INTERSTELLAR

With the conception and execution of INTERSTELLAR, Christopher Nolan has a triumph on his hands, thanks in part to Kip Thorne and everyone else involved with hashing out the script.  In my view, movies are a great example in art of the importance of what is left unstated. INTERSTELLAR appears to be the most definitive statement that I've seen in a long time up on the silver screen about the nature of our spacetime continuum.  

If nothing else, the movie is certainly an exciting and completely thoughtful human drama about relativity, family, gravity, and our destiny in time among the stars. (I want to thank Christopher Nolan for making it unnecessary for me to take DMT now--because I think I just experienced it vicariously.)

To be real--this movie kept me thinking the entire time I was leaving the theater, piecing it all together in my mind. 

**Spoilers to follow**  

I think the character Matt Damon played was a terrific Judas figure, and the actor pulled his role off beautifully. I love how the movie played out its contradictions. The dichotomy between Cooper struggling to champion the quest into outer space in order to help save the human race against the alternative 'Plan B' directive was really handled well throughout the movie. The main question I had when the credits rolled was what exactly the Morse code message happened to be--was it to burn down the corn field and then establish a human emigration to colonize in orbit around Saturn so the remaining human population on Earth could eventually follow through the wormhole to colonize the third planet in the new system discovered there? I suppose so.

I gathered that 'They' who placed the wormhole there as an "escape route" was in fact not an alien race but humanity itself in the future. (Reminiscent of the so-called "aliens" at the end of Spielberg's gloriously problematic AI adaptation: those were not extraterrestrials at all, but rather our own evolved AI.) 

With INTERSTELLAR, I was left with the impression that the female astronaut Brand got stranded on the third planet initially, but due to Cooper's transcendent success in communicating with his daughter in the form of a living ghost, Brand's situation was transformed into being the first human colonizer; an Eve figure, if you will.  So when Cooper snuck into that spacecraft and escaped Saturn's orbit to join her, he was just leaping ahead and cutting to the chase to be with her, thus becoming the Adam prototype. 

So how did Cooper, with the help of his mobile computer unit, manage to wiggle the second hand on his daughter's wristwatch, then?  Something to do with string theory, I suppose. Well I loved  how within the striation of the wicker woven singularity under the skin of the black hole's peripheral gravitational edge, Cooper could find all things in existence, arranged around him in a cage of criss-crossing perspectives, like bandwidths, that he could zoom in on and manipulate slightly as if strumming harp strings.  

I remember wondering, at the beginning of the movie, what the intended significance of the rows upon rows of bookshelves must be.  (The first author I spotted, incidentally, was Gabriel Garcia Marquez.)  I also liked how the daughter's wristwatch was placed on the bookshelf in front of Stephen King's The Stand, and can't help but speculate if it's a sly tip that Nolan may be involved in the forthcoming four-part movie adaptation.  

The surprise supporting cast (including Burstyn, Damon, and Lithgow in a brief though convincing role as Cooper's father) worked well with the ensemble.  All in all, INTERSTELLAR delivered far beyond my own expectations in that it seems to also double as a readily comprehensible model of relativity for the layman's edification.  Being a layman myself, I thoroughly enjoyed this movie, and am very pleased I saw it in the theater. There were plenty of truly glorious panoptic screen shots and stunning visuals that in my mind, all fit rather accurately into our current scientific observations.  A welcome departure from both the DC comic book universe of Batman as well as the more esoteric dream realm of Inception (though I enjoyed all four of those movies, as well).  

In short, I consider INTERSTELLAR to be Nolan's highest film achievement thus far. I'm looking forward to his handling of the forthcoming adaptation of the real life Dunkirk evacuation during WWII. I'm getting the sense that the depiction of realism will become this director's forte.