Interstellar essentially Magnificent

If you have not seen the movie at least twice do not even look at the picture!!! This blog is not a just a spoiler its a freezer full of dead meat that has not had powered for a month.

I choose this picture because it captures the idea that we are explorers mostly lost and most of the time up the creek. Yet we always seem to find a paddle.

This movie is meant to be a Gulliver's Travels Travelogue. Gulliver's Travels was one of the most influential books ever written. It was a real case of the pen being mightier than the sword.

Published seven years after Daniel Defoe's wildly successful Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels may be read as a systematic rebuttal of Defoe's optimistic account of human capability. In The Unthinkable Swift: The Spontaneous Philosophy of a Church of England Man, Warren Montag argues that Swift was concerned to refute the notion that the individual precedes society, as Defoe's novel seems to suggest. Swift regarded such thought as a dangerous endorsement of Thomas Hobbes' radical political philosophy and for this reason Gulliver repeatedly encounters established societies rather than desolate islands. The captain who invites Gulliver to serve as a surgeon aboard his ship on the disastrous third voyage is named Robinson. (paragrahfic Wikipedia)

Our current crop of idiots only know Gulliver's Travels as a Disney story. It was a epochal successful attack on the Tea Party of the day. An idea expressed in print that changed history. Interstellar in video has its sights fixed firmly on todays Republicans in the same way.

The movie opens is a degraded world where crop blight is a malignant cancer upon humanity. This is a very real possibility. Just think about bananas. 

Though its never mentioned climate change is destroying the habitat of humanity. Big dig number one. Cooper goes to school and finds his daughter is ostracised and delinquent for believing man landed on the moon. MASSIVE BURN!

I think the opening was too subtle. I would have had a James Bond type panorama of Republican stupidly creating global destruction.  But even Christopher Nolan can not be perfect.

He clumsily pounds the point home with Coopers remarks about us no longer looking to the stars but concentrating downward on the symptom of topsoil erosion.

The movie shifts to a Contact event. Likely not a coincidence also starring Matthew McConaughey. When the dust settles we find that NASA is a black op still working overtime to save the world.

"Those are not mountains, there waves" is what our characters find first after transversing a wormhole. MASSIVE BURN two.

Next our intrepid crew find the best of the best the human that the establishment established was a great leader. He turns out to be a psychopath. MASSIVE BURN three.

Then at the end of the day humanity is saved by science and people just showing up. Most importantly religion plays no part in this film. Man saves man no higher power. MASSIVE BURN 4.

I have read so much science fiction its hard for me to be surprised. This movie surprised me. Christopher and Jolan Nolan should win the Hugo and Nebula for this film. They have taken real science at the edge of understanding and made a plausible case for their plot.

Star Wars, Star Trek et all are wonderful escapes. 2001, Clockwork Orange, Planet of the Apes are a few in a big handful that deal in real.

Interstellar eclipses them all IMHO.

Christopher Nolan is a special genius. A modern day Shakespeare. A testament to the logic that cream rises to the top. Wow Wow Wow Wow.

It is one of the pleasures of my life that I lived long enough to see a movie like Interstellar.

Update Ocsar nomination day. Interstellar shut out of the Ocscars. Very sad day for cinima. A groundbreaking thought provoking movie like this would have been a shoo in for an Oscar sweep twenty years ago. Maybe people dont like to face a future that is too close to home. On the other hand maybe the movie had flaws that fans ignored but the broader audience could not hear the dog whistles.
A review that explains that.
Its also possible the Academy is dumbed down to the point of no return. Not nominating the Lego Movie is my case in point.