Interstellar (2014)

There is window-dressing here of a mutually dependent relationship between love and science, where the optimistic hope found in love pushes the characters toward discovery. Early on in the film, Anne Hathaway's character, Dr. Brand, suggests that they travel to a planet where the man she loved once traveled.  The other characters decide against this, but she's ultimately vindicated.  On the other hand, Matt Damon's character, Dr. Mann, falsifies scientific data out of desperation and pessimism to lure the other characters in before almost getting them all killed. 

But discovery of what?  Humanity supposedly outgrows its cradle by changing where people live, but not how.  They problem is solved when they can go back to exactly what they were doing before.  They build a suburb on the inside of an O'Neill cylinder when they can't build them on Earth anymore.  How little this film actually digs into the relationship between love and discovery is seen in Dr. Brand, whose intuition turns out to be correct but who actually cannot give the other characters any reason to embrace it.

Time is often made strange in Christopher Nolan's films, sometimes in very on-the-nose ways and sometimes with a science-fictional explanation of why the characters are not experiencing time as we normally do.  These films imagine science and technology changing the fundaments of the world to bend to what people feel is most important.  But aside from Tenet, they don't contemplate changes in what people find important.  In Inception and in this film it's the nuclear family; in Dunkirk it's the nation.  

Coop says "it's not possible, it's necessary."  Like so many other movies, the need for the characters to make decisions is simplified because their backs are thrown against the wall.  It is poignant that Coop had to leave his daughter behind on Earth and travel to the other side of the universe for her well-being, and one of the best scenes in the film focuses on just this.  But the fact is he didn't really have a choice.  What love called for was obvious.

I can see why some viewers are enraptured by this film's dream of discovery and human fulfillment coinciding.  But why should the conclusion be that nature is controllable to the extent that nothing humans haven't already done has to change to achieve this union?  The film this one is always compared to, 2001: A Space Odyssey, at least entertains this idea, if only in an extremely abstract way.  If not for the all-or-nothing stakes of this film, there would be an aspect of Manifest Destiny to it.  Optimism is synonymous with not only discovering new places, but settling there and taking control of them.  And when Coop makes his last-ditch effort to save the world, he finds that the universe has always been under human control.  The one solution was always there, and the black-and-white necessity imposed by the crisis leave no room to question it.  It's not possible, because it's not necessary.

Lots of films have this kind of all-or-nothing crisis, and no one feels a need to question the choice of solution.  But not as many films explicitly center science to this extent.  At the beginning of the film, Coop is appalled to learn that children on Earth are no longer being taught about the moon landing, to avoid inspiring too much hope in a doomed world.  He knows it's good to look at the stars with aspiration.  And the film rather oddly uses fake Reds-style documentary footage to make the historic weight of the characters' task set in.  My problem is this: the chief idea of this film is that we can explore, but won't be doing things any differently when we get wherever we're going.  There are a lot of people who like this movie for reasons I can respect, but in my experience it also attracts a certain type of person who thinks they like science because it makes them feel smart, not because they really want to look at the roots of things.