Interstellar: The Answer to Beauty from a Man Who Kept Challenging the Depiction of “Time”

　Who was the first person to depict the speed of space?

　As a child, Mamoru Oshii watched the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey where the space station slowly and elegantly rotates. He was amazed, thinking, “Kubrick decided the speed of space.” From then on, it became common knowledge that vehicles and objects in space should all move as if they were gently floating. Kubrick’s influence is impossible to overstate.

　I’m ashamed to admit that I saw Interstellar for the first time during this recent rerelease.

　It was an incredible shock. I’ve seen quite a few of Nolan’s films, from Memento and Oppenheimer to Tenet and The Dark Knight, but this one is especially huge in scale. I’m grateful that I was finally able to experience it in a movie theater, even if it took me this long.

　Interstellar clearly pays homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Even as one of the defining science fiction films of the 2010s, its spacecraft still move slowly through space.

　What moved me most about Interstellar was its “visualization of space.” Spoilers ahead, so turn back if you care about that.

　In this film, they enter the “fifth dimension.” The fifth dimension. A world beyond human understanding where even time can be traversed. Just as nobody had ever seen the speed of space in the past, nobody knows what the scenery of the fifth dimension looks like.

　VAKISHIM, the popular Ultra Monster from Ultraman Ace, which I love dearly, appears by literally splitting open the sky. It showed children glued to their televisions what “another dimension” looked like.

　Even though I was part of the generation that rented DVDs, young Nyarla was no exception. That scene completely blew me away, and I remember thinking, “This really is an invader from another dimension!”

　The entire movie experience of Interstellar depends on how it depicts the fifth dimension. If the world beyond the black hole didn’t give us a vision of space that nobody had ever seen before, there would be no way to satisfy us after nearly three hours strapped into our seats.

　Nolan’s films are extremely logical. Everything is explained within the work. The information and chronology can be complicated to organize, but there are no mysteries left hanging. They are science-minded films that don’t use direction or emotion to cover things up. And this is the scenery he arrived at.

　Countless bookshelves floating in space. Nolan interpreted the fifth dimension, which transcends even time, as a “library”!

　Wonderful. I forgot all about the fatigue of more than two hours, and from this scene onward I was glued to the screen. This was the answer from a director who had spent his entire career challenging himself to depict “time” in different ways. It is beautiful.

　He arrived at this three-dimensional library because he pushed the consistency of every setup and bit of foreshadowing in the film as far as it could go, then carefully considered how to interpret another dimension rationally and turn that interpretation into a visual that also worked as cinema. This is true art, something you cannot reach through poetic sensibility alone.

　At the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick depicted the room of extraterrestrials possessing intelligence beyond humanity as a pristine, luxurious white hotel room.

　The colors, arrangement, luxury. Every part of the space is wonderful. Yet the interpretation was so sharp that nobody understood what it meant. Perhaps it was the furthest point of interpreting science fiction through pure sensibility. Even real aliens would be surprised by something like this.

　By contrast, Interstellar’s answer is the extreme point of interpreting science fiction through logic and cinematic direction. Without a doubt, it is a masterpiece. I saw an incredible film. And even after launching a massive work like this, he never slows down his pace of filmmaking. A genius possessed by cinema.

　The fact that, sometime in the not-so-distant future, I’ll be able to watch another Christopher Nolan film, with even more refined technology and direction, is simply something to be happy about.