Director Christopher Nolan has brought us many great films like Memento, The Dark Knight and Inception, but every great director always creates a masterpiece that defines their career.
Interstellar is Nolan’s biggest and and most awe inspiring film that will set the bar so high that we may not see another film as marvelous, ambitious and jaw dropping for another decade. So maybe we need to quickly find a worm hole and screw with time so that we can see the next great film.
Interstellar, which stars Mathew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Michael Caine and a plethora of other fine actors, takes us into a spaceship and sends us to the far reaches of space in order to find a planet that could sustain human life.
You see, in the not too distant future, Earth has become inhabitable, food is running out, desertification is sweeping the land and the air is becoming less breathable.
There is never really an explanation on why but if you were to put two and two together, Nolan is predicting what most modern scientists predict, we are killing our planet folks. All that remains is corn, dust and human ingenuity.
McConaughey puts aside his “alright, alright, alright” persona and delivers a great performance as Cooper, a former NASA test pilot turned genius farmer who stumbles upon a gravitational anomaly.
What he ends up finding is a secret NASA project that just so happens to be looking for a pilot to fly their spaceship to another galaxy. Cooper decides to leave his family in the rear-view mirror and join a crew whose mission is to save the human race.
Meanwhile his young daughter Murph, who never forgives her father for leaving, works on trying to figure out the mystery of gravity along side Professor Brand played by Michael Caine.
The beginning of the film seems rather too convenient and thrown together, but it gives us just enough before we are swept off into a rocket ship where director Christopher Nolan provides a science lesson in relativity and quantum theory. Did I mention there are robots?
Don’t worry you don’t need to be an astrophysicist to understand the premise. Christopher Nolan spent a lot of time with Kip Thorne, a world famous theoretical physicist and the executive producer of the film, who made sure that scientific facts and theories were accurate. That said, I recommend that people watch a few episodes of Cosmos on Netflix beforehand.
Speaking of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, I remember something astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson once said about how humans have stopped dreaming. McConaughey’s character ponders the same thing in that “we’ve forgotten who we are — explorers, pioneers.”
In the future teachers are pushing the idea that we have devolved into a “caretaker” civilization, and are teaching kids that the Americans never landed on the Moon. It’s better to be a farmer than to have hopes and dreams of anything else.
After you watch Interstellar you can’t help but be curious on what the human race could accomplish if we truly were interested in reaching for the stars once again. Nolan makes an epic masterpiece that taps us on the shoulder and reminds us of just that.
The imagery is breathtaking and the entire film plays out like a science fiction opera that was obviously influenced greatly by 2001: A Space Odyssey.
It’s clear from the get go that Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan, who originally wrote the script for Steven Spielberg, were also influenced by films like Solaris, Planet of the Apes and even Disney’s Black Hole.
The film is gorgeous to look at and the story doesn’t come off as preachy instead we are told that “humans aren’t meant to die here.” If anything it celebrates the perseverance of mankind. It’s thought-provoking and pulse-pounding, and we are just along for the ride.
Interstellar makes last year’s space film Gravity look like Romper Room. We have entered a renaissance when it comes to the science fiction genre, and Christopher Nolan has set the bar high for future science fiction film makers, much like Stanley Kubrick did with 2001.
I recommend the film, in fact it is worth the extra dollars to see it in IMAX.
I give Interstellar 4.5 raindrops.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePbKGoIGAXY
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