Interstellar is another of the movies that I meant to see in theaters and just didn’t because my life has been ridiculously out of hand so far this year. I saw Interstellar in the store when I was browsing for some household stuff that I needed. I didn’t realize it was available, but I remembered that I wanted to see it, so I picked it up and watched it about two days ago.

This is “The story of a team of pioneers undertaking the most important mission in human history. An ex-pilot-turned-farmer must leave his family and a foundering Earth behind to lead an expedition traveling beyond this galaxy to discover whether mankind has a future among the stars.”

Honestly? This movie isn’t even close to what I was expecting. I was expecting kind of a more thoughtful and philosophical movie about space and not an extremely tense movie about how space can affect so many things all at once. I am actually quite glad that I didn’t watch this movie in the theaters because I was all over the place while watching it in my apartment. I must have yelled at the screen or the characters about four different times throughout the movie. This was not a relaxing movie.

The soundtrack on this movie created such an atmosphere of reality that it took me quite some time to calm down once I’d finished the movie. I did some research about the soundtrack and I guess there were actually two soundtracks available for purchase, one of them being a shorter and simpler version without the key “docking sequence” portion and the other with 24 songs from the film. The only concern I have with this method of selling music is that the extra eight songs, including “No Time For Caution”, can only be found on the digital download option and not on an actual music CD, unless you purchase the “Illuminated Star Project” imported edition for $40. I suspect I will purchase some form of this soundtrack and perhaps a review of it as well at some point in the future 🙂

Meanwhile, back to the movie.

The movie starts out with an agrarian Earth where technology is taboo and everyone is a farmer. Some sort of crop and atmospheric problems indicate that the Earth is dying and NASA is working in secret to attempt to find a suitable place to relocate the population and save the human race. The absolute backwards thinking in Murph’s school was just astounding and I saw so many parallels with how information is manipulated in order to control the basic population that I was rather frightened for the future of humanity as a whole. Those in charge basically decided to outlaw all technology because of the mistakes of the past and to focus humanity’s efforts on a failing agrarian society because that was “what’s best.” Destroying technology almost destroyed the human race and it frightens me that someday, people might actually attempt to limit our dreams and our capabilities because of other mistakes.

The characters in this movie make so very many mistakes. They are all human and nothing goes according to plan. One mistake of minutes costs decades of consequences. There are a lot of times in this movies where things are not as they appear and I very much enjoyed having my expectations tossed around and thrown out the window. One of the key examples of that for me was when I first saw the robots. I thought TARS and CASE were the absolute worst designs for a robot I could ever imagine because their designs seemed impractical for any sort of movement or utility. I didn’t understand their versatility until the team landed on Miller’s planet and then I realized that the design for TARS and CASE were intentional and extremely neat.

I am absolutely NOT going to go into any more depth on the movie because I am hoping this movie is as addictive for you as it was for me. I think I will rate it as a high three on my rating scale because the music was fantastic and I cared deeply about everything the characters went through. I’m not entirely sold on the accuracy of the science in the movie, but it was believable enough for me to focus more on the story and the characters than the science (and science isn’t my strength anyway 🙂 ).