It may just be a coincidence, or planned, but it is interesting that the release of Interstellar came only a few days before the landing of a robot on a comet. Both show humanity's thirst for exploration, to find our position in the Universe, with Interstellar using the medium of film and the ESA using the very real world of science.
I’ll get this out of the way straight away, I loved Interstellar and the only reason I am not calling it my favourite movie of all time, is simply that I want to see it again.
There I said it.
It is the science fiction movie I have been waiting for since I first started reading hard science fiction novels and short stories. This is a high concept movie, full of ideas, themes and very real scientific theories. It is not science fiction for someone who simply wants to be entertained by big fighting robots or huge space battles (nothing wrong with this form of escapism, I hasten to add). You need to be prepared to become emotionally tied to the movie, and think a lot more. Luckily you don’t need to have a degree in physics to understand the theories involved, but equally, you can’t let your mind wonder.
I won’t go over the plot and the premise of the movie, due simply to the assumption you are reading this having watched the movie. Its not a critical review. I love the movie too much to be objective, so its more of a tribute. Any quotes from the movie will be very much a case of paraphrasing.
I first became aware of Christopher Nolan as a filmmaker with Batman Begins. I was blown over by his gritty realistic take on one of my personal favourite comic book characters. The sequels helped create, in my mind, the finest movie trilogy. After Batman Begins, I discovered his skill for creating huge and interesting visuals in Inception - the bending of the city is a shot that will stick in my mind for a very long time.
So, when I read he was going to try his hand at science fiction, I was very pleased. When I heard he was planning to use real theoretical physics (by Kip Thorne), I became very interested. When I heard this involved wormholes and a huge journey across time and space, I became very excited. Add in a black hole and a story using the time dilation effects of interstellar travel and I was completely sold.
Already it was sounding like a film version of a novel by Alastair Reynolds (he uses real physics theories, issues with time dilation and in Revelation Space, a Neutron Star).
It turned out, I wasn’t far wrong in my prediction. It also contains a far more plausible Dystopian future than The Hunger Games, shown both frighteningly, and in an eerily possible way, in the teacher-parent scene, when we discover the children are being taught that the Apollo moon landings were faked for propaganda purposes so as to bankrupt the USSR into a space race they could never afford.
The movie is an emotional journey of sacrifices and survival. As humans we have always looked to expand, from leaving the valley in caveman times, to Christopher Columbus sailing to prove the world was round to sending probes out into the solar system. Whilst other life on Earth evolved due to their surroundings, we have changed those same surroundings to meet out needs. Much like the dinosaurs, we will reach our end one day on this planet, and be but a fossil, a minor memory in the vast history of this planet. Interstellar explores this as we look to other worlds to colonise and stop our inevitable extinction. “Mankind wasn’t meant to die on this planet,” one character muses.
The future, as depicted in the movie, is one of backwards thinking, of returning back to our hunter/gatherer past. We no longer worry about technical leaps, or engineering skill, only basic survival and not running out of food. I’ve never been a huge fan of how a dystopian future is depicted in a lot of movies and books, it always seems too over the top and too out of line with todays society to have a believable and logical link between the two. Hence my earlier comment on The Hunger Games. Last years Elysium did it wonderfully by having the rich and powerful living in a huge Iain M Banks style orbital habitat with the poor living on Earth. Stephen King, writing as Richard Bachman, examined this style of a future society in both The Long Walk and The Running Man (a far better story than the movie). Interstellar may not have the large rich/poor divide, traditionally found in Dystopian fiction, but it is a bleak future with no optimism. One big reveal admits that the whole plan is to populate another world with fertilised eggs and leave humans on Earth to die out within a couple of generations. Luckily, as with all dystopian futures, there are a few who won’t give up and will find a way to understand the physics needed to save mankind.
This is lead by Murph, the daughter of Cooper, the pilot on board the ship travelling to far away worlds. As a parent myself, the movie does a very good job of dealing with the relationship and bond between a parent and their offspring. I simply couldn’t imagine having to leave my son at home, to go off and explore new worlds, knowing that he will have aged a lot faster than I will have when I hopefully return. But Cooper has to do this for the good of humanity, and for himself, a man born to explore, “born forty years to soon or too late” as his father in law puts it. He has to make that sacrifice.
One criticism I have read on more than one online post, is that Cooper uses love as a mystical force to resolve matters. The reason for the criticism is simply that this is a hippy way to resolve the issues in the movie, and that trying to make out love can be explained in scientific terms is incorrect. It is almost as if these posters have not even seen the movie. Yes, love is a huge theme. Yes, love is the motivating factor to keep Cooper going. But it isn’t love that allows him to move books, or hands on the watch from inside the Tesseract. It is gravity. These posters must have nodded off when Brand was describing how time could appear to a “higher being” - going back in time would be no more different than us climbing down a mountain. They must have also been asleep when we discover that it isn’t some alien civilisation that have been trying to help us, but a future version of us that transcends both time and space, who created the Tesseract as a time portal and a way to move backwards in time, among other things.
Interstellar is on hell of an emotional roller-coaster ride. Due to the time dilation effects of being on a planet too close to a black hole, what feels like a couple of hours for Cooper and his team, is actually twenty three years on Earth. It is very hard to grasp how that must feel for a parent, knowing your children have lived almost a quarter of a century in a blink of an eye. This sequence is shown via videos sent from Earth via the wormhole and we see as Cooper does what any father would in this situation - he breaks down in tears.
Of course the movie allows Cooper to answer the one question, asked of parents with more than one kid, who is your favourite? Cooper blatantly decides who his favourite is! But joking aside, his almost blase approach to his son, is simply that he knows and trusts his son is now a man and that he can let him go to make a life of his own. His daughter though is younger and in need of a fatherly figure. She also doesn’t understand that he is leaving. One moment, via the video, she pleads with him to return due to now being the same age as he was when he left, a promise he gave her. Of course, they do eventually meet again, when at the end of the movie, Cooper returns to find his daughter is an elderly woman on her death bed. When asked how she knew he would return, she simply replies, “my daddy promised me.” Again, as a daddy myself, the promise made to your son or daughter is legally binding. It is also another case of love, keeping both Cooper and Murph alive, feeding the basic survival instinct we all have. As Dr Mann says, “the final thing you see before you die is your children.”
As a movie, Interstellar is as near perfect as possible. It is probably the best chance, we as genre fans have, for a science fiction movie to win best picture at the Oscars. In fact it could quite conceivably clear up with acting awards going to Matthew McConaughey as Cooper & Ann Hathaway as Brand, both exceptional performances.
Finally, nothing is perfect, and my one gripe was the very end. When Cooper launches from the new home of Earth, Nolan missed a great opportunity for a “money shot”. He could have mirrored the ending to Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds, when we realise just how immense the structure the humans are in. But Nolan does like to leave some things to the imagination of the audience, especially at the end of a movie, so I can see why he resisted. This though is minor. The exploration of what makes us human is handled beautifully.
Survival, love and the need to explore and further ourselves are big parts of what makes us human.
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