Interstellar {2014} and the Deus Ex Machina of Time Travel

If you've been around for a while, you may have heard me say before that I dislike time travel in fiction.  I just do.  There are (a very few) exceptions, of course, but, for the most part, if I know that a story involves time travel, I can give it a friendly "Not for me" and move along my merry way with no hard feelings on either side.  

I've more or less always known that this technique is one of my fictional no-go's, but I haven't always known why — or, at least, I haven't always known fully why.  That changed when I watched Christopher Nolan's Interstellar for the first time a few months ago.  (Yep, this post has been in draft that long. *coughs*)

If you don't know, Interstellar tells a fairly familiar story:  a retired military-pilot-turned-farmer living on a futuristic Earth teetering at the cusp of ecological Armageddon is recruited by a super-secret branch of NASA.  His mission, should he choose to accept it, is to undertake a Perilous Quest into the Final Frontier in search of another planet with the capability to sustain human life.  This is getting pretty urgent since — well, ecological Armageddon, and all that.  Earth is quickly becoming uninhabitable, and the human race — or at least a viable subsection thereof — need to get off it, stat.

Now, sure, this premise is pretty old.  Some could (legitimately) argue, even worn-out.  But let's roll with it for a minute.  Suppose we did know that our time on Earth was coming to an imminent close — what should we do?  Suppose we had the good fortune to have an entire stronghold of the world's premier scientific minds devoting every ounce of their energy to finding a solution?  Suppose that network did find a solution, and that solution entailed a father leaving his children to embark on an intergalactic odyssey with an unknown return date?

Suppose that unknown return date was complicated by the fact that, due to planetary differences in the space-time continuum, a minute spent on one planet will mean a decade missed on another?  Sure, there's the fate of the entire human race to consider on one hand, but on the other, there's the possibility of a father missing the majority of his children's lives in order to try and save his future grandchildren.

What do you do with that, as a human being?  How do you grapple with such a terrible ultimatum?  How do you face consequences so intimate and so devastating when the choice at hand is so cosmic?

Those are the questions that Interstellar sets out to explore — and, insofar as the interpersonal drama and tragedy of the situation go, it succeeds.  But, insofar as the disaster plot goes, it fails.  And the reason it fails is that Nolan doesn't focus exclusively on the personal trauma caused by "wrinkles" in time.  He doesn't lean all his narrative weight onto the pressure his premise places on his protagonist.  He doesn't just highlight the emotional impact of time discrepancy on his astronauts — no, instead, he utilizes time travel, in its most urbane, most commonplace sense, as a plot device.  And that's where the film really lost me.

Understand, now, up until that point, I'd been rooting for the movie!  Sure, it's poorly written as far as the dialogue goes, but other than that, it's an undeniably stunning, unnerving, and intensely existentially evocative cinematic experience.  But around the three-quarter mark — in what has to be one of the single greatest plot let-downs I've ever experienced — Nolan suddenly offloads the entire thematic and emotional onus of his story onto the one of my least-favorite fictional schticks.

And it feels like such a freaking sellout. 

Now, from this point on, I'm going to be spoiling this movie big-time.  The spoilers won't make much sense unless you've watched the film, but they would also spoil it if you started to watch it after reading them.  Clear as mud?  Terrific. 

Basically:  if you haven't yet seen this movie and you have any interest in doing so without knowing what happens (which is probably the best way to experience it), then leave now.

Everyone gone who wants to be gone?  Great.

Here's my thing:

Having Cooper be the one who's been sending Murphy Morse code messages through her bookshelf is not only (in my opinion) singularly stupid and sentimental; it's also narratively and tonally irresponsible for a film like this one.  This movie blends the known and the imagined in a heady existential mix, exploring massive, mind-boggling, insurmountable scientific theories along the way.  And, sure, it does so while never losing sight of the very real human ramifications of those theories— but still, as a writer, you can't tease impossibility and then deliver such embarrassing ease.  If you want to use your story to put the very fabric of reality under a microscope on a literally cosmic scale, then for the love of everything holy, do that.  Don't run full-tilt towards an earth-shattering narrative revelation and then duck out the back exit at the last minute.  Don't promise me a heart-pounding climax only to give me such a flaccid denouement.

See, one of my biggest problems with time travel as a plot device is that it demolishes the stakes.  For me, at least.  You cannot convince me to take your predicament seriously if I know that, at any moment, you could glibly reverse the space-time continuum to get out of it.  

To put it in the context of this film, if I find out that the conflict unfolding before me was actually already resolved years ago, then how the heck am I supposed to care anymore?  Why the heck am I supposed to care anymore?  Whence is the tension supposed to come?  If Cooper is stuck in a five-dimensional time warp that was created by an advanced human race decades after his life, then, spoiler alert: the human race has been safe this entire time and I've just dedicated almost two and a half hours of my life to a self-defeating premise.

(Really, it's fine.  I'm cool.)

Time travel — used in this way — is just so ridiculously convenient.  It allows you, as a character, to escape the hard work of actually dealing with the consequences of your choices, or of others'.  After all, why do that when you can always just nip back in time and wipe out the past like it's written in dry-erase marker?

Granted, in this particular case, the characters do work incredibly hard to make sure that their choices help instead of hinder.  They do dedicate their lives to their goal and make monumental sacrifices to try to achieve it.  Thus, I can't say that there's no emphasis on personal responsibility in the development of the characters' conundrum.  However, I do think that resorting to time travel as a way to solve that conundrum is incredibly irresponsible — and, frankly, lazy.

Of course, that's not to say that the use of time travel in fiction is always lazy.  In some cases, it can be stunningly creative and well-executed.  A lot of my antipathy towards the technique simply springs from personal preference and has nothing whatsoever to do with quality.  (That's where the cheery "Not for me" that I mentioned at the beginning of the post comes into play.)  Nine times out of ten, time travel just doesn't work for me; it does not follow that it doesn't work at all.

Moreover, even in this case — as in all fictional cases — there is ultimate subjectivity.  Someone else may adore Interstellar's twist for the very reason I hated it.

But . . . I did hate it. 😂

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Have you watched Interstellar?  

What did you think of it, if you have?

How do you feel about time travel in fiction?