Interstellar - Boldly goes where no movie has gone before
- 2 minsI am a big time Christopher Nolan fan. The Dark Knight and Inception are my favourite movies. Ever since I heard that Christopher Nolan’s next directorial venture was going to be Interstellar, I have been waiting impatiently for it. Of course, the trailers didn’t help at all. Every time they released a new trailer, I would find myself going “Enough, just release it already”. So, when I went to watch it last week, I went in with some unparalleled hype and the fear of the movie not being able to live up to the hype. But by the time the credits rolled, all those fears had been dispelled and all that remained was “WOW” and a strong desire to rewatch it.
Now let’s talk about the movie for a bit. Don’t worry I won’t give out spoilers. This three hour ride of climate change, dust storms, wormholes, black holes, time travel, space colonization is stunning to look at. There is a scene in the movie where you get a shot of a spaceship passing a tiny speck of dust against the backdrop of a huge Saturn. Space has never looked so magnificent and frightening at the same time. Complementing the visuals is the soundtrack which will evoke a sense of grandeur as the characters voyage through the wormholes and the black holes.
At the center of the special effects extravaganza lies the love story of a father and a daughter. Set in the near future, Interstellar shows Earth reaching its end of life where dust storms are everyday occurrence and blight has killed off most of Earth’s food supply. Engineers, scientists have retired and have taken up farming as their day jobs. Cooper, the father played by the ever so stellar Matthew McConaughey(no pun intended) is a similar engineer turned farmer living with his daughter and son. Somewhat later in the movie Cooper has to leave his daughter Murph on Earth and into the unknown space to find an inhabitable planet where humankind can settle. Their struggle to get back together is what drives both the characters for the rest of the film. There is also a robot called TARS who has hopped onto the spaceship for the travel. With its humour setting at 100%, TARS provides a lot of comic relief in an otherwise serious movie.
This movie fulfills science fiction cinema’s promise - to fill our hearts with gleeful wonder all the while giving us something to ponder and think about.
Sayak Biswas
Graduate Student | Software Engineer | Music Lover