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
