Interstellar [Movie Review]

I consider this movie to be the spiritual successor to 2001: A Space Odyssey. However the parallels are not that great nor are they heavy handed. In essence, Christopher Nolan (director of the most recent Batman Trilogy) has crafted an epic science movie. So epic that I was actually getting worried over the hyper about the film. Over-hyped movies have a tendency to let one down.

 

Near Saturn. I had snatches of the Pale Blue Dot playing in my mind.

The Endurance.

This was not a movie I wanted to be let down by. I have been waiting for it since I first heard whispers about it.

4.5 out of 5 stars

What a 3D wormhole should look like.

I was mildly let down. Very mildly, and only because of one real reason. I'll get to it later. This was, pun intended, a stellar movie.

I'm going to give some plot background to the film.

Essentially: Mild Spoilers Below!

Cold Sleep.

The movie begins slowly, easing you into it. You are introduced to an Earth that is dying. The 'blight' has killed all wheat crops (creating a future without Hefeweizen... sadness), and okra crops. Corn has become humanities primary grain (at least in the west. Nothing about rice was mentioned), but it too will soon begin to die off. The population of the planet has declined considerably. Blowing noxious dust worse than that seen during the Dust Bowl plagues humanity.

A slightly different take on the end of humanity. Starvation due to plague and endless dust storms. 

NASA is hidden away from the general populace because in a future where food is hard to come by, it is asserted that people would not take kindly to spending their tax dollars on space. In truth it is not all that different from today. So many people seem to think that NASA is a waste of tax dollars, when in reality we should probably be spending more on the program. Just a couple of weeks ago China launched an unmanned probe, the Chang'e 5 T1, that circled the moon. We had two rockets explode. The USA is now loosing the final frontier.

Kip Thorne worked out the equations for a rotating super-massive black hole. This is the result.

All of that is background before getting to the meat of the film. Interstellar travel, leaving our solar system via a wormhole and traveling to another system. The purpose: to find a new or temporary home for humanity as Earth is no longer habitable by humans. For this NASA has created project Lazarus, two plans to save humanity. The Endurance, a long trip ship equipped with cold sleep capsules, launches with a human crew of four and two awesome robots: TARS & CASE. (Honestly the robots steal the movie in many ways.)

See the robot walk...

When the wormhole appears they sent 12 astronauts through on (potential) one way missions to find habitable planets. There are three potential worlds.

The Endurance must evaluate them.

Not to be droll, but can you guess which cast member dies?

Now, I've really just hit a few points. There is a whole huge section of plot that occurs back on earth, where as it correctly turns out, years and years pass.

And there in lies why this movie is truly special, truly amazing. Of our main characters 4 out of 5 of them are scientists or engineers. Of the secondary characters, another 4 out of 5 are scientists or engineers. That is amazing! This is a science film, and a damn good one.

Walking in an ocean on an extra-terrestrial planet.

And science was used like crazy in the making of it. Kip Thorne worked on the black-hole and had a strong hand in keeping the film scientifically accurate. This movie handles several large scientific issues and handles them well, not the least of which is Relativity.I don't want to go into all the detail, because there is a lot, but for quickly just imagine the tidal forces affecting an ocean on a planet orbiting a black hole. Have you? Yeah... 
Science!

It also handles social issues. In an early scene there is a part where Murphy is in trouble at school for bringing in an old text book that talks about the Apollo moon missions landing on Mars. The official line that the school board uses is that the Apollo program never went to the moon, it was simply a clever ruse to get the Soviet Union to bankrupt itself. It's like Nolan was channeling all those recent jack-ass school boards that keep censoring scientific text books - in some cases simply ripping pages out of them.

Oh, going back to the very beginning when I said I was mildly let down? Well, it is finally time to reveal my reasoning. The reason I was let down were the few (and thankfully they were few) pure Hollywood lines that snuck in. Things like (to paraphrase) 'love transcends the physical laws of the universe,' or the like. The whole Hollywood speil. Now the good part is that some of those lines (not all of them) are completely voided by the movie. Oh, and the really really loud music... sometimes too loud. But that might have just been the theater...

Much like Fury, I think this movie is going to be serious Oscar competition. I think this is less likely to win mainly because it is so scientifically powerful. I would love, absolutely love, to be proven wrong. This movie is just stellar.

Oh, and it uses one of my all time favorite poems, utterly and completely apt for this film. Dylan Thomas wrote it in 1951 and it has no title save the opening line.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. - See more at: http://allpoetry.com/Do-Not-Go-Gentle-Into-That-Good-Night#sthash.hd8QtUM9.dpuf

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. - See more at: http://allpoetry.com/Do-Not-Go-Gentle-Into-That-Good-Night#sthash.hd8QtUM9.dpuf

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rage at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. 

Only the first stanza is really used, but the whole poem fits the movie's tone and each stanza can be seen as relevant to the film. If you want to read it all, and it is a short poem, click HERE.