper, a widower raising two children on his corn farm (one of the few crops that will grow these days), and his high-IQ daughter Murphy to what is left of NASA. There, Cooper meets back up with an old mentor and teacher, Professor Brand (Michael Caine), who is working on an escape strategy for those left on the dying earth. Mankind’s exodus will be made possible by the mysterious appearance of a wormhole near Saturn. Its origin is unknown but its timely arrival must be more than coincidence. NASA has sent missions through the hole already and has identified three potentially habitable planets. They are preparing an experimental spacecraft to travel through the hole to recover the previous missions’ data and determine if there is a suitable planet. Coop is the perfect pilot for this trip but there is a catch ­– traveling through the wormhole messes with time. What will be weeks and months for the travelers will be years on earth. This, Professor Brand explains, will give him time to solve the main problem of moving all of humanity to the new home… gravity, but those Coop leaves behind will be much older than him, or worse, if and when he returns.

Those with music backgrounds will likely be commenting in their head to me that the first movement of a symphony is usually fast paced – not an adagio. They’d be right of course, but Interstellar is a slow starter. It even feels a bit awkward as we trudge through the motivation for it all and get used to McConaughey as an astronaut and, oh yeah, Anne Hathaway as an astrophysicist (Brand’s daughter). But writer and director Christopher Nolan (Batman Begins, Inception) must set up the dissonance – what guided Cooper to NASA, where did the worm hole come from, who wins the race against time, man or nature (or man’s nature)? – I told you it was ambitious. But every thing starts to harmonize in space where McConaughey and the rest hit their stride.

The influences of past sci-fi film makers on Interstellar are very evident – Nolan has admitted as much: the space ballets of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the used feel of Aliens’ ships and space stations for examples. But the story is more closely comparable to that of Contact – big and bold and beyond us sometimes. Some will find Nolan’s resolution in Interstellar to consonance incredible… others may find it inane as he pits the human attributes of faith and love up against instinct and logic. He’s trying to cover all bases, striving for the cold science and beauty of 2001 and the heart and magic of Spielberg films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Yes, Interstellar is a very, very ambitious work. Not all of the film’s goals are completely obtained I think – they seem just outside of an impossible reach. But it gets us most of the way there and that feels like more than enough. 8 out of 10.

Fury

“War is hell”, my father would tell me when I was a boy, was not just a catch phrase, but the gospel truth. "There is little glory in it," he would teach, "it’s mostly just pain and death." He'd know about war I figured, having fought in two of them - he wore a long panel of ribbons on his chest when he went to work each morning and those ribbons matched the heavy medals I would dig out of the bottom of the cedar chest sometimes... stars and crosses and eagles. Yeah, he'd know I figured, and so I believed him.  And having viewed Fury’s trailers, I was prepared to be reminded of that truth when I bought the ticket. But Fury director David Ayer isn’t content with just a reminder of what I already thought that I knew; he is committed, in Fury, to drag us up and down and through the devil's hot house - and then back and forth across it again and again until that message becomes like a mantra given forth in repeated and graphic displays of physical, mental and spiritual pain - pounding over and over again until we’ve learned the lesson.

Fury is an examination of the depth and height of human behavior in war, set during the last month of the European Theater of WWII (April 1945). The allies are making a final surge through Germany - the outcome of the war is certain. And yet Germany is commanded by its fuehrer to fight on, including now it's women and children, in defense of the motherland - an order gruesomely enforced by the dreaded SS. A battle-weary tank crew commanded by U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Don "Wardaddy" Collier (Brad Pitt) is slugging it out against a sporadic but still deadly defense. The veteran team in the M4A3E8 Sherman tank, named Fury, has been together from North Africa, through Normandy, to here. The crew has lost its bow gunner - dead in the tank as it pulls into a rendezvous base. There, the gunner is replaced by Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman, Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters). Norman’s never been inside of a tank, never seen combat, and is a subtraction not an addition to the tightly bonded Fury team - “I promised my crew a long time ago I'd keep them alive… you’re standing in the way of that.” Collier tells the petrified private.

It takes a while for Ayer to get to the payoff part of the film - the desperate situation of the crew’s disabled tank in the path of an advancing enemy force. The first half of the film is spent getting to know Fury’s crew. They’ve lived through several hells and it’s taken its toll on each of them. Ayer’s soldiers, all those appearing on the screen it seems, are not only physically scarred but mentally damaged. They are hard and vulgar, their feel for human life muffled – there is no benevolence in Ayer’s war. The crew's humanity has been stripped away leaving little else but loyalty to themselves – even to Norman eventually. Pitt shines here, amidst the artillery, the fire and smoke, as the scarred patriarch of these men. But a surprisingly brighter glow comes from Shia Lebeouf as Boyd "Bible" Swan, the only “believer” in the crew until Norman comes along. His character is more interesting than Pitt’s and the more believably played up against the over the top atrocities of Collier and the debauchery of Grady "Coon-Ass" Travis (Jon Bernthal, The Walking Dead), the tanks loader – Lebeouf nails it.

The detail in Fury is exceptional, from the uniforms to the armament (real Shermans and the only working German Tiger Tank on the planet). But for a film with such attention to detail and with so much care taken to obtain realism, I was disappointed that Fury’s long battle finale was an artificial device – an unreal encounter. The contrivance provides the opportunity for a glorious (oddly) end story and some deep ( I suppose) visual symbolism, but it seems suddenly out of place and severely weakens the film. Fury is grey and grim. It is tense, at least in its second half. It is uncomfortable, disturbing and often wrenching. But, by the end, the film is less significant than these attributes would lead to believe. Unfortunately, Fury's whole is somehow less than the sum of it's parts. And yet… still a 7 out of 10.