Ah, for simpler times back in the spring, when True Detective was on the air and Matthew McConaughey's Rust Cohle was explaining to us that time is 'a flat circle.' McConaughey has now returned for director Christopher Nolan's sci-fi opus and, over the intervening months, time, as a concept, has only become more perplexing-one dimension out of at least five that make an appearance in the movie. Indeed, a modicum of perplexity may be the price of admission: Though Interstellar is quick to cite Einstein's theories of relativity-celebrated theoretical physicist Kip Thorne acted as a consultant and executive producer-it rarely slows down to explain how they apply.
In any case, Interstellar is quite adamant-and here I'm certain the movie is not channeling Einstein-that however many dimensions may exist, love trumps them all. Love, we are instructed variously, is 'quantifiable,' 'must have a purpose,' and 'is the one thing that transcends time and space.'
If this sounds like a hokey premise for a story about Earthly apocalypse and intergalactic exodus, that's because it is one. But this is hokiness of uncommon scale and grandeur. Interstellar may be a preposterous epic, but it is an epic nonetheless. For years, the project was attached to Steven Spielberg, and these roots are very much in evidence. Envision a movie as Spielberg-y as any you've ever seen-all the craftsmanship, all the sentimentality-add in a concluding twist reminiscent of M. Night Shyamalan (not the current version, but the circa- Signs, not-yet-tragic version), and you'll have a pretty good sense of what to expect.
Related Story Interstellar: The New 2001?
The movie opens with a series of elderly commentators recollecting their youth in a rural America smothered by dust: dust covering bookshelves, dust choking crops, dust accumulating so insistently that you had to put the plates facedown when setting the table. Steinbeck's Dustbowl? No, a stray laptop soon alerts us that this is a Dustbowl yet to come. The exact cause of the environmental catastrophe is never clarified, though it is clearly something we brought upon ourselves. The threat, moreover, is existential: The Earth is slowly suffocating itself. The last wheat harvests are long gone, and the last okra harvest is around the corner-though, according to taste, one might consider this a feature rather than a bug. Corn remains, but how long can it sprout from land so doomed?
Among the farmers tilling this egregious soil is a former NASA pilot named Cooper (McConaughey), single father to a down-to-Earth son and a head-in-the-clouds daughter. The latter, Murph (named after Murphy's Law, and played in her youth by Mackenzie Foy), believes that a poltergeist is haunting the overstuffed bookshelf in her bedroom and, in her mystico-scientific way, sets out to prove it. She also gets in trouble for bringing an old textbook to school, one that has not been 'corrected' to explain that the 20th-century Apollo missions were merely a hoax to bankrupt the Soviets. Burned once by science, the nation as a whole has turned inward, backward.
But not so Cooper. 'We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars,' he lectures his father-in-law (played with curmudgeonly nonchalance by John Lithgow). 'Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.' Luckily for Cooper, he is not alone in this view. The NASA for which he once flew, long believed shuttered, has in fact gone underground as exactly the kind of covert government outfit that Fox Mulder was always looking for. Moreover, it just happens to be in need of a top-notch pilot to complete its ongoing secret mission of extraterrestrial exploration and colonization.
As luck would have it, the fellow running the show turns out to be an old teacher of Cooper's, Professor Brand (Michael Caine), who explains that decades earlier an intergalactic wormhole was created near Saturn by mysterious five-dimensional beings who evidently wanted to help humankind find a new home. Initial manned probes were sent to several planets on the far side, and the plan is for Cooper to fly a larger ship called the Endurance-a ring-shaped vessel reminiscent of the space station in 2001: A Space Odyssey -through the wormhole to determine which of those worlds might prove fittest for human habitation.
Post By http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/11/interstellar-a-preposterous-epic/382478/
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