I am dictating this, rather than typing it, both to try something new, and because my computer is broken.
If you wanted to make a movie that would just give me the biggest boner you've ever seen, it would be interstellar.
Quotation marks 2001: a Space Odyssey quotation marks is the greatest movie ever made in my opinion. Not only science fiction, but movie in general. It is tough to overstate if impact culturally artistically and cinematically. Kubrick and Clarke busted the doors wide open. And now, every science fiction movie has to measure up to that. Not every science fiction movie needs to. Obviously some have different goals. Alien, for example, was essentially a monster movie but grounded in theoretical biology. Blade Runner ask the question of what it actually means to be human. 2001 was a monster movie, questioned what we were, asked where we came from, and suggested where we could go.
Christopher Nolan's interstellar does not shy away from this. It recognizes that it can't just ignore the elephant in the room. And not just the elephant of 2001. It also recognizes that Disney play a role.
I really don't want to get into the plot too much. It's really good. The story is one that hit me all over the place. The challenge with interstellar, and any really good sci-fi, is to connect humanity with sometimes very abstract scientific ideas. Blade Runner was the Turing test wrapped inside a detective story. 2001 replaced the notion of God with the concept of a species vastly more evolved than humanity. Interstellar explorers the effects of relativity on families. Relativity for relatives.
What is time? What is gravity? Why are these two phenomena connected? Why are we only able to receive three dimensions when we know that more exist? Is Christopher Nolan comfortable with questions of time because he's British and there's been a blue police box in his cultural psyche for 50 years? No, seriously. Time gets wibbly wobbly, and it works dramatically.
Design wise, you have to recognize the design of the robots. Clearly, they hearken back to 2001 and its monolith. But you also have to notice the naming conventions. It is been ages since I have seen the movie, but one of my favorite parts of an older sci-fi flick was the robots, V.I.N.C.E.N.T. and Old B.O.B. Here, we have T.A.R.S. and C.A.S.E. When I made that connection, oh boy did I smile.
Another huge influence on Interstellar is Steven Spielberg. Close in counters of the third kind is represented big and bad. And I loved it. I don't mind being emotionally manipulated if it's done skillfully.
So, what we have here, is christopher nolan love letter to stanley kubrick, steven spielberg, and to quantum physics. This movie needs to be seen in the theater. I'm going to stop now because I can just go on forever.
