“Interstellar” is Our Modern Day “2001: A Space Odyssey”

By Michael James Gonzalez

There are movies that tell a great story, and there are movies that inspire human imagination. Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” is a visually stunning, sci-fi epic that both challenges our current ideas of what is possible and inspires us to reach toward the seemingly impossible. The auteur director and his brother Jonathan (the writing due behind the “Dark Knight Trilogy”) penned “Interstellar” with renowned theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, who served as scientific contributor to the film. The narrative takes us on an odyssey across time and space, through worm holes that deconstruct and redefine our current concepts of gravity and physics, which to this day only Albert Einstein’s equations could in theory explain to us. The film is set some decades into the future. America’s heartland has regressed back into a dust bowl and most crops have been destroyed, thus the masses cannot be fed. The effects are catastrophic and seem to be irreversible. Enter Cooper (Mathew McConaughey), a former NASA pilot and engineer turned farmer by necessity who lives somewhere in the Midwest amidst one of the last surviving cornfields with his daughter “Murph” (Mackenzie Foy), his son Tom (Timothee Chalamet), and his father, played by John Lithgow. When Cooper and his inquisitive daughter stumble onto a top-secret NASA test site, they are greeted by Cooper’s former colleague Professor Brand (Michael Cain), a theoretical physicist who has devoted his entire life to the mathematics behind high-speed human space travel. Cooper-along with a team of astronauts played by Anne Hathaway, Wes Bentley, and David Gyasi-is recruited to pilot the Endurance, a new spacecraft that will traverse through a newly discovered worm hold in Saturn’s solar system. This wormhole will propel them to a galaxy many light years away from Earth where a previous space crew has discovered three planets that could be hospitable to humans. The chance that Cooper and his team will return to Earth is a long shot, and if they do return, many years will have passed on Earth, but the astronauts will have remained the same age due to Einstein’s theory that time slows down for any object traveling close to or at the speed of light. This is no doubt Nolan’s most ambitious and monumental project of his career. The visual effects team, the sound team, cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, and production designer Nathan Crowley should all be lauded for their achievements, which will surely be noted in this year’s Oscar nominations. Admittedly, the story itself might at times be somewhat overly sentimental and certain plot points underdeveloped and clumsily strung together, but the performances and the visuals far outweigh any flaws in storytelling. It’s clear that this was more than just a film for Nolan. It’s his treatise on the intellectual and emotional reasons for why we should continue to research and invest in space exploration, and on that level he has established himself as a cinematic trailblazer.

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