Interstellar

So I saw Interstellar and I really liked it. I might be a little biased though because I really love movies about space and space exploration.  After I saw the movie I played Kerbal Space Program for like 10 hours because I was just in a very "TO THE STARS' kind of mood. Anyway, the movie! It stars Matthew McConaughey as Cooper, the pilot of a spaceship on a mission to find a new home for humanity as Earth dies beneath our feet. On their trip, Cooper and his crew (including Anne Hatheway and a few robots among others) face a number of challenges, from fist-fights on frozen worlds to overcoming time itself.

The cinematography for this movie is amazing. The sense of scale you get as our hero's tiny spaceship flies past Saturn or onto the surface of an alien world is both humbling and exhilarating.  On the other hand, when the camera isn't pulled all the way back, a lot of the space shots are done seemingly from cameras aboard the ship, so part of the ship's hull always takes up part of the screen. To me this was both reminiscent of the movies I've seen of the actual moon landings and helped to place the viewer within the action of the scene.

I enjoyed a lot of the science-y stuff in the movie. There's a lot in this movie about time, both how long it takes to actually travel through space conventionally and how time can dilate when you get too close to a black hole.  This concept-that an hour for you can be days, weeks, or even years to everyone else-has always fascinated me, even since I read Time for the Stars, a Juvenile Sci-Fi novel about that concept as it relates to travel near light speed.

The robots in the movie are amazing.  Instead of being the usual movie robot-a guy in a suit or wearing makeup-these robots are completely non-anthropomorphic. They're instead just boxes make up of a few planks, making them walk like a person using crutches, and run by turning into vaguely jack shaped wheel.  Combine that innovative design with extremely dry senses of humor and a bit of self awareness about how robots usually end up in these kinds of movies (i.e. destroyed or being the bad guy), and you get a winning combination.

I guess what I didn't like was that towards the end things get a little too cute for my taste. Like the whole movie is very hard science for most of its run-time and then gets mystic towards the end. I've heard some of my friends really appreciate this aspect, but it left me kind of cold. Also, this is a movie directed by Christopher Nolan, so that means that it's almost three hours long and may have some parts that you find confusing, be forewarned!

To sum up: A beautiful and smart sci-fi adventure, I wish there were more movies like this!