Movie Review: Interstellar

I have always wondered what it would have been like to see 2001:  A Space Odyssey for the first time in a large screen movie theatre.  According to Rolling Stone magazine, during one screening of that movie a young man rose as if in a trance at the monolith's reappearance near the end and ran down the theatre's aisle shouting "It's God! It's God!" Before the theatre's management could stop him, he had crashed through the screen.

Similarly, I have always wanted our son to experience what I had experienced as a kid when I saw Star Wars for the first time on a large movie screen.  I know my friends will jump on me to a) not compare Star Wars with 2001: A Space Odyssey and b) not mistake a space cowboy movie for real science.  But I would like to suggest that what I am getting at is wonderment, not science.

With Interstellar the new movie by the Mensa-level IQ possessing Christopher Nolan at the helm, combines the science of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the bravado of Star Wars and the sentiment of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, with updated cosmology and the more recent social consciousness of how we are trammelling over our planet.

Let me dispense with the plot quickly, since hundreds of reviews are already available on this score: Humans explores another galaxy for habitable planets since the earth has become a dust bowl in the near future.

Let me also review the reviewers for a quick second. The reviews of the movie use the traditional yardstick to measure this.  In other words they are using a ruler, when they should be using a protractor.  They comment on plot, believability, dialogue, music, screenplay and visuals.  They miss experience, wonderment and science.  Luckily, audiences don't go to movies because of movie critics!

I will therefore focus on these three aspects that the reviewers on the whole are missing.

Experience:

We saw this movie on an IMAX screen.  As we would have said it colloquially when we were kids, 'IMAX is 70 mm ka baap!'  Every frame and every scene whether on earth or into the solar system or into another galaxy is so amazingly shot.  It is a fully immersive experience, with an A+ acting cast making every scene count.  Three hours went by in a flash, with this viewer wanting more.

Wonderment:

I think I have sucked up every well done YouTube video and documentary on Cosmology - about blackholes, pulsars, nebula, filaments, galaxies and so on including the old and new TV Series Cosmos.  Most of these by virtue of their smaller budgets and lack of Hollywood level talent, bounce along as dry science documentaries, depending on the viewers deep interest in science for sticking with the show.

Interstellar takes that natural human wonderment of our place in the universe and places it squarely in the middle of the movie making conceit, and never lets go.  The plot, the dialogue, the framing all make human wonderment central to the movie making experience.

I might no longer be the teen that saw Star Wars in the 1970s.  But I certainly recaptured that feeling of awe watching this movie showcase cosmological objects.

Science:

Several important topics are dealt with from a science point of view.

Environment:  I am quite in-tune with environmental issues these days, given my work in Socially Responsible Investing (which is also more clunkily called Environmental - Social - Governance Investing and more catchily called Impact Investing).  The blight, food shortages, regressive turn in culture, losing the pioneering spirit through deflated expectations, are very well captured in the first third of the movie.

i.e. what is the 'burning platform' that causes humans to recapture their spirit of adventure?

Robotics:  The robot(s) of Interstellar are more like HAL of 2001: Space Odyssey and less like C3PO of Star Wars.  i.e they are physically functional, but quite superior in terms of Artificial Intelligence.  Very credible - Siri meets Tesla.

Exo-Planets:  These are planets not part of our solar system.  Natalie Batalha is a real life exo-planet hunter.  I follow her on Facebook, since she shares her findings in easy and appealing nuggets there.  Natalie has the following to say about Interstellar:  "I felt that the space travel scenes were much more realistic.  I found the extreme tides depicted crazy scary.  I felt keen despair watching the cast walk across a lifeless world."

Wormhole:  This is the second best cosmological object depicted in the movie.  What does a 3-dimensional wormhole look like?  The conception and execution of this was simply amazing.  The other scientist I follow is CalTech Physicist Sean Carroll.

This is what he has to say about the wormhole in Interstellar:  "Kip Thorne, who is my colleague at Caltech had helped Carl Sagan with some science advice for his book Contact. In particular, Sagan wanted to have some way for his characters to traverse great distances at speeds faster than light, by taking a shortcut through spacetime. Kip recognized that a wormhole was what was called for, but also realized that any form of faster-than-light travel had the possibility of leading to travel backwards in time. Thus was the entire field of wormhole time travel born.  I know that Kip has been very closely involved with the script as the film has developed, and he’s done his darnedest to make sure the science is right, or at least plausible. (We don’t actually whether wormholes are allowed by the laws of physics, but we don’t know that they’re not allowed.) "

Blackhole:  I think you would agree that blackholes are the most awe inducing mysterious objects that were subjects of conjectures for decades and finally being mathematically posited and detected by inference in recent years.

The visualization of a blackhole is so incredibly amazing.  This is where, I nearly did what Rolling Stone said of the young man watching 2001: A Space Odyssey did.  I did run down the stairs in the middle of the movie. But rather than run through the screen, my reason was more prosaic - I wanted to get some popcorn!

Here are Christopher Nolan and Kip Thorne discussing the blackhole:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yxaUi8LIzE

There is much more science and engineering to gawk at:  space ships, saturn, earth from space, space-time fabric, imagination of what it is like inside the black hole etc.

Summary:

I would highly recommend watching Interstellar while it is still in theaters.  Plunk the extra amount to watch it on the biggest screen that is available.  Take your kids or nieces and nephews.  Give them a fabulous science and human experience.

However, take a curvilinear protractor and not a linear ruler to this movie. i.e. don't judge it on traditional yardsticks of what makes a good movie.  After all the movie from 1966, Fantastic Voyage is a great human adventure that explores the human body (but you buy the line that humans can be shrunk to a nano-size to be able to watch the rest of the movie).

So, instead enjoy the director Christopher Nolan's ambition, the seriousness of effort to bring science into the visuals (and not just into the plot) and setting of the current social context.

I am seeing it again.