Genre: Science Fiction
Director: Christopher Nolan
Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Michael Caine
Known for making grand technical statements, Christopher Nolan addresses the tear ducts this time while building on his strength. At a time when National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has lost some of its sheen and the financial compulsions are forcing Americans to look within, Nolan makes a case for revitalising the space programme. Early in the film a teacher says we need more farmers than engineers now because we are not in danger of running out of TV sets but food.
As always the world as we know it is in danger. This time it is the dust clouds, described as blight, which are threatening to destroy American food resources. Yes, apart from an Indian drone early in the film, perhaps a nod to increasing audience base for such tent poles in the country, there is no mention of any other country neither on land nor in space. It is an American expedition all the way.
As the clouds gather, Farmer Cooper (McConaughey), who was once a test pilot with NASA is lured into leading a mission to find an alternative of Earth in space by Professor Bard (Michael Caine) leaving behind his precocious daughter Murphy (Jessica Chastain). He is joined by robotic and human colleagues including Bard’s daughter Amelia (Anne Hathaway).
Beneath all the physics thrown at us there is a throbbing heart as the Nolan brothers (Christopher and writer Jonathon) manage the interplay between science and sentiments rather well. Every minute that Cooper spends in space amounts to two on earth. It creates an emotional swell because his daughter could outgrow him if he doesn’t complete the mission in time. Relativity makes us see not only time and space but also concepts of love and faith, ghost and logic in a rational light. It comes out that perhaps Amelia is making this journey into the wormhole to find her love. Can the love for species ever be bigger than love for self and family?
Every time the slush of sentimentality threatens to stop the vehicle in its tracks, the brothers throw some grandiose visual effects at us –– a humungous wave of water on an unknown planet or a robot taking the shape of an asterisk showing our place in nature –– and whenever the atmospherics bog down the proceedings, they pull the strings of heart to keep the shuttle flying. Can Nature be evil? Or does its formidable manifestation confuse us? However, this juggling goes awry in the climax, which reeks of unbridled indulgence to whip up an emotional frenzy. There is lot of expounding in conversations to make the audience understand the jargons but it makes the characters look out of depth, and the climactic trick shows the algorithm type screenplay is essentially just a house of cards.
In one of the most defining performances of his eventful career, McConaughey holds this space odyssey together till the end and Anne matches him. Matt Damon impresses in a cameo. At times, it literally becomes a test of endurance but overall it is an experience that deserves your three hours.
Bottomline: Making a case for space missions all over again, Nolan’s spectacle loses gravity in the final act.
Interstellar is the first Hollywood movie to attempt depicting a black hole as it would actually be seen by somebody nearby. For this we developed a code called DNGR (Double Negative Gravitational Renderer) to solve the equations for ray-bundle (light-beam) propagation through the curved spacetime of a spinning (Kerr) black hole, and to render IMAX-quality, rapidly changing images. Our ray-bundle techniques were crucial for achieving IMAX-quality smoothness without flickering.
This paper has four purposes: (i) To describe DNGR for physicists and CGI practitioners . (ii) To present the equations we use, when the camera is in arbitrary motion at an arbitrary location near a Kerr black hole, for mapping light sources to camera images via elliptical ray bundles. (iii) To describe new insights, from DNGR, into gravitational lensing when the camera is near the spinning black hole, rather than far away as in almost all prior studies. (iv) To describe how the images of the black hole Gargantua and its accretion disk, in the movie \emph{Interstellar}, were generated with DNGR. There are no new astrophysical insights in this accretion-disk section of the paper, but disk novices may find it pedagogically interesting, and movie buffs may find its discussions of Interstellar interesting.
Genius director Christopher Nolan reaches for the stars in “Interstellar” — and delivers a soulful, must-see masterpiece, one of the most exhilarating film experiences so far this century.
