Interstellar the Movie

I watched this picture today – initial noon showing at the Airport.  I walked out afterward thinking this was the best film I’d seen since, … …, since Star Wars opened in 1977.  I remember reading about that one in Time Magazine and it was heralded as a landmark film.  I called my best friend that morning and said we have to blow off work (downtown San Francisco) and see the opening showing at noon.  I listened last night to an NPR 3-minute review of this Interstellar film and felt the same way I did 37 years ago, so I went.

The casting was superb, these are all top-notch actors and actresses, playing in a movie that will certainly be a star in their resumes; possibly release-timed to be an Academy Awards contender.

The Directors and Screen Writers, brothers Christopher and Jonathan Nolan, have brought out everything these fine film stars have to offer.  These are meaningful roles, played convincingly.  The script and performances evoke tears at times, and cheers at others.  The viewer is in constant heightened tension, sometimes almost unbearable.  I was fidgeting and writhing, muscles tensed, wanting to scream or somehow release the mounting tension.

The NPR review focused on the Father-Daughter relationship, and that was a heart-rending one.  McConaughey is a father that anyone, everyone, would want.  If you were going to die, that’s who you’d want to raise your children.  And yet he goes off on his life’s dream of a NASA space mission to the stars.  Poignant: teary partings, teary messages across space.

The film had a far bigger slant, even on familial relationships, human relationships.  The good, the bad, and the ugly.  Can Love cross space?  Can Man master Space and Time?

Fortunately, and this is why I think this film will be an Academy Best-**  contender, the Nolan brothers didn’t dig too deeply into the Sci-Fi arcana.  Sandra Bullock’s performance  in “Gravity” notwithstanding, they realized that the focus had to be on the personal drama, tragedy and comedy, and not the set design.  The Nolan brothers went Cuarón (Gravity’s Director) one better, and moved apace, seamlessly from futuristic crisis to crisis.

I’m happy to say that computers were not anthropomorphic, nor evil: just smart toys.

Amazingly the almost three hours disappeared before I thought about it.

Again – It was riveting. 

The movie made you laugh, and cry (a lot), and stress, then cheer, and moan some.

NPR complained about the background organ music, but of course that was just homage to Stanley Kubrick’s “2001”.  We now realize that deep pipe organ music stirs the brain to …, …