This week my two teens and I went to see an early screening
of Interstellar, an epic space movie
that has been eagerly awaited by the legion who are fans of director
Christopher Nolan. You can count me in that category thanks to Memento and Inception, because I love the puzzle-like qualities of those films.
Interstellar is
about a dystopian Earth that has dried up and just suffers one sandstorm after
another due to overpopulation and climate change. The only thing they can grow
now is corn. Matthew McConaughey used to be an engineer and a NASA test pilot,
but now he’s a farmer just like everyone else, trying to grow enough corn to
keep the population alive.
Eventually he ends up discovering a scientific team who is
working to find another planet that people can inhabit. He gets sent into space
to explore some possible planets, which is possible thanks to a mysterious
wormhole that has opened up near Saturn (think tesseract like in A Wrinkle in Time). Of course, his
children, and his daughter in particular, are not happy that he is going to be
shot into another galaxy, because if you had Matthew McConaughey in your family
you might want to keep him close too. I enjoyed the warmth and family dynamics
of the early portion of the movie.
The space travel that came next felt very real. I say that
with all of the space travel knowledge of someone who has both seen all the Star Wars movies AND has been to Epcot.
We saw the movie in IMAX which is likely the best (and loudest) way to see this
one. I enjoyed the tremendous visuals of the different planets.
There were also lots of stars, by which I mean the people in
the movie. But they aren’t all given something interesting to do, which is
unfortunate. John Lithgow is such a talented actor, but he’s not given much to
work with. I also really enjoy Anne Hathaway sometimes (see Becoming Jane in which she plays a young
Jane Austen in a somewhat maudlin yet sighworthy film opposite James McAvoy.
Sigh. Wait, what was I saying?). Here her character was never fully developed.
The movie is overlong and too drawn out. There is lots of
scientific talk with varying degrees of realness, not that I would know the
difference. But I did read an article afterward that told me what was real and
what was not. The point isn’t whether it was real or not, but that they talked
about it too much.
A big piece of the movie is relativity—particularly in time.
Time passes slower on one planet than on another. Let’s just say that at the
end of three hours I felt like I’d been on a space journey myself and that I came
back a few years older than when I left. Reactions from my teens: the manchild
felt satisfied by such an egregious amount of science that he could pick apart
and ruminate on. He really liked it. The womanchild looked a bit like she might
fall asleep a few times, but at the end she stood up and said “I saw a smart
person’s movie. And I think I even understood it.”
So it’s a mixed bag. For a movie that, in part, deals with
more dimensions than we currently perceive, it fell a bit flat.
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