- Location: Regal Longston Place Stadium 14
- I find few things more insufferable than modern science fiction that conspicuously and unjustifiably believes itself to be profound. While this behavior seemed charming enough in quaint sci-fi of the 50's and 60's -- the generic quote "We'll call this planet...Earth" pops into mind -- it is not an approach that has aged well. Let's face it: we can't all be 2001: A Space Odyssey, people. Films like Donnie Darko, Upstream Color, and Snowpiercer all give the impression that their creators read precisely one philosophy textbook: too much to settle for enjoyably stupid and yet too little to achieve authentic intelligence. Can we blame the atrocious Matrix movies for this trend, or has it always been a part of the genre?
- Regardless, the latest offender is Christopher Nolan's Interstellar. Its basic conceit is that humanity has experienced a major agricultural catastrophe while a small cadre of dedicated space scientists has secretly constructed a ship capable of traveling through the mysterious wormhole that resides near Saturn. That may seem like a lot to take in, but the film's first third focuses primarily on how rotten things have become on Earth. A rugged fellow named Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), whose background involves some combination of piloting and engineering, farms corn out of desperation to support his father Donald (John Lithgow), son Tom (Timothée Chalamet), and daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy). Of these, the rebellious Murph seems the most promising, but her obtuse teachers don't value higher education, noting that "the world doesn't need any more engineers." Personally, I would have pointed out the value of agricultural engineering, but this film champions space exploration instead.
- Incidentally, Cooper and Murph discover the secret rocket scientists (Anne Hathaway, David Gyasi, Wes Bentley, Michael Caine) because books go flying off a shelf in their home only to represent in binary the coordinates of NASA's underground research station. The scientists are so happy that a pilot has landed on their doorstep that they almost immediately ship him out to Saturn and beyond (ha!), leaving his young children to grow up into Jessica Chastain and Casey Affleck while he's away. Oh, and those books I mentioned earlier? They were toppled by a future version of Cooper himself, who eventually ends up traveling into a black hole that allows him to visit any point in space and time. Normally revelations like that are preceded by the words "spoiler alert," but I like to pretend that I'm traveling back in time to warn my past self that this movie contained that and many other stupid ideas.
- Before this review drags on for too long, perhaps it would be more efficient simply to list the positive and negative attributes of this film. Heading up the wins column is the "Studs Terkel"-style introductory narration describing conditions during this planetwide Dust Bowl event. Also impressive are the film's visuals, ranging from its depiction of a trip past Saturn to a barren ice planet to the final excursion into a black hole and...the 5th dimension! Never was this film's biggest problem its look, which is admittedly a backhanded compliment. Finally, I have to commend any film willing to tackle the challenges of special and general relativity in a mostly self-consistent manner. Sure, tidal forces only appear when convenient, and yes, radiation was completely ignored, but I'll take my hat off to any production that handles time dilation correctly. I briefly considered employing this film as an example in my upcoming Modern Physics class, but I don't trust my discussion of the film not to devolve into a rant.
- Which brings me to the problems with Interstellar. Let's say that, hypothetically speaking, you're sending ships on the sly through a wormhole to plant the seeds of life. Several questions arise. How do a few dozen people build such ships? Why don't the advance scouts, including Matt Damon's disgruntled science icon, send more than just a vague hint of what awaits future landing parties? For that matter, why send people at all when you have those remarkably talented robots? More fundamentally, why does anybody think intergalactic (not just interstellar) travel is a better option than funding farming research? For chrissakes, I'm an astrophysicist, and I would deprioritize space exploration decades before we were down to one crop left on Earth. Moving on to Matthew McConaughey: why are there two visually adept films about extra-dimensional space exploration that involve this yokel? But maybe you have to be a dope to swallow quotes like "Love is the one thing we're capable of perceiving that transcends time and space." No, love comes and goes--it's shit that sticks.
- Also featuring William Devane in a regrettably minor role.
- Kip Thorne was a consultant and co-producer and presumably the inspiration for the robot KIPP.
