THE FOLLOWING REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS OF THE DISCUSSED FILM. READERS DISCRETION IS ADVISED.
Every second of our lives will always count because if you don't pay attention, it'll be over before you know it.
PLOT
Interstellar follows former NASA pilot turned farmer Joseph ‘Coop’ Cooper who lives in Colorado with his children Tom & Murph, and his father in law (John Lithgow). Earth is suffering from a global famine due to ecocide, causing space exploration to be abandoned. In a series of events, Coop and Murph start experiencing a gravitational anomaly within the house, mostly occurring in the daughter’s bedroom. The results come from her model falling on its own and when dust settled into perfect lines on the floor. When Coop sees the lines, he studies it overnight and takes assumption it can be binary code and coordinates. With a map, he and Murph end up finding what is a secret NASA facility ran by Professor John Brand. The professor explains that they are running one last expedition to find an exoplanet capable of supporting life, while also working on a gravity equation to ensure how to transport large amounts of people off Earth. If they can’t evacuate the human race, then the back up plan would be to repopulate the new home with fertilized eggs. Due to finding the station, Coop is enlisted to pilot the Endurance spacecraft, containing two Ranger crafts & a Lander craft, and find a new home. Apart from the use of surplus robots TARS & CASE, the team will include scientists Doyle (Wes Bentley), Romilly, and John’s daughter Amelia. This would be a difficult decision for Coop to accept because he can’t promise his family when he’ll return, causing him to leave in bad terms with Murph. Once the team departs to space and enter a wormhole near Saturn, they narrow down to three exoplanets near the black hole Gargantua, all of which were checked by past explorers. They first check one that is oceanic and filled with shallow water. They declare it inhabitable when finding the debris of the late Laura Miller’s beacon. They try to leave quickly, but get delayed when their Ranger engines get flooded from a tidal wave that drowns Doyle. When they dry them out in time, they leave to avoid being swept again. Upon returning to the Endurance, they discover over 23 years have passed on Earth due to the time dilation caused by Gargantua’s gravity. When Coop looks through video messages from his family, he sees the lives of his children flash before his eyes. Tom would grow up to be a farmer and have two kids with his own wife Lois (Leah Cairns). His first born Jesse would sadly die from a lung ailment caused by Earth’s deteriorating conditions. Donald would pass away from old age. As for Murph, she grew up to be a scientist and work with John to figure out the equation. When Amelia checks on her father’s messages, his old age has led to him being wheelchair bound. Although she would prefer to visit the planet visited by her boyfriend Wolf Edmunds, Coop & Romilly vote against her and choose to instead visit the one visited by Hugh Mann. When they check the second planet, they find it cold, surrounded by glaciers and has a poisonous atmosphere of methane. When they find Mann and wake him from cryosleep, he claims the planet can be livable on the lower part of it. Just when he shares this, Murph sends a message that John had passed and revealed Plan A was never gonna work because the equation deemed the trip impossible. This surprises the team because neither of them knew of this beforehand. However, Mann admits he did and knew Plan B (the fertilized colony) was the only option. However, he ends up trying to leave Coop’s team for dead, admitting his planet was also inhabitable. As Amelia saves him, Romilly would die from an explosion booby trapped by Mann himself. The latter does all of this to gain access to Endurance and get to Edmunds’ planet to complete the mission. However, his attempt to dock would get him killed and damage the spacecraft. Luckily, Coop is able to pull off docking manually to save the pre-fertilized eggs. On Earth, Murph disputes with Tom to leave the farm in order to save their family from dying like Jesse did. He refuses and decides to kick her out, being in denial of what can happen. This leads to Murph causing a fire in one of the corn fields to lure out her brother. With the help of her colleague Getty (Topher Grace), she prepares them to leave but chooses to look around her childhood room to find any kind of clue that could save humanity. Once the dock is successful in space, Coop would then pull off slingshotting around Gargantua to get to Edmunds’ planet. Due to the low amount of fuel, he detaches himself from Amelia and allows himself to be devoured by the beach hole for her to reach the third planet. Rather than dying, Coop would find himself in a five-dimensional Tesseract that’s out of view from beyond the event horizon. He is surrounded by memories of Murph’s childhood and tries contacting his daughter by manipulating the items in her bedroom, creating the Morse code message ‘STAY’. As he contacts TARS from afar, he realizes humans were able to build this construct after figuring out time travel. With the Tesseract, he is also able to plant a black hole equation on his old wristwatch he left. When Adult Murph finds the watch, she realizes her dad was the ghost the whole time. She would then use the same equation to complete the answer that would save humanity. As the Tesseract closes, Coop & TARS would be rescued by the remaining race in a cylindrical station named after the former’s daughter. When he reunites with her, he finds her to be in an elderly state who has carried on their bloodline like Tom did. Feeling content with her life that her father came back as promised, Murph encourages him to go and find Amelia. As he and TARS do just that, the film would end with the revelation that she and CASE made it safely in what is confirmed to be Edmunds’ planet capable of sustaining life.
