Interstellar

Romanticism vs Enlightenment in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Interstellar

2014 has been a great year for sci-fi. Guardians Of The Galaxy proved one of Marvel's biggest hits to date despite starring little known characters and lacking a big star name among the cast; Luc Besson's affably bonkers Lucy and Jonathan Glazer's chillingly impenetrable Under The Skin saw Scarlett Johansson build up a fine run of form in the genre after voicing a sentient, amorous operating system in 2013's Her; X-Men: Days Of Future Past made time travel an integral part of the X-movie universe; Tom Cruise suffered his own Groundhog Day in the middle of an alien war in Edge Of Tomorrow, and the Ethan Hawke-starring Predestination received plaudits for its integration of gender politics into an otherwise fairly rote time travel narrative.

Perhaps the biggest and most interesting event of the 2014 sci-fi revival was Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, standing out not only for being a rare original blockbuster in a galaxy of comic book franchises, but also its unashamed exploration of 'hard' sci-fi concepts such as time dilation, relativity and interstellar travel. If anything, the movie is at its least interesting when making concessions to the mainstream audience's supposed expectation of action: Matt Damon's cameo feels out of place and entirely unnecessary, seemingly existing only to interject big set-pieces into a movie which had previously succeeded admirably without them. Just as The Matrix and Nolan's earlier Inception disproved the notion that audiences are turned off by big ideas in their popcorn entertainment, Interstellar's success (currently sitting at a $622m return on its $165m production budget) is a triumph for all of us crossing our fingers that the recent sci-fi revival will be allowed to explore the genre's more intellectual side alongside such pulpy delights as Guardians and Star Wars.

One of Christopher Nolan's biggest inspirations for Interstellar, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, also saw a limited re-release in the UK last month. While Nolan's debt to the 1968 classic is clear, watching them both in such close proximity reveals fascinating differences between the philosophies underpinning each movie. Interstellar is unabashedly intellectual, with a big deal having been made in the build-up to the film's release of its scientific accuracy (theoretical physicist Kip Thorne consulted on the writing) and of two academic papers being written on the back of its simulated models of black holes. Within the movie itself, many of the characters' biggest challenges revolve around established scientific principles, such as how long to spend visiting a planet subject to extreme time dilation (that is, where time moves much more slowly on the surface of the planet than in its orbit) and whether it is possible to communicate through a black hole's event horizon (the point at which nothing, not even light, should theoretically be able to escape its gravitational pull).

Interstellar's universe is firmly in thrall to the idea that with the right set of calculations, there is no phenomenon too great for humanity to catalogue and control. As with its occasional lapses into thriller storytelling, the times when the movie recants on its firm belief in scientific absolutism are the moments when it feels at its least sincere. Anne Hathaway's speech about love being the only force able to transcend time and gravity, foreshadowing the movie's aggressively saccharine ending, never feels like anything other than an attempt at emotional manipulation of the most brazen and cringeworthy variety, a misjudged bid to correct the perception that Christopher Nolan's films are all head and no heart in an otherwise defiantly intellectual movie.

2001: A Space Odyssey also has a reputation for being cold, complex and distant, though where Interstellar occasionally wobbles in its devotion to science over sentiment, Kubrick's movie is far more subtle and powerful in conveying the emotional weight of its story. If Interstellar at its best is a movie firmly rooted in an Enlightenment way of thinking, worshipping reason and observation as humanity's greatest tool for conquering the universe, 2001 sets out its stall firmly in the opposite camp. The universe Kubrick portrays is vast, fearsome and beyond comprehension; the only truth revealed by the human capacity for perception and analysis is how resoundingly limited those two things are when faced with the mesmerising grandeur of space and time. Knowledge is not imparted by reason, but by the random interjection of unknowable outside forces, represented in the movie in the shape of a flawless black monolith. 2001 is the rare sci-fi movie with its philosophy rooted firmly on the side of the Romantics.

It is untrue to suggest 2001 is an unemotional film for its lack of interest in love and human connection. In fact, the experience of watching Kubrick's movie is a deeply emotional one. Few released before or since have been so overwhelmingly powerful at conveying awe at the horror and the beauty of the infinite unknown. It is a film deeply in love with humanity, or more specifically its curiosity and persistence in the face of things it will most likely never be capable of rationalising or reaching. It celebrates humanity's never-ending desire to grow and progress, so jaw-droppingly represented by that phenomenal cut from a bone flying through the air to a spacestation sweeping through space, as well as the idea that in an infinite universe, the capacity for growth must also be infinite, never achieving an end goal but never stopping either.

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The later novels in Arthur C. Clarke's Odyssey series lost much of their power as they explored in greater depth the nature and origin of the black monoliths and the forces that created them. Kubrick's determination that his 2001 be bereft of such explanations - even if Clarke, in fairness, nevertheless retained a fair amount of mystery in his works - is, I think, one of the key factors behind why it remains such an enduring classic. The stunning visuals and classical soundtrack certainly help, but that dedication to the importance of asking questions ahead of getting answers is one compelling on a near-subconscious level, challenging its viewers to face the awareness of how tiny and insignificant our lives and our world really are, but also find comfort in what a beautiful and somehow encouraging thing that can be. Unlike Interstellar's cast of intellectual titans, never wrong in their reasoning or perception, 2001 posits that it is that smallness and those flaws denied Nolan's characters which define us and push us forward. It is telling that the malfunctioning artificial intelligence HAL attributes a miscalculation to human error, even if it misunderstands that the error was in fact in the idea that humanity could ever build a flawless machine when it is itself a race of imperfect beings.

2001's Romantic philosophy is surely a product of the era in which the film was made. Its release came a little over a year before Neil Armstrong became the first man on the moon in 1969, while the post-Summer Of Love, late '60s infatuation with hallucinogenic drugs and the collapse of social inhibitions marked a period in modern history when people were experimenting with expanding their minds and vision beyond anything which had ever been tried before, a process both scary and wonderous at the same time. Interstellar, on the other hand, arrives at a time when humanity has seen the often terrible consequences of its decisions, actions and inactions come home to roost, when the ability to control and make sense of our place and purpose feels increasingly distant and increasingly important to achieving a stable, prosperous future. Interstellar tries to be reassuring, telling us that total control of our circumstances is only a matter of looking at things in the right way, but in doing so reduces the size of its universe to within the reach of the human mind and perpetuates a misapprehension which may have been a key factor in us reaching this point in the first place. Dated though some of its aesthetics may be - check out that Pan Am space shuttle! - 2001 instead offers the opposite treatise, that it is human perception which is inherently limited and the universe which is grand and limitless. For all Interstellar's posturing on the power of love and the comforts of total knowledge being within reach if only we could think a little bigger, 2001 eschews easy sentiments and answers, but in doing so feels profoundly more honest and human.

by Xander Markham