{"id":18242,"date":"2014-11-12T06:16:41","date_gmt":"2014-11-12T11:16:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=18242"},"modified":"2014-11-12T07:16:09","modified_gmt":"2014-11-12T12:16:09","slug":"interstellar-merges-space-and-opera-in-the-best-possible-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2014\/11\/12\/interstellar-merges-space-and-opera-in-the-best-possible-way\/","title":{"rendered":"“Interstellar” merges space and opera in the best possible way"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"interstellar\"<\/a>Every once in a while, though less often as I get older, a work of art lands in a kind of sweet spot that seems tailor-made to my own weird sensibilities.<\/p>\n

I’m a huge fan of science fiction.\u00a0 The idea that humans should find a way to climb beyond our earthly cradle has long struck me as the most hopeful and common-sensical big idea to emerge from the 20th century.<\/p>\n

I’m also a huge fan of opera.\u00a0 I love the muchness of it, the sense that stories don’t have to quite hang together, the idea that all the rules of theater and storytelling can be tossed out the window at any given moment so long as the music and the spectacle carry the experience forward.<\/p>\n

So when I landed in the movie theater this weekend to watch Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar,” I found myself in that little wedge of the Venn diagram where those two disparate worlds — opera and hard sci-fi — overlap and merge.<\/p>\n

In case you’ve missed the hype, Nolan’s film describes a dystopian future a few decades out from present-day.\u00a0 Humans are scrambling to find a way to survive on our environmentally damaged planet and the best solution seems to be giving up and going elsewhere.<\/p>\n

The story is a big creaking carnival ride of ideas, stuffed with black holes, time dilation, climate change, atmospheric degradation, alien ghosts, interactions with the fifth dimension and some really cool post-Hal 2000 robot computers.<\/p>\n

Overlaying it all is a magnificent, meditative score by Hans Zimmer.\u00a0 You can hear a chunk of it in this Youtube video, though like most music scores, this one works best when crammed in with the visuals.<\/p>\n