Vauxhall: Nope, people just have opinions.
Anyway, more rambling time now that I'm feeling slightly more coherent:
Interstellar. Wow. I think that may be the greatest film I've ever seen, for me. It was gorgeous on every single level...visually, aurally, even in the story... The realistic renderings of wormholes, black holes, the "fourth dimension" and tesseracts...God damn, just...as someone who loves science, particularly physics and space, to death...this film is the crowning moment of sci-fi, I think. It's a science fiction film that really, *genuinely* LOVES science and it shows. No half-assed special effects just to have big explosions and crap, no, this film is gorgeous because of its realism. I don't think people really *grasp* how *gorgeous* and amazing space is. We're fed this halfhearted crap by sci-fi films that we just take for granted now, but this film goes the whole damn mile to show you exactly what space is, how grand and expansive and unimaginably beyond imagination it is. When they're going through that wormhole...something we've seen in dozens of films, but when they're doing it here and it's modeled by a real physicist, rendered for hundreds of hours with complex algorithms to make sure it's accurate...it's beyond anything I've ever seen before.
And the music...and the absolute lack of it at times... I could go on for hours. It's absolutely beautiful. Minimal when it needs to be, and extremely loud and shrill when the film would benefit most...then dead silent in the vast expanse of space. It's chilling.
Then, finally, the story. I don't want to spoil anything, but god. I'll be the first to admit that the film forgoes realism at various points for the sake of film, and that it even veers into hypothetical—or sheerly tangential—territory at times, it's all worth it. This movie, man...this movie. I haven't cried at a movie in a good while, but this one made me cry two and a half times. Once sort of early on I cried from Matthew McConaughey's amazing performance, then I teared up later on. Then afterwards, as I left the theater, I just started crying again...partly because it was just so amazing to me, but also because it got me thinking about the world so much.
Everyone should have to see this. THIS is the amazing, *real* stuff we're missing out on when we cut NASA funding because it's "not important". Not important? Do you forget who we are? Like they say in the film, humans are explorers, it's in us, our fate is not to die on this planet, it's to go beyond and yet we're letting ourselves be held back because people are so obsessed with the goddamn materialism and petty squabbles and attachments here. We're so short-sighted that we think it's better to pollute the hell out of this planet and then dismiss any solutions as "not worth it", or "too costly" or "unnecessary". Honestly, after this film...that line of thinking really disgusts me. It's actually really, really saddening...I want to see space, other planets, new discoveries and exploration. I don't want humanity to doom itself to a pathetic life of bitching between vaguely-different political parties or stupid fights about how people shouldn't be equal because everyone's so damn scared of change. I don't want humanity to have this amazing start where we colonized an entire planet, scraped the edge of space by sending men to the Goddamn *moon*, only to flicker out and die because we were too short-sighted, selfish and obsessed with immediate gain to continue our legacy. It's legitimately hard not to cry about, just looking up into the sky and knowing that we should be up there, we should be doing everything in our power to be among the fucking stars and just doing things we'd have never imagined possible before. I want that more than anything. I think this film, more than anything, has solidified my desire to get into science, to be a physicist. Hopefully I have the drive to do it. But, above all, I really hope more people see this movie and open their eyes to what we should be doing.
Our destiny is not on this planet. Earth should really just be our stepping stone to greater things. Our destiny is out there.