Interstellar

My wife and I went to see this yesterday and I must say I'm glad we did.  I can't remember the last movie I saw that was this good.  I can't even remember the last film I saw that even tried to be good.  I guess this is partially my fault.  It's not entirely that Hollywood has stopped trying to make good films.  It's that you won't find that kind of quality in summer blockbusters.  I've heard good things about Life of Pi, for instance, and Hugo, and whatever else, but I didn't want to see them.

Interstellar, on the other hand, I did want to see.  I knew almost nothing about it, and what I thought I knew was mostly wrong.  For the past several weeks, the Physics pages of Facebook had been filled with discussions of it, mostly of one of the story's central elements, the gigantic black hole called Gargantua, that the planets of Interstellar orbit.   I gathered the gist of the setup was "man has destroyed his environment, and needs to find new worlds".  Since that is the plot of dozens of science fiction stories, as well as a large chunk of our political argument today, and isn't that plausible in either case, I was going to skip it, since I've made a solemn promise to myself to waste no more time on anti-human, anti-science, Luddite screeds masquerading as science fiction.  But the rest of the movie sounded so intriguing (a black hole! whee!) that I changed my mind.  I figured I could control my eye rolling long enough to get to the good stuff.  I had hopes that the beginning was going to just be that nod of the head to Hollywood sensibilities that you need to get a film made (Hollywood liberal pieties work much the same way as Chinese political censors it seems to me)-spend five minutes spouting some cliche about "environmentalism", or "diversity" and then you can get to the bang up, shoot em up you intended to make.

I was wrong.  In some ways, the beginning of the film is the best part.  At this point, if you haven't seen the film, stop reading.  Go see this movie.  It's considerably more literate than I am. The central conflict, the one that creates the moral stakes necessary to send human beings through a not particularly well tested wormhole to another galaxy, has nothing to do with handwringing about humanity's lack of love for Mother Earth.  The cause of the central disaster, a nitrogen breathing microorganism destroying food crops all over the world, isn't atrributed to any particular agency.  It's just a problem that must be dealt with.  And, in a brilliant bit of political subversity, it's one that we aren't dealing with.   We're presented with something that looks kind of like our America, specifically that small town, central Illinois/Iowa/Indiana section of America often referred to as "the Heartland", and we soon find out, that's all there is.   A school determines that a young man won't be allowed to go to college because "we don't need engineers, we need farmers" (lines later in the film indicate that the character does go to college, for agriculture, later, for anyone who was worried that farming got insulted there).  And then there is the line about "approved textbooks" which tell the proper story about "how the moon landing was faked".  As anyone who has heard the arguments over curricula, or the lower and lower standards of approved government standards, or seen the way "sustainability" and other nebulous political terms are prejudiced over advancement or excellence, can't help but find this funhouse mirror America eerily prophetic.

From there, we learn that some people haven't given up trying to solve the crisis, specifically by providing a way to find another planet to live on.   There's also a possibility that aliens are somehow trying to help us reach the stars otherwise out of our reach.  And we're off to the races, or to another galaxy.  But the action also continues on Earth, (over a greater span of time, thanks to relativity).

All in all, it was eminently satisfying.  It very consciously evokes 2001-I get the feeling that the makers knew it would invite comparisons anyway, so they threw in some nods to make it explicit.  Spiritually, it feels like a sister film.  It's more to my taste, since this work is considerably more pro-human than 2001.  It is, in the way that all the best science fiction is, optimistic.   It is also, in the way that all the best science fiction is, about the human condition.  It is what Star Trek occasionally managed to be.  And lastly, it reads like a story written by Arthur C. Clarke, if Clarke had Robert Heinlein's values.

4 stars, highly recommended.