Movie Review – Interstellar (2014)

Imagine a world in the not-too-distant future where mankind itself was faced with its own extinction.

We’re not talking about a killer asteroid, a global nuclear holocaust, or a massive attack by extraterrestrial aliens, but from a different threat instead.  In this case it’s a world where a giant dust storm is threatening to destroy the last of the farmland, eliminating a major source of food for the human race.  On top of that, other plants are also dying, and the oxygen in the atmosphere is going to be depleted.

In order for humans to survive, they’re going to have to find a new home in outer space.  Of course, none of the planets in our solar system are capable of handling human civilization.  In order to survive, mankind is going to have to reach new worlds in distant galaxies.

That’s the premise for Interstellar, a science-fiction adventure film created by Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan Nolan.  In Interstellar, a small team of astronaut explorers uses a wormhole to reach another galaxy and determine if any of the planets are suitable for human life.  It’s a race against time as the astronauts make the incredible journey and try to find a new home for humanity.  While they’re away on their mission, scientists back on Earth try to research a way to transport the masses off the dying planet and into outer space.

Directed by Christopher Nolan, written by Jonathan and Christopher Nolan, and with music by Hans Zimmer, Interstellar stars Matthew McConaughey as Cooper, a former NASA pilot and a widowed father of two children.  Supporting him are Anne Hathaway as astronaut / scientist Amelia Brand, Michael Caine as Professor Brand, Amelia’s father, Casey Affleck as Tom, Cooper’s grown son, John Lithgow as Donald, Cooper’s father-in-law, and Matt Damon as astronaut / scientist Dr. Mann.

Interstellar begins on Earth in the near future.  The planet is dying.  Crops have slowly been failing, reducing the diversity of crops available for human consumption, and dust storms continue to plague the farmland.  It’s implied that the Earth’s population has been greatly reduced as part of the aftermath involving a world war, but those details aren’t discussed.  What we do know is that the future is looking extremely bleak for humanity as a whole.

One such farmer is Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a former NASA test pilot and engineer.  At night he’s haunted by nightmares of a failed test flight.  Living with him on the farm are his two children, teenager Tom (Timothee Chalamet) and 10-year-old daughter, Murphy (Mackenzie Foy), better known as “Murph“.  Although Cooper’s wife has died, his father-in-law, Donald (John Lithgow), lives with the family and helps keep an eye on the kids.  Donald also watches over Cooper’s farm vehicles, most of which have been enhanced through Cooper’s engineering skills.

Several odd disturbances have occurred inside of the farm house, and Murph believes that it’s a ghost who is trying to communicate with her.  Of course, Cooper doesn’t believe in ghosts and thinks that there’s a scientific reason for the disturbances.  One day after returning home from a baseball game, a terrible dust storm strikes and dust blows inside through Murph’s open window.  After they close the window they discover a series of ridges of dust on the floor, something definitely not natural.  Cooper determines that the ridges of dust were caused by differences in gravity, but he also realizes that the ridges form a coded binary message.  When the binary is translated, the message is really a set of coordinates.

Cooper and Murph set out and follow the coordinates to a secret NASA facility.  After being briefly interrogated by an artificially intelligent (A.I.) robot, Cooper is led into a meeting room and reunited with his daughter.  There he meets Professor Brand (Michael Caine), one of Cooper’s former professors, and a handful of other scientists.  All of them are surprised to see Cooper as the NASA site is highly classified.  It’s briefly mentioned that since NASA wasn’t willing to drop nuclear weapons in the previous war, the agency was basically defunded.  It was then secretly reinstated as it was discovered that the planet itself was dying, and the hope for humanity was out in space.

In the meeting with the NASA scientists, Cooper learns that there’s a wormhole in the solar system and orbiting planet Saturn.  The scientists have known about the wormhole for the past forty or so years, though they do not know its origins.  What they do know is that more advanced beings placed the wormhole there so that the people on Earth could use it as basically a freeway to another galaxy, a place with more suitable planets.

It’s also mentioned that probes and astronaut explorers have already been sent through the wormhole.  The Lazarus Mission sent twelve astronaut explorers to what were believed to be twelve potentially habitable planets.  Each planet was named after the scientist sent to explore it.  Should the scientist discover that the planet met the basic requirements for supporting human life, then they were to send a “thumbs up” signal back to Earth.  It’s implied that if the planet was too hostile for humans, then whatever scientist that landed there would be left behind and die on that planet.

