Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Michael Cainw, and Bill Irwin
Directed by: Christopher Nolan
Release Date: November 7, 2014
Interstellar is a gripping science fiction movie that will leave you speechless. It has a certain type of charm that will keep you hooked for the duration of the movie which is 2 hours and 49 minutes. That’s right, almost three hours long. The film is thrilling enough where it can keep the viewer’s interest but at times it drags along hoping not to bore everyone with its scientific jargon.
The movie takes place in a future time on Earth where the planet is slowly dying. Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is a corn farmer and former NASA astronaut. He lives on the corn farm with his father-in-law Donald (John Lithgow), his son Tom (Timothee Chalamet) and daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy). The four have a very caring relationship especially between Coop and Murph. Murph is a brilliant child who is ahead of her time and wants more out of life where as Tom is content with being a farmer just like his dad. One day while sitting at the table for dinner Murph tells everyone that she has a poltergeist in her room and its leaving her weird messages. No one really believes her but Cooper so he goes up to her room and investigates. Upon further inspection he finds coordinates that lead somewhere. So he and Murph go on adventure to find out where the coordinates lead to.
The two find out that the coordinates lead to an old secret NASA base where Cooper’s old Instructor, Professor Brand (Michael Caine) is. There he tells Cooper that he needs him to pilot a space shuttle to another dimension to find a substitute planet for Earth since its dying and probably won’t survive another generation. He discusses the risks and Cooper agrees. Cooper abandons his family (which doesn’t sit well with Murph) to pursue his dream of becoming an astronaut once again. So the four astronauts Cooper, Dr. Brand’s daughter, Brand (Anne Hathaway), Doyle (Wes Bentley) and Romily (David Gyasi) all embark on a mission to save the Earth through some dimensional worm hole supposedly left there by ‘aliens’ that will take them to another galaxy to find a suitable replacement for Earth. Along the way to provide some comedy relief for the film was TARS (Bill Irwin), a roving robot that helped lighten the mood when the film began to drag.
Once the astronauts get to Saturn (which took two years so they slept in a chamber to slow the aging process) they enter the worm hole which had some amazing special effects. Once on the other side the team attempts to track down other astronauts who had gone through the wormhole before them. The first planet they visited was only a water planet and it was virtually uninhabitable. Unfortunately, Doyle died on this mission as he tried to save Brand from a tidal wave the size of a building. After narrowly escaping the planet they device another plan to go to a planet that was full of ice and it was inhabited by an astronaut, Dr. Mann (Matt Damon), sent before them.
Dr. Mann tells them that the planet can be habitable but it is all lies. He attempts to kill Cooper (but thanks to Brand she saves him) and steal the ship so he can get back to Earth. Unfortunately, before Dr. Mann leaves he set a booby trap which kills Romily. As he attempts to escape in the ship and dock on the propeller ship, he can’t lock on accurately and blows himself up. Fortunately Cooper and TARS are able to connect their ship to the propeller ship but it wasn’t without complications. Cooper, TARS, and Brand device a plan that will shoot them through the worm hole and get them back to Earth but not without any problems so Cooper volunteers to give it a test run. As he falls through the worm hole he finds himself in a fifth dimension where he learns that he was the poltergeist all along telling Murph to tell his past self not to go on this mission but to convince Murph to work for NASA and find a solution to Earth’s problem.
Interstellar is a very entertaining if not long movie. It’s an intellectual film that if you go to the restroom you’ll miss key sections of the film and find yourself perplexed. It wasn’t a groundbreaking film but it does make the viewer think about how the Earth is hurting. This film receives 7 stars out of 10 stars.