THOUGHTS
When I first saw this in theaters back in 2014, I was lost with words upon the incredibility I witnessed. Years later, I feel like I have an idea of what to say. Looking back, I do believe Director Christopher Nolan succeeds in presenting another mesmerizing sci-fi experience. Considering the impact that he already made with Inception, you already know you're going to feel something oh so different. There have been past fictional adventures of astronauts traveling through space, but I don't think it gets any better than this. With every second you digest far reaches of this solar system past the wormhole and witnessing environments you never thought to witness like the Gargantua black hole, the fictional planets or the dimensional tesseract, you already are feeling like you're part of the expedition and it's a feeling I enjoy having because that's what movies are all about. So it would go without saying the impressive blend of visual and practical effects blew me away in making the settings as lifelike as possible. I would've not believed you of the fact being there was a set built for the tesseract dimension until the bts pictures were revealed. There is such a right balance of reality and fiction to behold and respect because Christopher and his co-writing brother Jonathan are trying to show us a possibility of what Earth can be if we don't take care of our planet. The details on reality were so essential to make the story feel grounded. That was the case when it's noted Murph's class does not believe in the Apollo missions. When I say the fiction is well balanced, the first sign goes to how within the same scene, we notice dirt visibly on the meeting table, proving that the apocalypse doesn't just affect a small group of people. There's not even a stretch on how time travel is used. We just accept that it exists because people figured it out in a future and used it to make the tesseract and look out for one another. Hans Zimmer's score is so beautiful to hear because he is telling us how to feel with the stakes at hand within the story: There is a sense of tragedy, there is a moment of intensity but there will be a moment of joy by the end. To me, I believe this captures the true theme of the story: Each moment in our lives are essential because they can take us things we may or may not want. However you would feel afterwards, you would then realize how valuable they all are. This motto is extremely affective when having a family because it translates to making it all matter and due to us following a protagonist who is a parent, the connection becomes official. I personally believe Matthew McConaughey was able to have us relate to Coop quickly off of his optimism; He is aware of the stakes and has the determination to find success in order to get back home. Again, it was a hard decision for him to leave because he knew he was going to miss out on the lives of his children due to not being sure when he would return. Having said that, the entire scene in which he breaks down seeing Tom's messages is indeed a heartbreaking moment because it is common for parents to miss out on their kids' lives after being caught up with responsibilities. McConaughey gives a surreal acting lesson upon this scene because he's happy that his son is growing up, but hates he wasn't there. The waterworks truly kick in when he sees Murph's only message, not seeing her own evolution due to her neglect towards him for what he had to do. Off of that, he was only more determined to do the absolute necessary that would bring him back home. I don't think anyone would've guessed he was his daughter's ghost, but that would only be a blessing in disguise as it implied he was always there for her. And knowing that made him feel complete with his past and motivated enough to move on with the mission. While it makes sense for us to connect with Coop, I think it's Murph who we connect with more in comparison. At first, the young Mackenzie Foy warms our hearts because we admire the compassion she has for her interest. Then second, the mature Jessica Chastain is stubborn but still willing to take part in making a difference. At that point in her life, she couldn't guarantee if she would see her dad again, but just had to find an answer that would satisfy her. And luckily for her, she found the best answer to ask for, her dad always there. And in the final stages, the veteran Ellen Burstyn embraced acceptance on everything that happened because everything was bound to happen in their own way. The waterworks kick in again when she reunites with Coop because it was the true solace she was seeking and she got to live long enough to get it. Just knowing that is satisfying because it never sounds easy to end life on a positive note. I don't think people talk about Tom enough because despite being the oldest child, he still had his own conflict to cope with. At first, the young Timothée Chalamet appeared to be accepting with all the changes that were happening. That is until the mature Casey Affleck appeared, who had his own set of denial. He refused to abandon the farm because it was the only memory he had left of his dad wasn't gonna bare letting it go. That would sadly lead to him being a brute force when it came to preventing his family from leaving. He didn't want them to leave because he was tired of losing his loved ones, little did he was realize he was