Cooper is recruited to be the pilot for the Endurance, an experimental spaceship designed to travel through the wormhole and explore the planets on the opposite side.  It’s a mission that will take several years to complete, but it’s for the survival of humanity.  Should the crew of the Endurance succeed, then Professor Brand has two plans for the future of the human race.  “Plan A” calls for lifting a massive NASA space station into orbit and shuttling most of Earth’s population to it.  The space station will then fly to Saturn, pass through the wormhole, and then colonize one of the worlds.  However, completing that mission involves Professor Brand being able to solve the problem of lifting the space station into orbit, something that conventional rockets cannot do.

Otherwise, there’s “Plan B,” a collection of thousands of fertilized human embryos frozen in stasis.  This would function as a “population bomb” and start over mankind on a new world, but doing so would leave behind the rest of Earth’s population, dooming every person on Earth.  The human embryos would be carried on board the Endurance should “Plan A” fail.

The selling point for Cooper occurs when Professor Brand explains just how bleak of a future it’ll be for humans.  His daughter will be the last generation to survive.  After that, people will either starve to death or suffocate from the gradually reduced supply of oxygen.  Should the Endurance succeed, then his children and their children will be able to continue to live for countless generations.  Cooper agrees to join the crew, but this decision crushes Murph’s heart.  She tries to convince him to stay (including showing him a Morse Code message left behind by the “ghost”), but Cooper sticks with his decision.  He leaves for the NASA facility and launches on the Endurance into Earth orbit.

On board the Endurance are Cooper; Professor Brand’s daughter, Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway); physicist Romilly (David Gyasi); geographer Doyle (Wes Bentley); and two A.I. robots — CASE (voiced by Josh Stewart) and TARS (voiced by Bill Irwin).  The flight to Saturn takes two years, and the crew passes the time in hypersleep.  They then catch up on recorded messages from Earth, and they send their messages back home before passing through the wormhole.  While passing through the wormhole, Amelia sees a strange presence and shakes hands with it, though we don’t actually see the extra-dimensional creature.

The Endurance safely passes through the wormhole and arrives in another galaxy.  They have to decide which of the three allegedly habitable planets to visit (Miller, Edmunds or Mann — each of them allegedly has an alive astronaut explorer on the surface).  The spacecraft only has a limited supply of resources, and it’s still a matter of time to find a new home and then return to Earth with the data.  To make matters worse, the planets are very close to Gargantua, a nearby rotating black hole.  Not only does the black hole itself pose a severe gravitational pull, but it also distorts time as well.  On planet Miller, the best candidate based on early transmissions, time is significantly slower than it is back on Earth.  An hour on planet Miller lasts seven years on Earth.

Romilly remains behind on the Endurance while Cooper, Amelia, Doyle and TARS take the Ranger (one of two shuttles on the Endurance) to descend to the surface of Miller.  The follow the homing beacon and land on Miller’s surface, but they quickly discover that the surface is really inhospitable.  The planet itself is covered by a two-foot-deep ocean that is continually roiled by giant tsunami waves.  Amelia and Doyle locate the wreckage of Miller’s capsule and find the data container.  A giant wave approaches and TARS helps Amelia back to the Ranger, but Doyle is killed by the wave.  The water floods the Ranger‘s engines, temporarily stranding them on the surface of the planet.

Cooper and Amelia realize that with the compression of time on the planet, Miller’s spacecraft really crashed only a few minutes ago, explaining why the wreckage was still there at the homing beacon.  The compression of time made it look like Miller’s transmission was continually being broadcast over a series of years on Earth, but it was only minutes on planet Miller.  Cooper is able to reignite the Ranger‘s engines, and he and Amelia barely make it off the planet’s surface before the next wave reaches them.

Back on the Endurance, Cooper and Amelia are shocked to see that Romilly had significantly aged.  It turns out that they were on the planet’s surface for 23 Earth years.  Romilly chose to stay in orbit and wait for their return, taking the time to research the black hole.  Romilly informs them that they have still been receiving video messages from Earth, but they are unable to communicate back to the planet.  When Cooper reviews the years of messages, he watches as Tom has grown up, gotten married, and had a son.  Tom also reports the news of the death of Donald.  Murph is suspiciously absent from the years of messages (she had been holding a grudge against her father for this whole time) until it’s her birthday later in life.  Before Cooper left on his mission, he told her that when he returned to Earth the two of them may be the same age.  When Murph reaches that age, she sends a video message to her father informing him on how he failed to keep his promise of returning home.

Back on Earth, the adult Murph (Jessica Chastain) works at NASA and tries to help the aging Professor Brand solve the physics problem of lifting the massive space station into Earth orbit.  Meanwhile, adult Tom (Casey Affleck) is running the family’s farm.  The conditions have continued to deteriorate and it won’t be long until the dust storms destroy the rest of the crops.  We later learn that Tom’s first child had died (presumably from breathing too much dust), and now his wife and second son both have breathing problems.  Murph visits the house and tries to convince them to leave, but Tom refuses.

