Netflix lands two of the best sci-fi movies ever made to kick off the new year.
Netflix is kicking off the new year in style. Two of the best sci-fi movies ever made just landed on the streaming service and whether or not you’ve seen them, either would make for a great New Year’s Day watch-party.
Netflix always adds a swath of new movies on the first of each month, but rarely does it add two heavy-hitters of this caliber on the same day. The two films, from esteemed director Christopher Nolan, are among my favorites of his entire oeuvre. Nolan is the British film director behind such hits as The Dark Knight Trilogy and Oppenheimer, though the first movie of his I saw was Momento.
A Voyage Through Space And Time
The first of Nolan’s films landing on Netflix today is Interstellar. The film released back in 2014—over a decade ago!—and was written by Nolan’s brother, Jonathan. It stars Matthew McConaughey as Joseph Cooper, a former NASA test pilot who has turned to farming while raising his two children. Cooper is a widower, and raises his kids with the help of his father-in-law, Donald (John Lithgow).
Interstellar blends a subtle dystopianism with space travel. The world Cooper lives in is a post-truth society. His daughter’s teachers scold him for teaching her that the Apollo missions were not fabricated. Dust storms ravage the countryside. Humankind, it seems, has given up. When Cooper discovers a strange anomaly at his farm, he finds himself caught up in a last-ditch effort to save humanity by venturing out into space to travel through a wormhole near Saturn that leads to a distant star system. And while all of this is epic science-fiction at its finest, the film is also deeply personal and surprisingly poignant. It does have a long runtime, however, clocking in at 2 hours and 49 minutes, so be sure to block out enough time to give it a proper viewing.
Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Michael Caine, Matt Damon, Casey Affleck and a number of other talented actors star in the film, including a young Timothée Chalamet in one of his very first appearances (something I’d actually forgotten about entirely, not having known who he was when I first watched this).
Interstellar isn’t the best-reviewed of Nolan’s films, with critics giving it a 72% on Rotten Tomatoes. Audiences liked it better, giving it an 87% score. I thought the ending was brilliant and powerful, but not all critics agreed. Ryan Syrek of The Reader concluded: “Rotten score. Preposterous, pseudointellectual, poorly constructed, clichéd, impenetrably masculine, goofy and possessed of an indecipherable ending, Interstellar is the mother of all misfires.” I disagree entirely, but to each their own!
A Journey Into The Mind
The second of the two must-watch sci-fi films that just dropped on Netflix today is also a Christopher Nolan film, which released several years earlier. Inception, which Nolan wrote and directed, came out in 2010, and made waves thanks to both its compelling, twisty-turny story and the film’s remarkable, mind-bending visual effects.
I consider this one of Nolan’s best and most unique films (87% critic score and 91% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes) though it falls behind Memento, The Dark Knight, Batman Begins, The Prestige and ties Oppenheimer when it comes to audience scores, and Dunkirk and Insomnia for critic scores (it ties The Dark Knight with critics).
While Interstellar is a dystopian space travel epic, Inception is a mind-bending heist thriller, where the heists aren’t banks or armored cars, but rather the human mind itself. Leonardo DiCaprio plays a professional thief named Cobb who infiltrates his targets’ subconscious to steal their thoughts using advanced technology that allows them to weave dreams together in order to enter someone’s mind and extract the valuable intel.
When he and his partner Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) are hired for an impossible job—planting an idea in someone’s mind rather than making off with one—he forms a crack team and sets out on their most dangerous heist yet. His new employer has offered him a clean slate, and he’s willing to take on any risk for a chance at a new beginning. What follows is an action-packed, trippy adventure into dreams and nightmares—Mission Impossible on LSD.
The film’s ending remains one of the most cryptic, hotly-debated endings in modern cinema.
Check out both Interstellar and Inception on Netflix, along with a bunch of other great movies that just came to the streaming service including Meet The Parents, Schindler’s List and Bruce Almighty. And if you’re still looking for space travel, Apollo 13 also lands on Netflix today. Check out my weekend streaming guide for other great options as well.
