Movies: Big Hero 6, Interstellar

We were off on Veteran's Day (because we had just gotten back from Ohio on Monday, and Tuesday was our "rest day" before we went back to work on Wednesday), so we went to see Big Hero 6. Rob wasn't enthusiastic about going, for whatever reason, but he ended up liking it, and so did I. A lot. Mainly that was because of Baymax, the first-aid robot yanked by circumstances into the superhero business. He is adorable. The rest of the gang is pretty good, too, but Baymax is the thing that makes it way above average. (If you go, BE SURE you hang in there through the end credits. The payoff is totally worth it. We didn't know if there was anything at the end or not, but anybody who goes to Marvel movies has been conditioned to stay, and this felt enough like one of those that we stayed without even saying anything about it. (There was a pretty fair crowd there, and only six of us stayed through the credits. You can tell who the geeks are.)

Big Hero 6 was my choice of movie, and so Sunday I had to go with Rob to see his choice, which was Interstellar. And it was pretty good, too - better than I expected. I wouldn't go see Gravity last year, but I gather Interstellar was sort of part Gravity and part 2001, with a bit of a dollop of that Mel Gibson movie Signs, in the cornfield location and the family stuff. I'm sure you could come up with other influences, but those were the ones that occurred to me. I really especially had flashbacks of being taken to see 2001 when it came out (in '68, I believe it was? I was eight, and very confused towards the end - like most everybody else was, of whatever age.) Parts of Interstellar really deliberately(I think) evoke those later scenes of 2001. At least it has a more well-defined ending, although it's left rather open. (For a sequel? probably.)

The cast is full of people I'm not tremendously fond of, for the most part - McConaghey, Hathaway, Chastain, even Michael Caine is not really among my very favorite actors. (Caine doesn't really have a lot to do, anyway.) But, I don't know, somehow it hangs together pretty well. I actually predicted correctly what Murph's ghost was going to turn out to be, although I can't say I predicted much else that happened. The mathematics and the orbital dynamics and that kind of thing are mostly pretty beyond me, but I couldn't really see any huge blinding errors in the math & science pieces of the thing. I did like the message about how humans just don't give up, and that often the big breakthroughs are because we're forced by adversity to improvise. I liked the hopeful message of the ending- although I did wonder how much of humanity they had managed to get onto that space station.

(I'm falling asleep. My pardons if this is getting a bit confused toward the end here.)