GoPro of the Ridgeway Center Chihuly Negative
When the moon is in the Seventh House
And Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars
This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius
No, not that Sixty’s R&B group, but the space-time continuum’s fifth dimension. Wait, that’s only four dimensions (x, y, z, t), where did I leave that fifth one anyway? In the tesseract? No worry, it will turn up soon or later like it has always been here. On Saturday night, I saw Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” at the Esquire 7. I liked the movie, loved the venue, but I’ve already written about the theater. So, let’s talk about “Interstellar”.
Interstellar” is a sprawling, almost three-hour long mess of a movie, but it is a beautiful mess still the same. Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain headline the show. With an equally star-studded supporting cast, including John Lithgow, Michael Caine and Matt Damon to name just a few. Set in the near future, all of our crops are failing and humanity is starving. This is blamed on a disease called the ‘blight’, but it is played more like the 1930s dust bowl, than the Irish potato famine. All that dust must make for better visuals than rotten potatoes.
Humanity finds itself spiraling down the toilet. So, what better solution could there be then to give up on fixing our mess on Earth and instead just leave it behind and move somewhere else. It has always worked before. The first hour of the movie draws out this point so long that by the time we’re ready for takeoff, I wanted to get off Earth too and I had just the red barcalounger for the job, “Warp factor seven, Scotty. Make it so!”
A major theme in “Interstellar” is family. It permeates the movie and also grounds it in reality. This theme is personified in the relationship between astronaut-father McConaughey and his daughter Murph, short for Murphy’s Law. Murph is ten-years-old at blast-off, but through relativistic time-dilation effects she is soon portrayed by Jessica Chastain. Meanwhile, astronauts McConaughey and Hathaway head through a wormhole and around a black hole and then on and on.
A lot of press has been made about the scientific inaccuracies in this movie. To which I say, if you are expecting to get your science lessons from a Hollywood blockbuster, than you are also likely getting your news from a fake news comedy show. Both maybe highly engaging, but neither tell the whole story or for that matter let the truth get in the way of a good story. All this criticism must come across as negativity, but I really did enjoy the movie. The problem is that “Interstellar” is such a sprawling mess of a movie that it makes it all too easy to poke fun at. Go see it and judge for yourself. To infinity and beyond!