Sunday, December 07, 2014

Christopher Nolan: Interstellar (2014)

Christopher Nolan's Interstellar (2014) joins a handful of viscerally memorable -- as well as thoughtfully absorbing -- non-franchise science fiction movies that have swept over the Earth sometime in the past fifty years. It's of the same audacious caliber as Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey

A week after seeing Interstellar, its striking images are still roiling through my mind -- especially during altered dream states. 

Besides Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris / Солярис (1972) - which I have only seen in Russian with no subtitles and am not even quite sure I understand it as of yet - or Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), or Philip Kaufman's 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or Ridley Scott's Philip K. Dick-inspired Blade Runner (1982), Interstellar really gets into some good nitty gritty questions about existence and being, freedom and time, space travel and consciousness, memory and identity. 

And that's about all I have to say on the matter for now.  

Coda: if you're into this kind of thing at all, Interstellar is definitely worth seeing on the big screen.  

Today's Rune: Signals. 

5 comments:

Vesper said...

I've read some bad reviews of Interstellar so I'm glad to see someone who thinks highly of it. I haven't seen it yet, but now I think I will... :-)

Erik Donald France said...

Hey Vesper, thanks for your comment~! The dialogue, especially at first, is a little on the wooden side, but it's the overall experience that remains intact after the end credits roll.

Barbara Bruederlin said...

If it merits comparisons to Solaris and Blade Runner, then it is certainly worth checking out. I may just try to fit a real old fashioned trip to the movie theatre over the holidays.

jodi said...

Erik-So totally not my venue, but you make it sound so good!

t said...

I saw it on the big screen, liked, was gripped. I worried that non-geeks wouldn't feel the same.

Re: Vesper, true I had also read a negative review (I think it was on the Wall Street Journal) but it seems the idea was Nolan vs his potential, Nolan vs Spielberg , Nolan vs that universally applauded film event. And like I said, that's not what Interstellar delivers. But I liked it, I found it layered, cool, thought-provoking (not to a superlative degree) and get this I used to avoid films with 'star' in the title except it was like a Hollywood star or something :) . Nowadays, becoming more curious...

Watch it, especially if you're curious about physics and astronomy at all.

I have seen neither Solaris nor Blade Runner, so I can't comment on these.