Hi everybody–I’m taking the week off to give my spot over to my daughter, Ann Stapel-Kalat. She’s gonna talk about space movies. OK, Ann–take it away!
Before I say anything about this topic, let’s get two things straight. 1. I really freaking love space. 2. I know absolutely nothing about space. You could throw anything at me about space and I’d believe it. For someone who claims movies about space to be her favorite, I really haven’t done my homework. However, I am a 17 year old girl looking into a career in music, so I don’t think a very high level of expertise is expected of me. My emotions and opinions on science fiction could be completely different from one of a space major (yes, I know space major isn’t what it’s called but bear with me). But let’s talk about it anyway. Oh, one more thing to set straight: I am absolutely terrified of space.
Let’s get started.
Recently I saw the Christopher Nolan film Interstellar with my dad. I see a lot of movies with my dad. As I bet you guys already know, my dad likes movies. We see a lot of science fiction space movies particularly. A couple months ago, my dad and I saw Alfonso Cuarón’s film Gravity. Years ago, when I was about 10, maybe younger, my dad took me to a science fiction film festival, where I saw Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. These are not my only space movie experiences, but these three have a lot to talk about. What do they all have in common? Well first off, all three of them have the ability to give me nightmares even as a 17 year old, all three of them are oddly relatable, and all three stand right on top of the line between brilliance and ludicrous crap.
Space is terrifying. Space is the scariest thing known to man and I cannot be convinced otherwise. I’m even terrified of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Here’s why, to quote the Guide, “Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.” Which is true. Space is huge. That’s not even the scary part. Lots of things are huge. Ikea is huge. The difference is space is so huge we don’t even know how to communicate how huge it is. We don’t even know how big it is, really. THAT isn’t even the scariest part.
Here’s what gets me every time: You could die in space and absolutely nothing would change. You could die completely in vain in space. Who’s stopping you? In other movies that take place on earth, death is rarely in vain. In slasher, serial-killer horrors, the young girl murdered by the guy in the mask helps the police by putting them a step closer to the killer. In dramas, the death of a family member brings the torn family together or helps the main character understand his-or-her-self better. Even in action movies, the death is to help the protagonist, or to avenge the death of a wife or a pet.
In movies like Gravity and Interstellar in particular, a person can just die in space. No one mourns, there’s no candlelight vigil, that’s just it. Not even a little blip, nothing. Isn’t that absolutely freaking scary? That’s just space in general.
Also, if these three films have taught us anything, it’s that apparently, nothing ever goes right in space. There are no guarantees with space. It looks really easy to die in space for these characters. From what I’ve seen, all you need to do is what you’re supposed to do, and things go terribly wrong. You can spend years training for that moment, and it can be completely useless. Creepy stuff.
So what’s the upside? Not only the upside but what makes space movies the BEST movies (according to my claim)?
There are a couple reasons. Science Fiction, more specifically movies involving space are amazing because they take you beyond the realm of fantasy. Seeing a unicorn in a movie can be interesting because I’ll never see a unicorn in real life, because they’re not real. On the other hand, the things seen in the space movies are interesting because not only are they stunning, but they’re really out there. Space movies are seeing fantastical things that you will probably never see with your own to eyes, but actually exist. Maybe. I am well aware (though somewhat disappointed) that there are probably not all of the amazing places seen in Interstellar, but the concepts of relativity and wormholes and black holes, those are actually back there. Way more interesting than a unicorn, if you’re asking me.
Along those same lines, even in these faraway places, these three films especially bring a distinct humanity and somehow relatable feelings and themes to the table. Somehow, you know exactly how Sandra Bullock feels when she’s alone in her ship, crying to herself, thinking about her daughter’s death, and how she will probably be joining her soon. In my case, and I hope most of yours, I have never had a child die (as I have never had any children) nor have I ever been in such a circumstance where I have to look my own potential death right in the face, yet here I am, knowing exactly how that feels. I’m sitting there in the theater, in suburban Illinois, knowing exactly how it feels to be there, running low on air, in the epitome of the middle of nowhere, filled with grief, fear, but also relief. Relief that your suffering might soon be over. The ability to communicate those pure, intense, human emotions in a place that is anything but human, is pretty freaking cool. It brings something we understand to a place we really don’t. That, right there, is what is so cool about this brand of science fiction: it is power. We have the power to bring ourselves, our emotions and our stories, to a place that can’t support us, or even a place that scares us.
That’s all nice and true, but, if we’re being honest, one of the most alluring things about these space movies is the guts some of these plots have. I think, there’s a line, there’s a line between brilliant story-writing, and absolute utter nonsense. The line is like a centimeter thick. And these films? Not only do they stand right on top of the line but they dance back and forth on it too!
These films include talking robot friends, seemingly impossible escapes from death, new dimensions, characters who meet again under different time streams, all jumbled together. On paper, these movies may have absolutely stupid ridiculous plot lines. On screen, it’s almost a terrible plot line, and yet it isn’t. But it almost is. It’s so crazy, I couldn’t decide, as it was unfolding to me, whether Interstellar boasted the most genius plot twist in history, or the most stupid bunch of crap I had ever seen.
The beauty in this genre is you can do that, you can throw all that crap in and it can work. You can save the heroes, you can defy death and make it back because WHY NOT. We don’t know what’s going on behind a black hole; I mean I suppose it could be that. Who are we to say otherwise?
These movies are terrifying, emotionally charged, outright silly films. Those descriptors do not sound like they go together. In fact, they sound like they clash. But they don’t, because that’s what this whole thing is about! You can have it all in a film. It’s called science fiction and its nerdy crap but it’ll get you thinking for days. And from my experience, it’s pretty good at keeping you up at night too.