When I left Earth, I thought I was prepared to die. Truth is, I never really considered the possibility that my planet wasn’t the one.
There will come a day when the sun burns out—the Milky Way will welcome a blazing, brilliant red giant and the Earth will become a barren wasteland and eventually, the sun will fade into an eternal darkness. It sounds frightening, yet, oddly beautiful. Something that feels immortal, after billions of years, naturally passing in a literal blaze of glory.
But so it goes with all death, that every living thing has a more just life if it travels its natural cycle. Premature death, given the circumstances, can be heroic or tragic or pointless. In Christopher Nolan’s time-traveling epic, Interstellar, death is much more—it’s a sign of culpability and sacrifice, but above all else—gravity.
Interstellar (2014) opens with several elderly people speaking to the audience like they’re in a History Channel documentary. They talk about the Blight, a plague that ravaged Earth decades earlier and left the planet practically uninhabitable. Food is scarce, violent dust storms poison people’s lungs, and the government has subjected the country to an “alternative facts” education system.
Living in this hell is Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a former astronaut and the widowed father of Tom and Murph. Cooper harvests corn while staring up at the stars and thinking about the imminent extinction of humankind. But one day he and Murph stumble upon America’s greatest secret: the location of NASA, which has been driven underground since the Blight swept over the Earth. NASA leader Professor Brand (Michael Caine) tells Cooper that there is one last hope for humanity. If an astronautic team can find a new habitable planet, then they can build a new colony in another galaxy. Cooper accepts the mission despite knowing that thanks to the Theory of Relativity, he may spend months in space while his son and daughter age decades on Earth. Together with Dr. Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway), Dr. Romilly (David Gyasi), Dr. Doyle (Wes Bentley), and the robots TARS and CASE, Cooper must find a way to save the human race and rage against the dying of the light.
It’s hard to describe a visual masterpiece in words. (Interstellar won Best Visual Effects at the 87th Academy Awards for a reason.) Nolan certainly pays homage to space travel productions before him like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), but the film explores both the beauty and peril of outer space with an artistry that I have not witnessed before. I don’t want to spoil an incredible scene, but I will say that Interstellar takes full advantage of the Endurance spacecraft's design.
What makes Interstellar special, though, is that it balances visual spectacle with a centrifuge of emotions. The plot cuts back and forth between Cooper in space and back to his family on Earth, and so the audience feels the heartbreak of the time lapse along with Cooper.
Interstellar is more than an entertaining science-fiction blockbuster; it’s a deeply enriching, philosophical story about humanity’s—and the individual’s—place in the vast universe. What does it mean to be a hero if I’m stranded on a planet or when does my personal tragedy become subordinate to the tragedies of other people?
The film doesn’t provide much certainty. What it does is make you realize that gravity extends beyond physical mass. In the physics world, gravity is a force that attracts a body of mass toward a stronger body of mass, like the Moon to Earth. In the metaphysical world, love and death exert a force much like gravity. And someday, if we could quantify love and death, humans can evolve past a basic survival instinct.
Rating: A+ | 4 stars
