Just watched “Interstellar”, the new movie by Christopher Nolan. There’s been already a lot of discussion on the Internets, so I have been very curious.
I thought it was amazing!
A few thoughts (and spoilers) after the break:
We did not get much introduction into the Earth of our protagonists. There were only hints initially, that this was an apocalyptic future, where mankind was struggling to survive and a farmer was more important than an engineer or scientist. I think the first time it struck me, when Matthew McConaughey went to the meeting with the teacher of his daughter, and we learned that the official curriculum taught, that the moon landing never happened.
This really stirred me – I would not want to live in a world, where people believed that one of the greatest achievements of mankind was fake.
There were many more beautiful quotes and scenes – I loved the recurrent quoting of one of my favourite poems, and that “we were supposed to be explorers, not caretakers”. The entire move had just one great quote after the other!
And of course, the space scenes were breathtaking! And the space travel seemed extremely realistic, and the consequences – the incredible distances and the time disortions between yourself and the ones you left behind – were heart-breaking and sobering. And the wormhole was a sphere – of course!
As an old comic and science fiction reader, who’s read a lot of time travel stories, I had a hunch who was the one sending messages to the daughter. But it was beautiful to think of love being another kind of dimension, something beyond just a species preserving chemical reaction, and that it played an intergral part in navigating the unknown.
Why I did really like the resolution – I just felt slightly let down by the very ending. The relationship between father and daughter, and their bond over unimaginable distances of time and space turned out to be the one thing that saved the world – but when he is finally reunited with his daughter, he only spends a few minutes before catching a space ship to be with Anne Hathaway (whose love of her life conveniently has died on a distant planet, so she is free and available). That seemed way too Hollywood, and took away from the characters, I thought.
But that was the only minor quibble – otherwise it was great!!
Now to read all the reviews and discussions on the Internet to realise how wrong I am…