"Interstellar" PG 13
Chris Nolan and his brother, Jon, craft a strange nod to 2001 and The Grapes of Wrath in this epic space adventure about a dying human race and a last ditch space mission to rescue some of humanity, specifically in America. The local community is desperate because of a long suffering drought period where everything stopped growing somehow, and they somehow still have the means to survive despite it.
Cooper, Matthew McConahauhey, is a farmer who was once an astronaut living on a corn farm where there is a massive dust bowl and blight destroying crops. His Father, Donald, John Lithgow, lives with him and his two children, Tom, Timothee Chalemet, and Murphy, Mackenzie Foy.
Tom wants to be a boring farmer but younger Murphy wants to be a scientist, guided seemingly by a spirit that teaches her things in the farmhouse library. So, he decides to chase after coordinates found by her daughter through the strange trippy ghostly thing in the library, because yes libraries are haunted.
Cooper was an astronaut and is insatiably curious about things, and after tracking a drone he finds coordinates to a secret NASA base, but his daughter stows away and comes with him. Once there, they find Brand, Michael Cain, an eccentric scientist, and his astronaut daughter, Amalia, Ann Hathaway. They learn that the secret group plans to launch a space ark before the human race is wiped out.
Then Cooper decides to join the NASA mission wityout even questioning the idea and leaves his family in a heartfelt moment, although it is kind of weird, because he really should have thought it through. The nagging plot that one his last mission he crashed is ignored when he brazenly is able to fly updated ships without training! Presumably Cooper, which is his last name, just kept up with his training all these years while working the farm.
The mission is to travel to Saturn where 40 years before a wormhole just happened to appear, put there by aliens from another dimension, and presumably it is a means to escape. They journey through the wormhole with one token crewman, who is left hopelessly trapped in time at one point, but rescued 23 years later.
They first visit a watery world near a black hole, which must actually be a wormhole, and there time is slowed for them on the planet, but not for their crew mate who orbits the planet. The hapbless black third crewman is left in orbit, Romilly, played by David Geyasi. Because of the relativistic time shifts of the black hole nearby, the two visit the planet for a few hours, but 23 years pass in orbit. This is kind of silly. The token crewman could have had all the time to send word that they were at the time planet and where to find them. They had communications one way with Earth, which is weird, and were never once able to send anything back to Earth, but then later Cooper will do just that.
Then they go to another planet where there is a frozen snowball surface which they could not apparently check even though they had black hole, er wormhole, traversing communication with Earth. The space mad astronaut they find, name of Mann, Matt Damon is pretty obvious from the get go. Here it is Forbidden Planet a little, and 2001. Not going to spoil it as to what happened with him.
In order to explain the movie plot, some elements have to be given away. It is a good movie that should be seen in theaters, even if it is a little long. If you do not want spoilers, stop here.
(Spoilers). Eventually the two heroes make it off the ice planet. Then Cooper decides to travel into a singularity to the mysterious alien 'tesseract' or cosmic cube from Marvel! (They borrowed the name). Inside the cosmic cube though, it is like a fifth dimension and time is a physical space, and it's all trippy like the end of 2001, with the all points in space time leading to the wormholes, the way out, the math formula they need, and everything!
(Spoilers). At the same time, somehow the now grown children have to escape the farmhouse when the dust gets too bad, and miraculously the daughter thinks to pick up the watch, talisman, space thing, which the alien has transmitted the answers inside using a ridiculously convoluted outdated coding device. Inception meets Code Talkers. Well that is trippy.
Tesseract! Yes I know it's also a mathematical puzzle, but in Marvel movies and comics it is also the energy cube used by the Asguardians, and Thor, and in Transformers it was the Cosmic Cube or All Spark.
The great lengths they go to convey that the cube has the ability to manipulate space time is not used to simply negate the entire story! If you can transmit code, you can transmit video images, technical plans, cure the blight, and save the human race. Maybe Cooper wasn't thinking at the last minute there. And man, in the future his space suit has one heck of an air supply converter, which comes in handy when he might be rescued in the future floating in space by the space explorers, or something.
They used an actual scientist, Kip Thorne, on this movie and still had a guy dive into a black hole. He would have been stripped into his atomic elements never to return. Presumably the Tesseract was put in the way to stop him, which begs the question, who put it there and how did they know where he would be? Is that for the sequel? Nolan loves making up more questions than answers. Oh, maybe the guy was smart enough to transmit his coordinates too, into the watch. They could have done it so much easier. Have the aliens transmit a live message! They can because they did it before when talking to the other ship, as it had to be the aliens doing that. No way can communication travel to other galaxies faster than light.
And why did it have to be another galaxy? Solar system would have made more sense. It's still fantastic if it's another solar system in our galaxy. I bet what happened is even with a scientist into black holes on his staff, he never once asked the difference! Yes, another solar system. Your story would be called Intergalactic if it was another galaxy.
And if they do mount a rescue of the girl on the colony, she will likely be dead by the time he gets there. See, if you had just made it another solar system, it would have worked!
(Spoilers). Also if the human race goes out into space and knows that he sent the message to them, via the watch, then they should have gone looking for him a long time ago, and should have known to send help to the colony planet also. Well maybe he was not able to send that much information to the past, or something, but they say it's never about time travel to the past, except when it kind of is.
Apparently this was intended to be a Spielberg movie but he passed on it, and in the original script the aliens were a real thing that were just looking to save one of theirs, ala ET, not to save humanity. The planets were just out there. The other galaxy stuff came in later too, as it was merely another series of solar systems. It works better this way actually.
Some critics complained about Nolan not understanding human emotion, or putting too much into the first two acts, but really this is not a problem in the movie. They had seen the original script where there was no ecological disaster and it was just about an alien, which would have made it a glorified mess. No wonder Spielberg passed. Nolan did pretty good with it.
Review by Adam Browne
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