Weekend Movie Night: Interstellar.

Interstellar movie poster. Paramount Pictures/Warner Brothers.

It's time for another addition of my occasional movie review series. Every once and a while I'll see a movie that I'd like to write about and this week it is 2014's Interstellar, staring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain. It's a great movie and I have a lot to say about it. 

BEWARE! SPOILERS BELOW!

I really enjoyed this movie for quite a few reasons. First of all Matthew McConughey was pretty good in this movie. I remember the days  when he made sappy romantic comedies all the time. Now he's a respected actor. I loved him in True Detective too, so he has really stepped his game up. He was playing against type as well and I liked how it ended up. Everyone else was well acted as well. Even the robots were well voiced. 

I do have some criticism for the film though. I knew right away when Matt Damon showed up in the movie he would end up being a traitor. I wasn't expecting him to show up, but I knew there was going to be some character that showed up to cause problems. It happens in pretty much every sci fi movie like this. Some guy just can hack it, goes nuts and almost blows the whole mission. Space Madness. Ugh. Off the top of my head it showed up in Armageddon (ugh again), Sunshine, and bunch of episodes of Star Trek. It's overplayed and like Sunshine, the movie would have been improved a bit if it had just been Man vs Nature or in this case Man vs Space. It doesn't wreck the movie or anything, I just think it is an overused trope. 

I purposely left a major "Space Madness" film off the list. In many ways Interstellar is a lot like 2001: A Space Odyssey. I could go on and on about the similarities but for this discussion only one is important. Both feature AI's/robots to help with the mission. There was one huge difference though. The AI's in Interstellar  never betray the humans.

 That is almost unheard of in science fiction these days. If the "Space Madness" trope is overused, the "Crazy AI That Kills Everyone" is beyond the pale. To see robots that follow orders, sacrifice themselves (for all intents in purposes, even though TARS survives falling into a black hole) and are generally helpful because that is the way they are programmed. In short, it was incredibly refreshing to watch a movie that uses AI this way that it more then makes up for the "Space Madness" trope. And I'd like to think, that unlike every movie ever, AI would probably work out pretty good, especially if it was relatively limited like it was in Interstellar. 

I'm afraid I don't know too much about the science in this film. I do know that the technical adviser, Kip Thorne, did a lot of work to make sure that the movie was actuate scientifically. Two scientific papers were wrote about the work they put into figuring out what a black hole/wormhole would look like. I'm no scientist, so I have no idea how accurate it was, though other scientists said it was pretty accurate. I am a student of film though, and it was the most visually impressive depiction of a black hole I have seen. 

The time travel aspect of the movie was headache inducing, as all time travel plots tend to be. That's not a knock against the film, because it at least it made me think. But thinking about causality loops, like the one at the end of the film, makes my brain hurt. After all, the movie seems to imply that the 5th dimensional beings are advanced humans from the future. Which begs the question, how did they create the wormhole? I mean if the wormhole doesn't exist, Cooper doesn't communicate with his daughter and humanity goes extinct and can't create the wormhole. So they have to create the wormhole but they can't because humanity dies out, but they didn't die out so they must have done it somehow and now my brain hurts. Time travel always seems to end up this way in movies, but I don't really know how you could write your way around it other then avoiding time travel altogether, which just isn't fun! 

Minor criticism aside, the best praise I can give to the film is the sense of hope it has. Not just the kind of hope that you have in pretty much every disaster/end of the world movie, but the kind of hope that says that humanity will live beyond earth someday. I truly believe that humanity's fate lies out beyond the solar system. 

In a world where everything seems to be falling apart and every movie is set after the end of the world and the news is dominated by horror, it is good to see a piece of fiction that says something else. Humanity is awesome. And I mean that in the original meaning of the term. The proper reaction to humanity is awe. We will overcome our challenges. The stars are our birthright, and we will not go gently into that good night. That's a message I can stand behind, and it's one that seems to have died off in the past few years. 

Compare that message to the one in Avatar, another hugely successful film, but one I really did not like. In Avatar humanity is evil. We destroyed Earth through our greed and we will do the same thing to the peaceful Navi, who are perfect in every way. The Navi beat the nasty humans, who will presumably go extinct for their sins, and the Navi all live happily ever after, until the sun heats up and they all die, or James Cameron finally gets around to making the sequel. 

I'm sick of the message in movies like Avatar.The last thing humanity needs right now is a bunch of stories about how much we suck. Sure, individually humans can be awful, and large groups of humans are capable of terrible acts. But as a species we are special. We are apex predators on a former death world, that we tamed. That alone is an awe inspiring accomplishment. We have had so many other accomplishments in science and are on the verge of understanding the universe.  We aren't perfect but we have done more with our short time on Earth then every other species throughout history combined. Movies like Interstellar remind us of what we are, all we have overcome and all we have yet to do. Lets get to work and finish our journey into the stars...