When Professor Brand is on his deathbed, he confesses to Murph that he actually solved the physics problem years ago, and that “Plan A” will never work.  He knew that society was doomed.  Murph then transmits that information to the crew of the Endurance.

Out in space, the crew of the Endurance doesn’t have the time or resources to visit both of the remaining planets.  They can only visit one of them and then be able to return to Earth.  After confronting Amelia about her love for Dr. Edmunds, the crew ultimately decides to head to planet Mann.

The crew lands on Mann and discovers that it’s a rocky and icy world with lethal amounts of ammonia in the atmosphere.  A human could only breathe the air for a few moments before suffering fatal health effects.  They follow Dr. Mann’s homing beacon and reach his small research station.  Inside of the station they find the hypersleep chamber and successfully revive Dr. Mann (Matt Damon).  Dr. Mann is literally speechless as he figured that he was as good as dead, that no explorers would ever reach his planet.

Mann is vague when describing the details of the planet, but he claims that the surface of the planet is much more tolerable at the base of the mountains.  He sent out some probes and gathered more data.  His attitude changes when TARS broadcasts Murph’s message and Mann admits that he knew of Professor Brand’s true plans before he left on the Lazarus Mission.  This news crushes the remaining crew members.  Even though the future of humanity is doomed, Cooper is anxious to drop the human embryos onto the planet, set up the camp, and then return to Earth to see his kids again.

Cooper gets Mann to show him more of the planet’s surface and to find suitable places to station the laboratories for the embryos.  While walking, Mann disables Cooper’s long-range communications and admits that all of his data was false.  When Mann landed on the planet he knew that it was inhospitable, but he didn’t want to be stranded there and to die.  Instead, he sent a false “thumbs up” signal in hopes of being rescued.  Mann then attacks Cooper and manages to crack his helmet, allowing the deadly ammonia into his space suit.  Mann flees as Cooper finds his missing communication gear and calls for help.  Amelia responds and uses one of the shuttles to rescue Cooper.  While she’s doing that Mann reaches the other shuttle and takes off, heading up to the Endurance.

Romilly had been trying to repair KIPP, Mann’s A.I. robot, when it suddenly explodes.  Mann had booby-trapped it with explosives.  The explosion instantly kills Romilly.  After witnessing the explosion, Cooper and Amelia quickly change courses and chase Mann back to the Endurance.

Although Mann reaches the Endurance first, he runs into trouble when he discovers that the auto-pilot system had been disabled.  To make matters worse, Mann was not trained in docking maneuvers.  He tries to manually dock his shuttle to the Endurance, but he’s not able to make a secure connection.  When he tries to override the docking chamber he’s instantly killed during the rapid decompression.  The violent force damages the Endurance and puts it into a dangerous spin and a rapidly decaying orbit.  Cooper skillfully pilots his shuttle to the Endurance and uses TARS’s help with docking.  They use their thrusters and get the damaged Endurance back under control.

The Endurance is doomed and running low on fuel.  It’s not going to be able to return to Earth.  Instead of their mission being a loss for humanity, Cooper and Amelia decide to try to make a close pass by Gargantua and try to get the missing research data that Professor Brand needed.  The plan is to pilot the Endurance to Gargantua’s ergosphere, jettison TARS in one of the shuttles to A) Reduce the amount of mass, and B) Have TARS gather and transmit data on the singularity within the black hole.  The Endurance would then continue in a slingshot path to planet Edmunds.  Of course, making such a close pass by Gargantua would significantly slow down their time, and the slingshot maneuver would really take 68 Earth years to complete.

Cooper and Amelia proceed with their plan, and TARS is ejected into the black hole on Ranger 1.  The robot collects and reports back data until communication ends.  Cooper then surprises Amelia and ejects himself on Ranger 2, the other shuttle.  He sacrifices himself to ensure that the Endurance will be able to escape from Gargantua and reach planet Edmunds.  Cooper’s shuttle flies into the black hole and begins to take damage.  Just as he reaches the black hole’s event horizon, Cooper ejects from the shuttle and continues flying into the black hole, supported only by his space suit.

Instead of being crushed, Cooper eventually comes to a halt in an extra-dimensional space where time is no longer linear.  He can still communicate with TARS, and he realizes that the structure was built not by extra-terrestrials but rather a future, more advanced form of humanity that evolved to the point of transcending three-dimensional time and space.  They’ve crossed into a new dimension where time is a physical structure, and it’s possible to move backwards.  It was those futuristic human beings who travelled backwards in time and placed the wormhole by Saturn, ensuing the survival of humanity.

