Feeling Like a Kid Again

When I was a kid I wanted to be an astronaut. It was a combination of many factors I was deeply interested in at the time: death-defying adventure and high-velocity travel. Honestly, those remain interests.

But SPACE! Space was about the coolest thing this side of dinosaurs.

In the last twelve months twice I have ventured to the cinema-house to enjoy high doses of spectacle, the dreams of my childhood consciousness finally hitting a double movie crescendo.

Last year we left the Pike Theater wide-eyed and giddy with the prospect of free-falling around the entire planet during a shitty day at work. Last year it was Sandy and Georgie in Alfonso's Gravity. Last year it was the slow twirl of the initial fade-in to see the noob, Sandy, just trying to maintain on her first duty: tightening bolts. Yup, I remember nodding in the darkened theater, some days at work kinda suck, but most aren't 250 miles above the ground.

The mundane painted across the spectacle of an entire continent below using a brush heavy with nausea. Something about that opening set piece in Gravity felt so real and honest and...routine. But hurtling in constant freefall around Earth turns routine into life, and even then a storm of orbital space trash can come and turn that shitty day at work into a masterpiece of outlandish survival.

I haven't seen it in a year, but, does Gravity even let the audience have seven minutes before Sandy's Supermanning her way into oblivion? Four minutes? I know it get's right to it, not messing around even a little. I remember thinking, What? Already? Is this movie for real!?

There were some things that were kinda preposterous in Alfonso's space movie, but it is not a documentary---it is Sci-Fi, with the capital letters. It was a grownup's movie. Those scientific transgressions are easily forgiven because it otherwise is as accurate as it could be.

AND because it's so damn fun! I enjoyed the hell out of it. Easily the best movie I saw all year.

This year again we left the Pike Theater dazed and giddy, our brains full of dust and space and time-warping tidal-wave mountain walls. That was the spectacle. The thoughts, though, were deeper than the spectacle--they raced about meaning. They ignored the sentimentality and tried to appreciate the difficulties ahead.

This year it was Matt and Matt and Anne and Mike and even Topher in Interstellar. This year it's the tortured dad versus the dystopian future that needs farmers more than engineers. This year it's gravity re-purposed. This year it's not a shitty day at work, it's SAVE THE WORLD.

Interstellar is the 2001 for our generation. Right? Isn't that what we've been told over and over? Maybe it is...

It certainly aims to do things that Gravity simply wasn't interested in. Gravity spans in nearly real-time the three hours Doc Stone takes to go from tightening a bolt to being birthed from the lake in Arizona. Interstellar, on the other hand, relativity as a plot-device.

I don't want to give away too much, but Michael Caine plays "the Professor" who runs what's left of NASA in the dystopian future when food is scarce and crops world-wide are failing...

Trying to tease out the plot does an injustice--just see it if you're into the current transcendental Sci-Fi experience. Interstellar is trying to say something.

That something could be different for each person, but my takeaway was: do you see how hard any of these outlandish planet-saving missions are? In the fictional world of the movie they're nearly impossible...We need to fix this ourselves...

The science, again, is under assail from physicists and astronomers, but they do take pains to praise the intentions and most of the big-picture elements. 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien, and Star Wars are obvious inspirations.

Again I went to see a grown-up science-fiction film in the theater and again I enjoyed the hell out of it. It reached for the stars, literally, and came back with its hands full of the dust and emptiness and sadness that you'd expect to find alone in the vastness of the interstellar void. The movie isn't really that bleak, and there is some clunky sentimentality, but Mathew McConaughey basically jumps into a gigantic black hole.

And they use relativity as a plot-device.

Christopher Nolan has made some of the most original movies of my adulthood. Memento? It took non-linearity to a creative extreme. Inception and Interstellar? Big-time, big-concept movie events.

Gravity: holy cow it's awesome.
Interstellar: holy cow it's awesome.

Nothing like a couple of Sci-Fi movies to capture my child-like wonders with the realities of space travel.