Singular-Minded

Mayhaps I am a sensitive soul but watching movies is usually a terrifically emotional experience for me. Recently I've twice-sat in on two films which I could say I've experienced more than I really watched. The first would be Fury, a war movie starring Brad Pitt and company as the crewman for an American tank in the twilight months of the Second World War. Fury isn't an especially great movie - the overall message seems... sophomoric when considering the subject matter and it ladles out heavy servings of cheese on several occasions. It isn't as well put together as, say, Saving Private Ryan which does a better job of creating both an experience and conveying a story. 

But boy-howdy is Fury ever one of those see-it-in-theaters type movies. It's hard for me to easily recommend - if you want to feel like you're huddled huddled shoulder-to-shoulder with soggy, exhausted infantrymen whose coats are heavy with damp, reek, and mud while 7.62 rounds bang off the front of the clattering, snarling Sherman tank providing you with a mobile shield as you inch your way across open ground to a hasty German defensive position, then by all means watch it. If you want to feel claustrophobic, deafened, and terrified as four American Shermans dance a slow and high-stakes ballet with a single German Panzer - feel the air suck out of your lungs as 88mm anti-tank rounds howl like banshees overhead and peel paint off the side of your turret while your gunner frantically attempts to traverse and engage and everyone is screaming because people are dying and everyone is going to fucking die if you can't get around it and get ahead of its gun and then be racked with relief and grief when it's over and all that's left is the burning of engine oil and the terrible empty silence that was moments ago filled with chaos - well, this is the movie to see.  

Why you would might want to experience that is a pretty good question, I guess. But I remember watching Lone Survivor and listening to the squeal and thunder of Chinook rotors and feel the machine heartbeat in my chest and boots as a four-man team stepped panting into the mountains under the burden of heavy rucksacks. I watch Fury and I remember laughing nervously through a screen of cigarette smoke in the back of a LAV-3 while dust tumbled down in screens from the air-sentry hatch, ears humming with the monotony of radio chatter. I remember banging my fingers off the C-SAM and hearing the muffled thump-thump-thump clang-clang-clang of our gunner laying down a Z-pattern burst and watching the kinetic backlash kick dirt up on the screen and howling with the frenzy of it. It's cathartic. 

The second movie is Christopher Nolan's Interstellar. I've seen it twice and both times I've had the wind knocked out of me. Both times I've walked out of the theater with friends or my brothers and said it's the best movie I've ever seen - subjective, biased, a heat-of-the-moment sort of thing, maybe, but I can't help but feel disconnected from the cynical critical observations I've perused through online. I guess in the end, it's an emotional issue that can't readily be rationalized - I guess I'm a very empathetic being. 

Spoilers ahead, folks.

I think the main reason Star Trek: Into Darkness left such a bad taste in my mouth was that it was ideologically bankrupt and Star Trek, if anything, is an entirely ideological concept. When Gene Roddenberry wrote

"Space. The final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. It's five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before."

I doubt very much he intended it to be representative of a brainless game of laser-tag. Superficially Captain Kirk traveled to "strange new worlds" made of styrofoam and had sex with green women but subcutaneously the series was a kind of fictional vanguard for the pursuit of knowledge and for human exploration. Superficially, Interstellar (especially with all the awesome power of IMAX™) lets us wonder at the silent majesty of space yawning terribly around the fragile Endurance; we breathlessly watch it tumble insignificantly past Saturn's rings, fold through space into a wormhole and feel the physical stresses run through the ship's frame and instruments, gaze upon the blinding event horizon of a massive black hole, feel its tidal power move waves the size of mountains across the surface of a planet caught haplessly in its orbit, and break frozen clouds into a glittering riot across the upper atmospheres of some alien, semi-gaseous world galaxies away. 

The hard physics of this are irrelevant in face of the theme - if I can hand-on-heart talk about the conveyance of realism in Donkey Kong Country, then I can attest that Christopher Nolan achieves similar conveyance through Interstellar's depiction of space-travel. Now that the movie is also an emotional roller-coaster - to hook an audience on the layman's terms - and viscerally dramatizes temporal relativity and the traumatic effects on a small American family adds profundity to the overall experience. MacConnaughey watches helplessly as his children grow old and suffer emotionally through distant radio transmissions, stuck in dilated time, The concept of a loved one ultimately beyond your reach and that love exists beyond purely physical dimensions gnawed at my heart - but how couldn't it? We are all human and suffer the same. 

I am a very tonelessly unreligious man. To me, religion seems like a sort of betrayal - to believe in purely fantastical concepts for the sake of comfort and community baffle me because I guess I am a humanist. I acknowledge fundamental scientific reasoning and that unanswered questions will be answered not by some higher power but by our own ingenuity and achievement. If that is faith, then I willingly choose that faith. MacConnaughey's character plummets into Gargantua and finds himself unstuck in a tesseract of space-time desperately attempting to caress his daughter's face decades into the past and correct his mistakes. The revelation that this five-dimensional room is the construct not of some alien power, but of a future human civilization evolved beyond our contemporary comprehension raises the hair on my arms. Why believe in anything if not us? 

To know that there is a finite amount of matter in all the universe and that it cannot vanish - only change states - and to dream about somehow reaching beyond space and time to even faintly hold my youngest brother in my arms again; or that whatever made up Tommy beyond his physical vessel must exist in one form or another - could somehow try and reach through that barrier - is religion enough for me. 

How could anyone want to believe in anything else?