A Movie Review: Interstellar

Interstellar.  This movie provides the viewer with an engrossing story line and stunning visuals.  At 169 minutes, I didn't even feel the time pass though a person to my left did as he moaned and groaned more than a handful of times.  Part of me thinks that guy was a physicist who just couldn't deal with the creative license that movies are given.

The movie starts with our world in obvious demise.  Though not featured on a global scale, we are able to see on a local scale that traumatic environmental disaster has hit the earth.  The disaster is so great that the world is forced to make certain decisions dictated by government.  Here are a couple examples:

On the good side, nations have dismantled their armies.  There is world peace.

On the bad side, freedoms are limited.  Individuals can no longer decide their own destinies.  The government dictates careers.  Since farmers are needed, individuals are forced into farming.

Also, in order to encourage cooperation between nations, text books are cleansed of subject matters that might offend other nations.

Cooper (Matthew McConaughhey) is a farmer (though it would appear he chose that career versus it being forced onto him).  Prior to this, he was a test pilot/NASA astronaut.  He has two children Murph (Mackenzie Foy/Jessica Chastain/Ellen Burstyn) and Tom (Timothée Chalamet/Casey Affleck).  His father-in-law also lives with them, Donald (John Lithgow).  His wife died a few years back.  They head off one day to catch the equivalent of a bush league baseball game.  A massive dust storm starts to approach so folks hurry off to get back home.  There isn't any panic as this is just normal life.

Once home, Murph realizes that she left her bedroom window open.  Cooper and Murph rush up to her bedroom, which is covered in dust.  Interestingly, there is a gravitational anomaly that has happened.  The dust leaves a distinct design on the bedroom floor.  Cooper studies this for hours and realizes that there is something there, coordinates.  He uses this to discover the all to conveniently close black budget NASA facility.  NASA is attempting to save mankind.  "They" (unexplained beings) have opened up a worm hole that provides passage to a new Earth.  Humanity just needs to find this new planet(s).  

Matthew McConaughey does a brilliant acting job in this movie.  The emotions he displays when he catches up with years worth of videos sent to him from Tom is gripping.  And as we hit the final minutes of the movie, his acting becomes intense.

Though I don't think this is a Best Picture quality movie, I do think it is well worth the price of admission.

Now I'm not saying this movie doesn't have flaws and so (along with potential spoilers) . . .

As a note, the reason for the global environmental disaster isn't placed on over-dependency on fossil fuel, but on over-population.  The movie mentioned via Professor Brand (Michael Caine) that NASA refused to use the space technology to destroy a large segment of the global population.  A very noble refusal and yet (SPOILER) Professor Brand purposely sets things up so that Plan B is really the default and only option (Plan B being that humanity is left behind and frozen human embryos are used to re-start the human race on another planet), which brings up a degree of hypocrisy that is perhaps unrealized by Professor Brand.  On the other hand, if I understood correctly, one reason for NASA's refusal to destroy a large segment of the world's population was that it wouldn't have reversed the cycle of disappearing oxygen supplies, which I guess if you follow that path Professor Brand is a genocidal maniac anyways.  Instead of immediately having blood on his hands, he decided to just focus on the species and let the rest of humanity suffocate to death.

I am not an Anne Hathaway hater.  Well, okay, initially I was when she was doing The Princess Diaries movies, but then she turned me into a lover.  So I love that Anne Hathaway is in the movie; however, what was a touch annoying about this movie was the feeling that Christopher Nolan was bringing back the old gang:  Anne Hathaway, Michael Caine, William Devane and perhaps one or two others.  Even Topher Grace sort of reminded me of a placeholder actor for Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

Cooper doesn't appear to have had any rust after a number of years away from flying space ships.  Mercy, if I'm away from something for more than 3 months, I quickly start to forget procedures and such.

That scene where Cooper has to separate from Brand:  ah, too much like Gravity, maybe?!?  I understand the need, maybe just write the script differently.

"They" end up being the future us.  My problem:  humanity is supposed to suffocate in the not to distant future so how can there be an us?  Of course, I suppose, the idea of all humanity eventually suffocating was a dire prediction and not the actually outcome.  I understand the Terminator movies use the same SciFi technique, but in the Terminator movies there is a future us whereas in Interstellar there isn't supposed to be a future us.

And technically, when the new planet was found, how many of the billions in human population actually were able to travel to this new planet?  How many spacecraft needed to be built?  Hundreds of thousands?  How is that even possible?  How many were left behind on Earth?

The sound editing/score is so loud that I often had a hard time hearing the dialogue.  I was; however, able to make out the gist of things until the final concluding sentence or two where I didn't catch a single word, which is a real shame as I suspect that it was supposed to provide an over-all philosophical conclusion to the movie.  I have spent time searching the Internet to find what those concluding words were with no luck -- though I did find out that others also had the same issue hearing those words.