Monday 12 January 2015

Interstellar - a story set among the stars.

I sure stuck gold when I got tickets to (in IMAX!) Christopher Nolan’s grandiloquent space epic, Interstellar (2014). Starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain, Interstellar is a brilliant story of both destruction and the ‘survival of the fittest’ in a harsh planet where resources are too sparse that decisions have to be made logically, excluding human emotions and feelings.

Now, let’s speed up the clocks for a while: in the future of Interstellar, Earth is ravaged by a blight that kills food crops and humanity, facing extinction, has to give up on all scientific endeavours and focus on growing the only crop left, corn, in the failing agrarian society. Cooper, a former NASA pilot and a widowed father of two now working as a cultivator of corn, identifies a gravitational anomaly in his 10-year-old daughter, Murphy’s room which she believes was caused by a ‘ghost’. In a sudden turn of events, Cooper, having parted on bad terms from Murph, is on a spaceship to a wormhole near Saturn which NASA believes was created by 5-dimensional ‘aliens’. He, along with biologist Amelia Brand, scientists Romilly and Doyle and robots CASE and TARS (whose humour level is annoyingly 100%), are to travel through the wormhole to the three, possibly-habitable, planets to which 3 scientists (Miller, Mann and Edmund) have been sent years  earlier for research and are currently on hypersleep (for a decade!). The rest of the plot is driven by discoveries, deceptions, dimensions and above all, dauntlessness.

Nolan, needless to say, is a grand master, a rare kind of Vinci in his movies. He has an impeccable knack of handling things, carving scenes in such perfection and wit that his audience neglect the answers that lay right before their eyes, which are busy analyzing things far away. Interstellar is another incredible epic of his. The sound effects, visuals and graphics are incredible. Unlike most directors who add either too much or too little effects to their movies, Nolan has added the right amount, enough to spice up the movie a bit. He has also relayed complicated astrophysics in the simplest way it could be put. Clearly, Nolan has put in a lot of effort in making this movie. One such example of this is when he made his assistant screenwriter, Jonathan Nolan study relativity at the California Institute of Technology to understand the science while writing the script, which took 4 years! I also have to congratulate McKenzie Foy on her remarkable acting, which, unlike many child actors, doesn’t seem forced and artificial.

Personally, I’m rather ecstatic that Nolan has created a movie set beyond Earth’s atmosphere, since beyond Earth lies a world of mysteries yet to be discovered and of beauty so ethereal that one can stare at it for centuries and still never not appreciate its beauty. Also, he reinforces a particular idea (and my most favourite) frequently in Interstellar: that Nature can be both beautiful and dangerous at the same time (in the same way the most vibrant fishes are the most dangerous ones). One such example of this is (spoiler alert!) when the astronauts are standing smack in the middle of the shallow ocean in Saturn (where water barely comes up to your knees) and see gigantic and majestic grey mountains in the distance...which turns out to be a single 10,000 foot wave. Sure, the sheer force of the wave is frightening and evil and yet, there is still a certain kind of beauty in it. The same applies to a black hole depicted as a hole with a glowing circumference.

Among all the movies I’ve ever watched, Interstellar has the lowest number of drawbacks. The only one concerns the science in the last part, which introduces a 5th dimension (again, spoiler alert!) and talks about time as physical dimension, which is rather hard to fathom. I also felt that Nolan has left a few knots loose (why does the gravitational anomaly occur only in Murphy’s room?).

On the whole, Interstellar is a movie worth both your time and money (helps around with school a lot too).

                                                       

-Narayanan Nivetha