SPOILERS!!
I've been eagerly awaiting “Interstellar” for months and it really did live up to my expectations.
Christopher Nolan’s film, starring a stellar cast and breathtaking visuals, stands up very well as a Sci-Fi epic and is very entertaining. It will also make you question whether the human race is ready for interstellar travel, because these characters clearly are not. The film also enters some pretty strange realms of time, space and metaphysics, and even touches on that vast, unknowable emotion called love, and does all these things in an often clunky way.
The story (SPOILERS AHEAD, I meant it!) is this: in the near future (perhaps 25 years from now) humanity, presented here only by what’s going on in the USA, is suffering from massive droughts and dust bowl-like conditions that are causing all crops except corn to fail. And corn is about to fail, too. The population of the earth has fallen dramatically and the earth is basically dying. We need a new home out among the stars.
Matthew McConaughey is an engineer in a world where there is no need for engineers, so he’s a farmer dealing with all this misery. He has two kids. His son plays a minor role but his super-intelligent daughter plays a key role, and in fact, must be played by three actresses across generations.
And no, McConaughey does not drive a Lincoln in the film, as he does in his now-famous and extremely odd TV commercials. He drives a very old 2014 Dodge Ram pickup truck.
The film features the struggles on earth, intercut with danger and duplicity on distant planets, and the stars include an Affleck, a Damon, a Caine, and a former Spiderman, among many other big names rounded up by Nolan.
The first half of the movie basically sets all of this up, and it’s extremely bleak and horrifyingly believable. Leaving aside the CAUSE of all this misery – assumed to be a man-made event – the nation’s economic priorities have also changed. No more military (only because it’s no longer affordable) and no more space program. In fact, textbooks that are “government-corrected” – apparently by Oliver Stone – make it clear that we never even went to the moon, and that the faked lunar landings were only a ruse to bankrupt the Soviets.
But things get weird fast when a gravitational anomaly in his house leads McConaughey’s character to a secret government facility that turns out to be NASA’s new home. He’s quickly recruited to pilot a ship and crew, complete with robots, to a black hole/wormhole that’s mysteriously appeared near Saturn – put there by a “they” that is at first undefined.
I use the word “quickly” with great trepidation, because it takes these characters years to just get to Saturn in this film and it feels like it takes hours in the theater, too. WARNING: This film soars to nearly three hours in length. It feels like five. Discrete cutting could have brought it down to two, easily.
On the “other side” of the wormhole, they’re in another galaxy, and must explore three planets that have been deemed possibly inhabitable by humans – new homes for the starving millions, or (a Plan B) to repopulate with genetic material the astronauts brought with them.
For the sake of the audience, astronauts approaching the black hole are portrayed explaining how time can bend in an Einsteinian sense. This is something they surely would already know, and many other points seem pedantic and even silly. Some of the dialogue here seems like it could have been cut, leaving less-informed viewers to go to Wikipedia for scientific explanations.
2001: A Space Odyssey, to which this film could easily be compared in many respects (including some trippy wormhole scenes and the "HAL-like" robots, who luckily don't go insane) shows that constant chatter is unnecessary to show the majesty and vastness of space.
The remarkable Hans Zimmer's music added a lot to the effect of the film and gave it a “2001” feeling. He also composed music for Nolan’s “Inception,” which this film in some ways resembles. The musical score was too loud in places and covered some dialogue at the end.
Back to the plot, three explorers have managed to get messages out to earth, and exploring one of the planets – a water world (a type of planet which does exist and is extremely plausible) – that unfortunately lies too close to the black hole and causes time to run 1/7th slower. This has a devastating effect on the crew and incidentally demonstrates why such long-distance travel would be very difficult for humans.
Some ludicrous and unscientific points here include escaping the event horizon of a black hole by using rocket engines, and then “shedding the weight” of part of the ship. Huh? And the fact that “love” is the key to part of the solution, as elucidated by the love-addled Anne Hathaway, who is smitten with one of the male explorers who has gone to explore one of the promising planets. The idea that Love should color the decision to explore one planet instead of another is rightly shot down by McConauhey’s character. I immediately thought I was watching a sequel to “The Fifth Element.”
Instead, there are five dimensions here, and the final third of the film explores just how this can be and who is behind all of it, and it’s here that the film because incredibly surreal, and no description can be given without ruining the “surprise.” It IS science fiction, after all, and it lives up to the Fiction element as well as the Science portion.
Beautifully filmed, awesome in scope, I recommend Interstellar, but prepare for a long haul into these distant galaxies and back again.
Official movie site: https://interstellar.withgoogle.com/
This review on IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0816692/reviews-2399
