Out of This World! aka My Love of Christopher Nolan

I know this is a little behind the times, but I just saw Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar yesterday. And you know what? I liked it. I really, really liked it.

I can just hear the gasps of horror now. Bwuh? You liked Interstellar? How could this possibly be?

Okay, I’m not going to tout it as the greatest film ever made. Admittedly, it did have some flaws, but what story doesn’t? And that’s why I chose to blog about it when I haven’t about a movie before. I want to talk about the things that the Nolans got right.

Most of the complaining I’ve heard about Interstellar is that it’s long and boring. I didn’t think that at all. In fact, I felt like I was on the edge of my seat most of the time. I wanted to know more about what was going to happen.

It’s a story with many layers. It’s a disaster movie. There are mysteries. And ultimately, it’s a tale about human nature. That’s what science fiction is at its core. It’s a way of talking about us and the things we might do in certain situations. The science fiction setting allows writers to push their characters to their limits and find out what they’re made of.

Let’s face it, people. Space is a scary place. One of the characters in the film remarks that a relatively thin layer of materials separates you from a basic vacuum. A cold, dark vacuum. It’s not the West, but it’s easy to die there. So very, very easy. And die some of the characters do.

I hate to break it to you, but sound doesn’t travel in space. I thought that to be one of the more brilliant elements in Nolan’s direction. He figures out other ways of keeping the action in space from being boring. Music overlays those shots, or, in one instance, the sound of rain. (If you haven’t seen it, it makes sense with what’s going on; trust me.) And he threw in little details that didn’t necessarily have to be there but made things just that little more believable. (For example, at one point, Anne Hathaway’s character passes out from some G-force stress, and her arms float up because of lack of actual gravity in the capsule.)

Personally, I found myself invested in the main characters and all the trials they had to go through. In fact, I teared up during several moments, especially the end. For the most part, these people were fully realized characters with understandable motivations. Everyone wanted pretty much the same thing, the continuance of the human race, but they all had different ideas as to how to accomplish that. (Some better than others.)

Some people might have a hard time with some of the concepts in the film, such as the fourth-dimensional physics. I thought it had been handled well, but then again, I have some general knowledge on the subject.

I want to give the Nolans credit for not dumbing everything down. The first film I watched that Nolan directed was Memento. It blew my mind how you could tell a story backwards. Then I saw Batman Begins, and it remains one of the movies that I don’t mind watching over and over again. Having seen many different iterations of Batman through the years, I never thought it could happen in real life. And then I saw the Dark Knight presented as if it could. It blew me away.

I’ve seen other Nolan movies. While I didn’t like Insomnia, I have to admit that it told a good story with well-placed shots. I loved how the mystery played out in The Prestige though I thought the supernatural element didn’t exactly fit. (Of course the guy who passed over the technology did once live in a magical labyrinth. 😉 ) I marveled over being able to hold three different levels of reality in mind in Inception. (The Dark Knight was good, but I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as Batman Begins, and The Dark Knight Rises is definitely the weakest of his films.)

So say what you will about the man, but like his characters, he challenges us to think and consider things we might not have. He forces us to see things through different lenses and question the very nature of reality. We don’t necessarily have much of that in current society, so I want to give him credit for pushing the boundaries, and I wish I could see more of it.

I’m not going to give this movie a rating. I really enjoyed it, far more so than I have a lot of other movies I’ve seen recently. If you’re looking for something fun and basically mindless, definitely skip this. However, if you’re looking for something to make you question some of your philosopies, I’d suggest it.