Interstellar joins 2001 and Gravity in Pushing the Space Survival Envelope
Please join depthRADIUS in welcoming TimberClipse (a.k.a. Zev) as a new and hopefully continuing movie reviewer as well as reporter on film generally and the deviantART film community specifically. Zev’s qualifications include his having had his short film directorial efforts chosen as official selections at several prestigious showcases including the Austin Film Festival. This review kicks off what will be his continuing efforts to bring the most important films as well as ongoing activities and achievements of young deviant filmmakers to a sharper prominence in the global DeviantArt community.
Director Christopher Nolan has created another of his masterful epic cinematic journeys that culminate in leaving you wondering where the further unexplored possible channels of a continuing story might ultimately lead. His movies’ answers only fire up your brain to generate more questions.
Interstellar is no exception. Interstellar takes you on a journey to new worlds. A desperate journey to find a new home for humanity. A journey that will challenge the strength of loved ones. And explicate the attendant psychological struggles Nolan depicts so well. This nearly three hour odyssey pushes the limits with its astounding visuals and prodigious effects, which the actors super-charge with phenomenal performances. Whether categorized as sci-fi, drama, thriller or action-adventure,Interstellar is easily one of the few must-see movies of the year.
Set in a near future of devastating climate change and planetary depletion, the story involves a desperate hunt, via a recently fortuitously opened wormhole in space, to find a habitable planet for humanity in another galaxy. The astronauts involved in the search will, due to the space-time continuum, lose their loved ones forever; with all having died many years before the astronauts’ (unlikely) successful journey home. It’s a “suicide mission” for those left behind to live out their lives, rather than for the astronauts on the dangerous mission.
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Interstellar sucks us into unknown worlds of perpetual ice, raging water, and bleak nothingness. Each presents its own problems for human survival and each is a cinematically designed gem down to the most intricate detail. Director of Photography Hoyte Van Hoytema (Her, The Fighter) delivers an astonishingly beautiful cinematic adventure, showing why Nolan wanted him on board.
The film’s remarkable use of sound ( especially in its absence) is rarely this effective. With Gravity, sound design was re-thought: what does an astronaut “hear” in outer space, when there is no “sound?” But Interstellar is not Gravity. Interstellar takes space travel to a new and different level. Composer Hans Zimmer (Inception, Dark Knight Rises, The Lion King) delivers an incredible soundtrack once again. The best soundtracks are the ones that enhance viewership without being noticeable. TheInterstellar soundtrack is one the year’s few that you will want to listen to over and over again.
Finally, we are asked to absorb a lot of space science and theoretical physics to understand what’s going on in Interstellar. It’s the superbly meshing performances of Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway and the other veteran actors who make us believe all the theoretical events in this story really could happen. Their achievement of this complicated suspension of disbelief is quite an accomplishment.
Films like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Gravity have pushed the envelope for “hard science” sci-fi adventure films. They are a rare breed. Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar now joins that elite club.
Do you believe there are other inhabitable worlds in our Universe?
Your Thoughts
- Could you volunteer on a probably futile mission to save humanity if it meant that upon returning to Earth (should you survive), you would have aged a few years, but everyone you knew and loved had lived out their lives and died of old age many decades before?
- Do you believe more advanced forms of life in the Universe would/will seek to aid us in our evolution (“2001”) or survival (“Interstellar”)?
- Do you think other more advanced life forms in the Universe might view us as a degenerate life form due to the threat we pose in creating and using nuclear weapons?
- Do you believe humankind will always find a way to survive and thrive – even in the face of climate catastrophe, nuclear proliferation, new disease plagues, collapsed economies and war?
