Boyhood and Interstellar

“Mankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here.” ~Cooper, Interstellar

After watching them, these two movies have quickly climbed to the top of the list of the most personally influential movies to me. Both films were of epic scale, and contained themes that were universal to almost all of us, while being deeply imaginative.

Warning: contains mild spoilers.

Interstellar

This movie is impossible to describe in a single blog post-it’s a nearly three hour marathon, spanning across 5 dimensions, 4 planets, 80 years, a wormhole and black hole, one embedded poem, and one hell of a story-line. It connects two worlds that collide, inevitably, in a climax that reaches to the future and back into the past.

The film told the story of Cooper, a former NASA training pilot turned farmer who stumbles upon a secret NASA facility after starvation and blight has destroyed much of civilization and threatens to suffocate the survivors. When he gets there, he is quickly recruited for the mission Endurance, which is humanity’s last mission to find a way off of a dying planet.

I found Director Christopher Nolan’s ambition in this film, as well as the cohesion of these motifs-to be most impressive. By incorporating real dust bowl survivors talking of their experiences (the movie is set in an almost identical disaster, of blight and starvation), Nolan creates a historical and environmental window of context that makes this science fiction film into a frighteningly real warning towards our combined human actions to our environment. At the same time, Nolan, with the help of theoretical physicists, systematically portrays concepts of relativity, space-time, gravity’s role in the universe, and black hole behavior in a way that is easily understandable and visually stunning to a mass audience.

However grand in scale the film may be, the personal touch involved is still deeply felt in Interstellar. After all, at its basic level, it was a desperate father reaching out to his daughter albeit through an extra-dimensional tesseract, as well as a woman seeking to fulfill her love, in search of a hospitable planet to begin humanity anew. Human nature is explored, with the movie’s abundance of loyalty, selfishness, and conflicting but well-intentioned motives clearly driving the actions of the characters.

Characters like Matthew Mcconaughey, Jessica Chastain, and Anne Hathaway do a convincing portrayal of these characters, although it’s not clear to me whether they grasp the full implications of their roles based on their actions. Forgivable, given the incredibly difficult and complex plotline. In fact, it is this ambition that ultimately stops the movie from reaching perfection. It overreaches, but only slightly.

As you can see, I can go on much longer about the unique viewpoints that reveal themselves, some gradually, some all at once through the course of this movie. Put together, Interstellar is a spectacle that describes our world by leaving it behind, and despite being overwhelming at times, reveals deep truths about ourselves, how we came to be, and what we have to do to save a rapidly deteriorating world.

Boyhood

Boyhood, to me, was the more relatable of these two movies. Although these characters are not nearly as high-caliber, the film is produced over a span of 12 years with the same cast, following the main character from 6 years old to the graduation of high school. Besides that fact that we get the pleasure of seeing Ethane Hawke literally age in front of our eyes, the story is very relatable. The young boy, Mason, is just one year older than me, and so as he grew up as an adolescent boy in the 2000's , I found that could relate incredibly well. I, too, spent too much time playing Nintendo, and Wii as a kid, and goes through the same, teenage angst/girl problems phases as Mason experiences.

Of course, there are also some points which a well-off Asian guy would not understand. Mason’s dad is an alcoholic, and her single mother struggles to make ends meet. They move, they get into fights, and they generally scratch their way through thick and thin. Each of these characters are well developed, and are incredibly true to life, and are authentic to the point where I realized: Boyhood isn’t just a movie. Boyhood is a portrayal of my life itself.

I would highly recommend both of these movies! ~Chris