To my future self,
How’re you feeling now, my little
ghost? On 8th Nov 2014, you’d watched Interstellar, the latest baby
of Nolan brothers. It’s one of the memorable day in your life. You can very well
ask,
‘Did you understand each and
every aspect of the film?’ No.
‘Do you give a righteous fuck and
have the IQ to dissect and explain the scientific accuracy in the film?’ No, you
idiot, you flunked in the high school physics test that involved escape
velocity and Kip Thorne’s theories, you remember.
Since its first trailer release,
you’ve waited a year for this day and went through random wiki pages and blogs on
time dilation, light years, wormhole, singularity, theory of relativity, five
dimensional space, black hole, quantum physics and even attempted reading
Stephen Hawking’s ‘A Brief History of Time’ etc... And ended up confused
like the time when you failed to understand Binary to Hexadecimal conversion in
7th grade computer class or when your 9th grade math teacher,
that arrogant bastard, explained cos^2 θ + sin^2 θ = 1. You felt that there is
no point in even trying to understand all these concepts in one read. So, you
went and watched/ re watched your favorite sci-fi and time travel films like films
like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Contact, Solaris, Gravity, Moon, Blade Runner, Sunshine,
Inception, 12 Monkeys, Time crimes, Back to the future, Dark City, Another
Earth etc...You even watched that 3 hour long ‘The Right stuff’ that
Nolan had mentioned as one of his biggest inspiration for making this film. You
did all this for no reason but for the profound love of films, especially the
Nolan ones. Remember how you were
feeling so happy and proud while watching and grasping even the tiniest bit
from Nolan’s earlier films.
During the movie’s release, you have
thought about it quite often, even in your dreams. You heard it OST underwater,
during your melancholic long swims. You geared up for the weekend with a few
buddies, entered the theatre and found your favorite S.P.O.T. in the dark
screen, yes, that same old middle row middle seat of yours. You’d always felt a
movie experience so complete, while you sat there and watched a film without
hearing any lewd comments, mobile flashes and the never ending cries of small
babies. Those little rowdies, where do their parents get the faintest idea of
bringing them to theatres? Morons.
The frame opened, there was a
flash of light in your eyes. It prevailed and remained undisturbed for the
entire runtime, except when it’s clouded with the occasional tears. The earth
and dusty apocalypse scenes scared you. You felt that it’s not that far, while
the images of Beijing Air pollution scenes flashed in your mind. There were
even some scenes where people talk about their life and holocaust, like the
interviews from the 8 hour epic Shoah, which you were procrastinating to
watch it in a stretch, for ages, you lazy idiot.
The space scenes not just took your breath
away but left you dumbfounded. Like the Alfonso Cuaron fellow from ‘Gravity’, our Nolan didn’t just
showed the vast space from the top angle or aerial shots. Can I call it aerial
shot when it’s shot altogether in space? What about Supreme aerial or aura
shots? Something similar to the god-camera that Terrence Mallick uses? You see,
Nolan could’ve very well blow you away by showing the vast space, all the time,
but he rather treated his IMAX and the regular camera like a GoPro camera and
captured the haunting emptiness with tight, intense, close-up shots. When the
crew in film left earth and reaches space, looks at how lone the earth is and
starts hearing the sounds of nature in space, you related it to how everyone
wants to explore life outside their comfort zone, reach a point, feel lonely
and try hard to remember and admire their own roots. How ironic, no?
People are drawing comparisons
and conclusions to do their best at showing off their IQ and knowledge. They’re
stereotyping the father-daughter relationship from Contact and the limbo,
aging, locked up state from Inception and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Even
they are drawing references from Nolan’s earlier films on how the Spacecraft looked
like a Batmobile, the spherical cooper station, like the ones from Inception
universe. Well, Nolan has prepared himself and his audience all these years for
this one film. Inception, The Prestige, Memento and other films
of his now looks like a decade long foreplay for Interstellar. He has even said
it in an interview on how close the film is to him. Most of them are giving
loads of reasons to hate the film and they fail to harbor the beauty of it. The
same approach to life and existence, no? We worry, suffer, complain and quarrel
loads and miserably fail to understand life, its reality and that it’s a gigantic
puzzle which we can never fit all of its parts cohesively at any given instance
of time. You seriously felt bad when someone debated about this movie by
consuming so little inside and try to learn/ know more to hate it better. Oh,
you poor humans.
You always tried and understood
art in your own personal way, my ghost. To you, the perception and conclusion
on an art or science or technology is an ever changing phenomenon, but the only
advantage of art is, today, one will enjoy it in one view, tomorrow an another
one altogether. You might love it or even hate it more in any given day, but
still, it will definitely stay closer to you in a more personal way than the ever
debated science, with its never ending accuracy or anomaly. Art can never be
quantified or equated. Oh dear, to you, science is always like this ‘hot
girlfriend’ material that always fights, quarrels and tries hard to fool itself
and advance its presence, but art, on the other hand, is like a ‘wife material’,
the last oasis resort to your soul and well-being.
This Nolan here has pushed his bounds and limits, did his best and converted
his ‘GF material to wife material’. It’s such a beautiful marriage, you see.
How could one not see this, but picture the 'art and science' marriage like Mal and Cobb’s
marriage from Inception?
Now you’ll go back and try reading
all the blogs and dissection posts that will be up online by geeks, nerds and
also assholes. Don’t worry, read it. Unlike many, you are not going to dislike
this movie ever in your life. You need to understand more and love it loads. Each and every time, you are going to cherish
watching it and think about how it moved you, shocked you, jolted your emotions,
left you with a heavy heart and made you cry in many moments, especially the final
20 minutes. Holy!
Do you still feel lost, after
finding and reading this? Don’t be. You’ve loads of moments engraved in your
mind that you can think and feel lively all over again. As a fellow Twitterati says ‘If you didn't
enjoy Interstellar, the loss is entirely yours. We are lucky that way’. We
truly are, my adorable ghost. I don’t know if there could be a next time, but until then, adios.
P.S. Don’t ever knock the window
glass ever again. It scares the shit outta me, you dumbfuck.
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