Astronauts Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway journey to a distant galaxy on a desperate mission to save humanity in this brainy, heartfelt, gorgeous and flawlessly acted sci-fi epic — inspired by “2001: A Space Odyssey,’’ “Close Encounters of the Third Kind’’ and less likely sources such as “The Grapes of Wrath.’’
It’s the near future, 10 years after Earth began turning into a gigantic dust bowl, where those who don’t starve when crops wither soon face asphyxiation as nitrogen levels gradually rise in the atmosphere.
McConaughey is terrific as Coop, who’s retired from the space program and is a Midwestern corn farmer and widowed dad.
His feisty preteen daughter, Murph (Mackenzie Foy), is in trouble at school because she challenges a revisionist textbook claiming the moon landing was faked to justify “wasting’’ precious resources on the space program.
Since his breakthrough with the backward-running Memento, Christopher Nolan has made a plaything of time. In Interstellar, he slips into its very fabric, shaping its flows and exploding its particles. It's an absurd endeavour. And it's one of the most sublime movies of the decade.
As our chief large-canvas illusionist, Nolan’s kaleidoscope puzzles have often dazzled more than they have moved, prizing brilliant, hocus-pocus architecture over emotional interiors.
But a celestial warmth shines through Interstellar, which is, at heart, a father-daughter tale grandly spun across a cosmic tapestry.
There is turbulence along the way. Interstellar is overly explanatory about its physics, its dialogue can be clunky and you may want to send the composer Hans Zimmer's relentless organ into deep space. But if you take these for blips rather than black holes, the majesty of Interstellar is something to behold.
The film opens in the near future where a new kind of Dust Bowl, one called “the blight”, brings crop-killing storms upon the Midwest farm of the engineer-turned-farmer Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) and his children, 10-year-old Murph (Mackenzie Foy) and 15-year-old Tom (Timothéze Chalamet).
In this imperilled climate, space exploration is viewed as part of the “excess” of the 20th century and textbooks claim that the moon landings were faked. But Cooper, a former Nasa pilot, still believes in science’s capacity for greatness.
Nolan shoots for the stars, literally and cinematically, when Cooper’s curiosity leads him to a secret Nasa lair run by Dr Brand (Michael Caine). Large-scale dreaming has gone underground. The scientists enlist Cooper to pilot a desperate mission through a wormhole to follow an earlier expedition that may have found planets capable of sustaining human life.
Interstellar is a trip, for sure, but it’s not a supernatural one. There are no aliens bursting out of bellies or monument-blasting battles with extraterrestrials – it’s all about us humans.
Cooper's crew includes Brand's daughter (Anne Hathaway), a pair of researchers (a wonderful David Gyasi and Wes Bentley) and a robot named TARS – it's what the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey would be like if it were a shape-shifting Transformer.
What happens when their space ship, Endurance, passes through the wormhole? For starters, Nolan and his cinematographer, Hoyte Van Hoytema, conjure beautiful galactic imagery, contorting space and, eventually, dimensions.
What Nolan is really doing is dropping countless big ideas – science, survival, exploration, love – into a cosmic blender and seeing what retains its meaning out there in the heavenly abyss.
As in The Dark Knight, Nolan doesn't investigate all of the philosophical questions so much as juggle them in an often dazzling, but occasionally frustratingly incomplete way.
But Interstellar remains tethered to Earth, toggling between barren, otherworldly landscapes and life back home on an increasingly uninhabitable planet where Murph, now played by Jessica Chastain, has grown up to be a physicist trying to solve an essential equation.
More than anything, Interstellar makes you feel the great preciousness of time, a resource as valuable as oxygen. A wasted few hours on a planet where relative time accelerates, costs the astronauts decades. Returning to the ship, Cooper watches videos of his kids growing up before his eyes and weeps uncontrollably.
All of the visual awe, the quantum mathematics, the seeming complexity of the hugely ambitious film is just stardust clouding the orbit between a dad and his daughter.
While most science fiction withers out in space, Interstellar rockets home.
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