Interstellar is a religious experience
Interstellar, like most aged science fiction, is going to end up looking quaint
I would bet $$$ that Hans Zimmer’s Interstellar suite will outlive the movie by many centuries. In recent years it’s become part of organ recitals in major churches and cathedrals. It’s not impossible Zimmer might still be being played alongside Bach in five hundred years.
But Interstellar the movie is going to age badly. Not the special effects, I doubt there will ever be a more beautiful presentation of “space”. But as new discoveries change what we think space is, Interstellar, like most aged science fiction, is going to end up looking quaint.
“They thought Matrianic Phase Waffles were “Black Holes”…HILARIOUS!”
The visualization of Gargantua as a super-massive black hole has now been ripped-off so many times in so many other sci-fi narratives that it has simply become the defacto image of what a black hole is. Maybe one day we’ll be slingshotting starships around black holes that look just like that. Or maybe we won’t.
Future historians looking at Interstellar will realise, much more clearly than we do now, that it was less a movie about space travel, than about our search for coherent narratives in a time that has few of them to offer. Most of us are too skeptical for the story of Jesus today…but if you put Jesus in space we love it.
We can’t believe in heaven anymore, but a higher dimensional tesseract we can enter after death…sure why not. The Holy Trinity is a no, but a future you sending messages via gravity? Ok, that could happen. God? Absolutely not. But love as a unifying force emanating beyond space time? Erm…maybe?
Having now done analyses of Interstellar, Westworld and The Peripheral, I’d love to interview Jonathan Nolan just so I can interrogate him about whether he starts off with the idea of Space Jesus, or if the story finds its own way they are.
That’s the nature of archetypes. They appear over and again whether you ask them to or not.