Cooper quickly learns how to use the structure to view and manipulate environments back in time.  He realizes that he was really the “ghost” that Murph kept encountering when she was a child.  It was really Cooper trying to communicate with his daughter and younger self.  He tries to save his future self by creating the binary dust lines and having the younger Cooper take the message to the secret NASA facility.  When that doesn’t work, the Cooper in the black hole sends back the word “HELP” and tries to have the younger Murph use that message to try to keep Cooper from leaving on the Endurance.  Of course, that doesn’t work and Cooper can only watch in frustration as his younger self still leaves on the mission.

It’s realized that Murph is the key to solving the problem for “Plan A,” but she’s too young to understand it.  Cooper advances in time until he sees the older Murph returning to her old bedroom and finding the wristwatch that her father left for her.  Cooper is able to use gravity waves from inside of the tesseract in the black hole to communicate with Murph.  His daughter understands the message and realizes that her father is still alive.  Cooper successfully sends Murph the information about the singularity inside of the black hole, and she uses that to solve the gravity problem so that “Plan A” can continue and save humanity.

Soon after, the terreract closes, and Cooper is mysteriously transported back through the wormhole to Saturn.  He’s then rescued by a NASA spaceship.  When Cooper awakens in a medical facility, the doctor informs him that he’s really 124 years old.  Cooper expects to hear that Murph has died, but she’s still alive.  Murph had been in cryogenic sleep for the past couple of years, waiting until the return of her father.

It turns out that Cooper is really on board the massive NASA space station, the one that Professor Brand wanted to use to save humanity.  One of the items on the space station is Cooper’s old farm house, now a museum.  Inside of the house Cooper discovers that TARS was also saved.  The robot had made it through the black hole and back through the wormhole as well, but it needs repairs.

A short while later, Cooper is reunited with an elderly Murph who is also surrounded by her family and grandchildren.  Murph is overjoyed at finally seeing her father again.  She then tells him to go find Amelia, that his place is really out there and not beside herself as she’s dying.  That’s for her children to endure, not her father.

Cooper leaves his daughter, repairs TARS, and then steals a NASA ship.  He then heads towards the black hole with hopes of finding Amelia on planet Edmunds.

Interstellar ends with views on planet Edmunds.  We see that the planet is hospitable and that there’s a basic research station on the surface.  Dr. Edmunds had died though and Amelia buried him in a grave.  The movie ends with her waiting for somebody to rescue her.

FINAL THOUGHTS

So is Interstellar a good movie?

Absolutely!

For me, Interstellar was an incredible experience from start to finish.  The dire scenes on Earth were surreal, the Endurance spaceship was fascinating, the alien planets were interesting, and the wormhole and black hole were simply amazing.  Those flight sequences through space are definitely something to experience on a movie screen!

On top of that you also had some great characters and nail-biting sequences.  This is an incredible adventure movie that captures the fascination, incredible remoteness, and moments of sheer terror with deep space exploration.  It’s safe to say that Interstellar has raised the bar when it comes to a realistic look at the future of outer space travel.  Not since 2001: A Space Odyssey has there been a space travel movie like this one.

As you can tell, I loved Interstellar.  Seeing this movie in the theater was a fantastic experience, from the impressive visuals on the big screen to the haunting music score to the thunderous rumbles from the sound system.  We weren’t simply watching a movie, we were living it along side of the actors.

Interstellar (2014) – movie trailer

If you enjoy science-fiction and outer space, then Interstellar is definitely the movie for you!  Be caution though as some of the material presented here is fairly complicated, and it’s not going to be for everybody.

For me, not only was Interstellar the best movie that I’ve seen this year, but it’s also become one of my favorite science-fiction movies of all time.

Cooper – “We’ve always defined ourselves by the ability to overcome the impossible. And we count these moments. These moments when we dare to aim higher, to break barriers, to reach for the stars, to make the unknown known. We count these moments as our proudest achievements. But we lost all that. Or perhaps we’ve just forgotten that we are still pioneers. And we’ve barely begun. And that our greatest accomplishments cannot be behind us, because our destiny lies above us.”

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Cooper – “Mankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here.”

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Cooper – [When Cooper tries to reconfigure TARS] “Humour 75%.”
TARS – “75%. Self destruct sequence in T minus 10, 9, 8…”
Cooper – “Let’s make it 65%.”
TARS – “Knock, knock.”

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Brand – “Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends time and space.”