Man’s ability to dream and desire to explore has long been one of our defining features and what’s helped make our species, for better or worse, the dominant one on Earth, allowing for travel far beyond what was possible only 100 years ago. However, there is an argument to be made – a valid one – that we’ve stopped looking outward to the stars and the possibility of what lies beyond, and are now entirely too focused on the pettiness of looking down. Though it hasn’t much in recent memory, science fiction can show us a better future or at least a desire to create one. Christopher Nolan addresses this, and a whole lot of other things, in his new film Interstellar, a throwback to the space exploration films of the 1960s, now using state-of-the-art special effects and IMAX camera technology.
Without spoiling too much of the movie or the ending, the gist of it is that Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is a NASA test pilot and brilliant engineer turned farmer - because everyone on Earth has turned farmer with the lack of food - who stumbles back into NASA and takes on a mission to leave Earth with a team, search for a habitable planet, and return for the surviving humans. The point being to leave Earth altogether because in so many years everything, no matter what, will be dead. Crops refuse to grow, water is drying up, etc. Where will they find a habitable planet close enough to transfer survivors (and not just their children's children) to knowing from basic science that we haven't really even found one in our universe yet? Well, through the black hole that popped up out of nowhere near Saturn when Earth took a turn for the worse, of course.
While the movie focuses mostly on "bending space and time," it also focuses on the human connection to one another as well. It's actually as if 2001: A Space Odyssey had a love child with Contact who had a love child with The Martian who had a love child with Gravity. Actually... that's exactly what it's like. And I even like the fact that I saw The Martian before this movie because the science of it is spot on, and I like the fact that Matt Damon makes an appearance in Interstellar as well. And the ending... Here's a spoiler alert, so if you haven't seen it, read no further.
The ending can go a million different ways depending on it's interpretation, and honestly, I think that's exactly what the film-makers intended. I'm not upset about the speculation of love being quantifiable, or that gravity can transcend time and space, or that if you get pulled into a black hole (and don't get ripped to shreds) you will age extremely slower than you normally would or, I guess, others will age faster because to you it seems like it's only been minutes and to others further away from the black hole it's been years - 7 years to every 1 hour one planet really close to the BH, 2 minutes to 50 years right smack dab in the middle of the BH. But, no, I'm not upset. Why? Because it's a movie. It's meant to entertain. Make you think. If you have no emotion coming out of it, you're not human because it really is a great father-daughter movie, and the movie itself does exactly what it's meant to do. So, if you have 2 hours and 45 minutes to spare, watch it. Just don't be mad about a movie (all movies really) meant for entertainment.
