Interstellar

We have all heard of Matthew McConaughey's new movie hit Interstellar. If you haven't, here is a brief overview: basically Matthew McConaughey is this once engineer turned farmer, Cooper, who sets out on a mission to find a new planet to inhabit humans. I am not normally one for sci-fi movies, if this can be considered one, but this was a different type of sci-fi movie. For example, when I think "future," I normally think of hover cars and teleportation devices. I don't normally think of a world that has completely used up its new technological devices and that is paying the price for its many years of pollution  and wastefulness. Yet, that is how Interstellar is. Here we have a future that is completely based upon how we used our resources in the past. It really makes you think. Very rarely do I watch a movie that impacts me or really sticks with me. However, this was one of those movies. I could not believe that I actually loved a Matthew McConaughey movie. Don't get me wrong; the man is handsome. I personally am not a fan of his acting, although I'm sure many people will disagree with me. However, he was perfect in this movie. Another plus to this whole film was the special effects. I actually felt like I was in space with the crew. I felt lonely out in space while Matthew McConaughey and his group were there; and it honestly made me miss my family even though I was only 10 minutes away from them. It is very hard for a movie to grasp such emotions given the genre. Furthermore, I learned so many things. For example, time is relative. I was completely on the edge of my seat the whole time. Cooper (McConaughey's character) has to leave his family behind in order to help on this space mission. Yet time on earth is completely different from time out in space. I think the line that really just made my heart break was the scene in which Cooper is saying goodbye to his daughter Murph. He says that when he returns Murph might be just as old as him (keep in mind, his daughter is like 10 years old here). Immediately I knew that this was not going to be an easy journey. Of course Anne Hathaway's character, Brand, had a lot to lose too. Her father was the head of the mission and he was elderly (you can see where this is going). Each individual on the mission had so much to lose, yet so much to gain. Not to mention Brand's father quotes the poem by Dylan Thomas, "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Goodnight," which happens to be a poem my old English teacher read to us. It is a powerful poem and fit perfectly with this powerful movie. Yet just as the poem is so dark, this movie has several dark elements. So here our characters go. They have communication with the secret base of NASA (NOTE: all military and governmental programs were cut due to the money needed for drones) in which Cooper can still receive messages from his son and daughter and Brand still receives messages from her father. Well, Cooper's daughter is not on speaking terms with him because she did not want him to leave. She decoded a message prior from a gravitational signal that decoded the phrase "stay." Long story short, they come to this planet in which 1 hour on this planet = 7 Earth years. Time is relative remember? SPOILER ALERT: Because of such strong gravitational pull, this planet has massive waves; so high they resemble mountains. The ship gets struck by a wave and although it does not damage the ship, the engine gets flooded. They're stuck for a long time. By the time they get back, they realize they've been gone 4 hours or 28 years on Earth. Here is where your heart will break: Cooper gets a message from his family. His son is married and has a child. Next message: his son's child just died due to  lack of pure air. Next message: Cooper's father-in-law died. Then the worst message: his daughter Murph finally speaks to him. After 28 years of silence, she speaks to him. She is finally his age when he left for the mission. Mind blown right? Let's not forget how Murph is now working alongside Brand's dad. After Brand's father, Dr. Brand (Michael Caine), passes, Dr. Brand reveals that the mission was never for the group to return. Rather, they would find a planet and stay there. This brings us to the idea of altruism which they discuss in the movie. I learned this in my Biology class. It's the evolutionary concept of someone risking their own fitness to save their own species. In other words, instead of fixing the issues on Earth, he sent the strongest and bravest humans out on a mission to save the human species. Again, my heart was breaking. If that isn't enough we can fast forward to the end. Remember how Cooper has been gone for a very long time? Well he finds his way back. Happy right? Wrong. His daughter has apparently found a way to create a base on a neighboring planet of Saturn and has set up a whole civilization there. Cooper is still the same age as he was when he left, maybe a couple of years older but not by much. He returns to his daughter who happens to be dying of old age. That's right. She finishes up her line with a twist on the line Cooper told her in the very beginning "No parent deserves to see their child die." Crying yet? I wanted to. This movie was amazing though. The cast did a phenomenal job and kudos to you, Christopher Nolan, for creating an absolutely spectacular visionary masterpiece. I couldn't keep my eyes away from the screen. My only regret is that I didn't see this one in theaters. I highly recommend Interstellar to anyone who enjoys sci-fi movies.

The Fault In Our Stars

So I realize that technically the movie The Fault In Our Stars has not yet been released; I just want to discuss the book. I just finished reading it today. I decided upon this novel because I refuse to be a heathen who sees a movie before reading the book. I am not sure whether to be happy or sad about it. There are two sides I've taken to this book: one is that it is a love story about a girl and a boy with a tragedy at the end (basically every cliché romance novel) or two that it is a representation of death that no one wants to admit. The book was relatively pessimistic, but I guess that makes sense because it is about cancer. Then again the focus is far from a cancer novel. In fact, I was very impressed by the metaphorical aspect of it all. The character Augustus Waters was the type of character I have longed to see for a very long time. I have not loved a character so much since the Harry Potter books. He is the charming, charismatic type of character that everyone just wants to read about more and more. Yet he represented the brutal truth of death. The book tells us that we are all a statistic in the greater scheme of life. Time screws us all over eventually. All of us have a set number of days left on this earth (some more than others). However I think the scariest idea represented in the book was that all of us strive to make a mark on the earth before we die. We want to believe that when we die, people will remember us forever that it will be this great tragedy. Yet this is not true. It is such a pessimistic view but it is merely the truth that all of us hate to admit. When we die the world keeps moving. People mourn but eventually we are nothing but a forgotten memory to most. The sad reality is that all of us have this moral duty to treat the dying better than the living. Not to ruin the book, *SPOILER ALERT* but when one character is dying he sees people who have not talked to him in three years. They act like his best friend but no virtually nothing about him. Nevertheless, I have to say that I enjoyed John Green's pessimism throughout the novel. Not that I am a pessimistic. I have quite the optimistic view on life. John Green forces the reader to see beyond a cliché love story. He wants us to realize that we cannot live our lives until we can accept that one day we will die. I highly recommend everyone to read this book. After all the movie is coming out in about two weeks.