Interstellar-Metaphysical Bungee Jumping

Interstellar by Christopher Nolan - An outstanding movie, thinks Robbie Collin from the Telegraph: "In the age of shopping-centre cinema, Christopher Nolan builds cathedrals. His films are cold, enormous, sky-puncturing constructions, echoey with triumphant gloom, rippling with the gasps and whispers of the faithful." The film, he continues, includes much "metaphysical bungee jumping": 

"The film is a feast of extraordinary ideas, each one depicted by Nolan’s cinematographer, Hoyte van Hoytema, and his visual effects team with heart-swelling grandeur. But all the while, time passes, life vanishes, and the loss gnaws at Cooper like frostbite. As David Gyasi’s crew member quips earlier in the film, “That’s relativity, folks” – a shrugged-off reminder that time, whether flowing in a torrent or a trickle, is inescapable. To use a canvas this vast to make a point that searchingly intimate is the noblest thing science-fiction can achieve: it's the reason Kubrick’s 2001, Spielberg's AI Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, beyond their obvious visual astonishments, are so difficult to shake. Interstellar may be drifting a million miles out in the void, but it knows exactly where it's going."

At the centre of the movie is the message that geographical distance is a challenge while at the same time metaphysical distance even more. Both are challenged and dealt with as the protagonist Cooper encounters himself beyond the event horizon. And mankind's own struggles to overcome the restrictions of time and space are benefits in themselves.

I was reminded of this timeless classic: "The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun." (Ecclesiastes 1: 9). One might add ...in every galaxy...really.

If the film is prophetic for the 21st century vision of the future, the role of women of different ages and experiences is heartwarming and straightforward. Women stand for independence, love, intelligence, and the adventurous spirit that eventually propels mankind forward to explore new territory. Into a territory where we will be if our thought can travel that far into the vastness of space - and into the human condition.