becoming responsible. Had Murph not been absent, maybe he would've been more lenient about it. Since we don't see him in the Cooper Station, I don't believe he left Earth. I think that like his grandpa, he wasn't interested in the advanced technology and was only interested in the past. If that is the case, I'm sure things were peacefully content with him at that point. Moving on, I saw another part of myself in John Brand. Michael Caine showed him to be about as arrogant as anyone can be when it comes to wanting to save the human race. It was a tough call to lie of Plan A because this was the only way to keep everyone on the same page rather than make them give up and become savages. Him quoting Dylan Thomas poetry was his way to remind us all and the protagonists to motivate us to keep fighting for our lives at every turn. His actions were very deceptive, but were useful because it prevented catastrophe from happening sooner. Ironically, the connection we got with his daughter was reflection to what we were feeling with Murph. Anne Hathaway is the adult Amelia the whole time and that's the only difference. From there, she has that similar stubbornness because that's how sure she is with her opinion. She does start out as distant towards Coop, but that never means she isn't serious. She is not far off when making her theory based on love because it's just as much of a universal concept as time itself. It even works in a simple standpoint because it drives us to do what we have or want to do. And Coop definitely relates to that because the love for his children are why he took part of the expedition. He did the right thing detaching himself from her because she would know what to do from then on. Now that he has a clear conscience again and knows where to find her, I'm sure they'll create a great colony together platonically. The only other member of the Endurance team that caught my eye was Romilly. David Gyasi showed him as a guy who may have been slightly afraid of space, but still had his own dedication to the mission. He chose to wake up during cryosleep and catch up to his age because he knew it was better to live his life rather than pause it whenever. It was the most human thing to be done in this movie because he looked past the benefit and knew he'd be more useful awake. It was also a bummer for him to die because just like Doyle because neither clearly deserved to go in grim fashion. Nevertheless, I'm sure they'll be proud knowing the mission was worth it if there is an afterlife. Even in space, you can make an enemy and it was a shame on was made out of Mann. Matt Damon definitely surprised us in showing the character who had his own dedication to the mission, but chose to become a coward by the end of it. He was so full of pride that he was willing to make the unnecessary sacrifice to do what was the absolute. At that point, it was clear how deranged he got within his tenure on the planet. The loneliness got to him and he was willing to do anything to change that. Sadly for him, his selfishness would cost him his life and triggered an unlikely chain of events that would change everything. Last but not least, in a sci-fi standpoint, it was pretty cool to still get robotic characters in such a grounded story. I found it ironic for TARS and CASE to be such a dynamic duo because while Josh Stewart voiced the latter to be mostly quiet yet reserved, Bill Irwin got to portray the former as quite the talkative extrovert. That felt refreshing to notice due to the stakes surrounding them. There is no exaggeration when calling this a spectacular film, but there were a few moments I admit bothered me upon re-watching. For example, I think Coop was too damn lucky to catch up to the drone with a flat tire, especially since it was already malfunctioning. He was basically driving like it never happened, which is really weird. And let's be honest, was it really safe for his family to removes their masks & goggles when there were so many cracks on the window barriers. And this is before we found out Murph left her window open. Also, shouldn't NASA be recruiting new pilots if they've been under the radar for so long? I don't mind Coop leading the mission, but he's not the only astronaut out there. I don't even think it was a good idea for Brand to get the message of her dad's passing in front of the team? I know it ends up being important for the rest of the story to progress, but I feel like she should've had a moment to cope with the information before sharing it. It was definitely intense when Mann inadvertently takes his life when failing to dock, but I do feel like Brand should've tried talking over him to spill why it was a bad idea for him to try. It is a great twist for Coop to be the ghost by translating the morse code of 'STAY', but why not leave a note? I feel like that should be possible if he can touch the books. And lastly, the most common movie mistake is made when Coop leaves the station without the worry of security. Considering how famous he and his daughter are at that point, he should've been followed for his own protection. Other than that, it can be easy to love this movie for what it is. In conclusion, Interstellar is one of the best sci fi films ever made for broadening our minds and teaching us how valuable time makes our lives. If you are seeking a new way to explore, this film does the trick for you.
Comentários