Contact and Interstellar

The poster for Contact, a film from the 1990s and of the 1990s.

 

This weekend, I’ve seen two science fiction films that deal with wormholes, were both produced by Lynda Obst and star Matthew McConaughey.

I’d never seen Contact before, so went with a mate to see it on Friday night at the BFI, and event that started with a talk by Brian Cox and Adam Rutherford to mark the 40th anniversary of the Arecibo message. The talk was interesting, and only slightly marred, as these things always are, by questions from the audience, who always seem to have their own agenda.  Fair play to Cox for simply stating that a nutcase who claimed we had never landed on the moon was talking “bollocks”.

The film itself, from 1997, is based on a novel by Carl Sagan, the renowned astronomer.  The novel was actually planned as a film script, and turned into a novel when the film couldn’t get off the ground. Eventually it was filmed by Robert Zemeckis.

The film tells the story of Dr Ellie Arroway, played as an adult by Jodie Foster and as a child by Jena Malone – now appearing in the Hunger Games films and the new Batman Vs Superman film. Arroway lost her mother during childbirth and her father when she was 9. It’s fairly obvious that the SETI project she works on is an attempt to communicate with them.  After funding is cut by the David Drumlin scientific advisor to the President, played by Tom Skerritt, Arroway and her team have to leave Arecibo (where she’s meet and had a brief relationship with a priest turned general “spiritual” guru, played by McConaughey)  seek out private funding, eventually getting it from foundation run by an eccentric billionaire, played by an almost unrecognisable John Hurt (it’s worth noting that both Skerritt and Hurt starred in Alien, and Skerritt was in SpaceCamp, an enjoyable wish fulfillment movie for kids).

Just as they are about to get evicted from the government radio telescope they are renting when they receive a message that can only be from an intelligent, extraterrestrial species, which turns out to be plans for some sort of craft. Inevitably, the world’s media descends and politicians and scientists fight over what they should do.

Scientists love Contact, because by all accounts the science is very good, and it is a good film, but there’s a good twenty minute bit – involving a plan for Skerritt, not Foster, to go on the spacecraft that could be excised and no drama would have been lost (you know Foster is going to be the one to go).  Hurt’s billionaire decamping to the Mir space station is also faintly ridiculous.  Both of these elements may have worked in the book, but they just don’t sit right here.

It’s also a very 1990s film; when the news comes of the message, various crazies and cults descend on the Very Large Array that received the message.  The Heaven’s Gate cult, that committed suicide with the appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet just a few months before the film came out, also get a mention.  McConaughey’s character is exactly the sort of person – spiritual but not religious – that got magazine covers and television appearances in the post Cold War, pre-millenial decade. Even William Fichtner as a blind scientist with amazing hearing dates it – it seems like a very 90s trope, popping up in Sneakers too.  He’s too old now, but McConaughey should have played David Koresh at some point. Foster in a starring role also dates the film – she was everywhere in the 1990s, and now she’s nowhere.  She’s due a comeback, though it seems she’s recently directed an episode of Orange is the New Black. She’s not the first LGBT person to benefit from an acclaimed series made by Netflix, then.

It’s a good film, but I’m sure if it was being made now it’d be very different.

 

Chastain, Nolan, McConaughey and Hathaway: the man cast of Interstellar with the director.

 

It’ll be interesting to look back at Interstellar in 15 years.  Set at some point in the near future, on an Earth where crops are failing and dust storms are a regular occurrence, a “caretaker generation” is in charge, and McConaughey plays Cooper, an engineer turned pilot turned farmer, a single father bringing up two children with his father in law, played by John Lithgow.  The politics of Christopher Nolan films are always interesting, and I did wonder whether he was trying to say something about the present with a discussion between McConaughey and Lithgow, the former arguing the human race needs to get out there and explore and the latter arguing against it.  There’s an interesting meeting between Cooper and his daughter’s teacher, where he is told that his daughter shouldn’t use an old textbook, because it hasn’t been corrected and still claims the Apollo missions were real, when in fact they were propaganda to bankrupt the Soviet Union.  It’s a brilliant moment because it shows you who is in control; people like Lithgow’s character who are happy just to stay on Earth and accept the inevitable rather than explore. The film’s opening, interviews with elderly people about the beginning of the dust storms, which I thought looked like something out of a Ken Burns documentary.  The end credits revealed they actually are taken from Burns’s documentary on The Dust Bowl.  If you’re not familiar with his work, then check it out, you will not be disappointed.

McConaughey and his daughter are, through some apparently supernatural force, drawn to a secret NASA facility, where they meet a professor, played by Michael Caine, and his daughter, played by Anne Hathaway (one minor criticism I have of Nolan’s films is he reliance on a small troupe of actors). McConaughey is recruited to be a pilot on a mission through a wormhole to see if the human race can live on a number of planets that have been recce’d by earlier explorers.

This is where the film lets itself down, I think.  I’d have liked a film about this caretaker generation rather than a mix of two genres.  Maybe it would have worked better as a miniseries.

The highlight of the scenes set in space and the new potential planet is a startling cameo, and the robots that were intially laughable become silver rectangles you can relate to, but I preferred the stuff set on Earth. The new planet stuff was shot in Iceland, which has been used in several films recently – Batman Begins, Prometheus and Oblivion spring to mind – I wonder what tax breaks the Icelandic government are giving film-makers.

I’d have appreciated Jessica Chastain’s involvement being kept quiet, because there is a moment early on when you realise who she is going to play.  Having said that, I don’t think I’ve seen her in a bad film.  Give it fifteen years though and she’ll be gone, if Jodie Foster’s career is anything to go by.

I liked Interstellar more than I expected, but like Contact I had reservations about it.  It’s certainly not Nolan’s best and again you could cut chunks out and not lose anything, but it’s interesting.  I imagine it will be like Contact, a cult film that scientists love but doesn’t really resonate with the public.