An Open Letter to the Theo Scoffers of INTERSTELLAR
Dear people, and you know who you are, who have written the complaint about the film INTERSTELLAR:
You say that because Cooper, in the final climatic scene, speculates that the mysterious powers from the fifth dimension who saved his life and, working through him, saved the human race in the movie, are the remote descendants of the human race, from an era after our children evolved into beings and superhuman power and enter eternity, transcending the bounds of space and time, that this means this movie is hostile to God.
You say the filmmakers made the benevolent aliens into descendants of man rather than making them into angels in order to shut out the idea that the miracles that save man in this movie could have been arranged by Providence.
I will not, like the sci scoffers, tell you to go pound sand, because I think your mistake is understandable. It is, nonetheless, a mistake.
You are as utterly mistaken as to the intent of the movie as it is possible to be. Take it from me as a science fiction writer: when you put powerful, mysterious, unknown superbeings in a science fiction story, every writer assumes every reader will assume these are ALIENS, things strangers to us. When you find out that the aliens are human beings, the children of mankind, it is a discovery and a wild relief, because now you know they stand to us as Cooper stands to Murph. Instead of being horrible bug-things from a methane world, the superbeings are our own daughters who came back in time to hug us.
If from that idea you somehow get the idea that the filmmakers were saying ‘these angelic and saintlikes beings are humans therefore not sent by God’ then you did not see the same film I saw. Nay, I will say more: if that WAS the film maker’s intent, he failed as miserably as it is possible to fail. If anyone makes a story about faith, hope and love, about falling into an inescapable darkness in an act of self sacrifice, turning into a ghost, seeing one’s loved ones again, aiding them from beyond the grave and emerging again by a miracle into the life and light, and then tries to add one line to say that all this is part of the godless, hopeless and loveless secular world, that filmmaker is attempting the impossible.
Your arguments is the same as if I were to argue that ITS A WONDERFUL LIFE is godless because Clarence Odbody is a human being rather than an angel, and that there is no mention of Christ by name.
The point of the scene was that the mysterious THEY who established the wormhole, saved Cooper, and saved all mankind are “Human therefore not alien” not “Human therefore not sent by God.”
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
