Finally, a movie that supports technological progress! (As opposed to condemning it, like every other movie.)
This is just a great movie to exist right now. Granted, some of the messages, as critics have pointed out, are not very deep, but at least it has such messages that no other feature film dares to voice. Messages like nurturing a long-long-term solution, i.e. going into space, rather than plowing through the next harvest. Or messages about scientific tools being more valuable than the next dollar bill, as in the following dialogue:
Cooper: You don’t believe we went to the Moon?
Ms. Kelly: I believe it was a brilliant piece of propaganda, that the Soviets bankrupted themselves pouring resources into rockets and other useless machines…
Cooper: Useless machines?
Ms. Kelly: And if we don’t want to repeat of the excess and wastefulness of the 20th Century then we need to teach our kids about this Planet, not tales of leaving it.
Cooper: You know, one of those useless machines they used to make was called an MRI…
This MRI, as Cooper goes on to say, would have saved his wife.
And then, of course, you have the more obvious ones: “We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars, now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.” There is something simple yet infinitely dramatic to these lines.
Interstellar can be viewed in many ways, including as a space- and time-bending love story or as a “negative productivity shock hits the global economy.” I see it, perhaps over-optimistically, as a statement about what humanity can and will accomplish. More strongly, it is about what we must do if we wish to thrive as a species, let alone survive.
