The title is quite self-explanatory. But since this is supposed to be an article, like a full-length piece with hundreds of words, I guess I can't leave it there. So here goes.
Scifi is awesome. Christoper Nolan is awesome. The composer Hans Zimmer is awesome. Put those three together and you have awesome cubed. Even though Interstellar (2014) isn't Nolan's best work (for the record, it's Memento), it's still pretty darn good. One of the best scifi movies ever made, obviously.
Interstellar is about a group of astronauts who leave a dying Earth to see if they can find an inhabitable planet for their species somewhere else. The journey takes them through a wormhole, distorting spacetime so that time back on Earth passes a lot faster than where the astronauts are going. They explore three planets - one covered in water, other covered in ice, and a third that they eventually colonize - while missing home and losing members of the crew in the process.
Besides from being immensely well thought out and, to use the word properly, popcorn-munchingly entertaining, there are a few philosophical aspects to Interstellar as well. There's the idea of time passing on different rates, but I've already covered that to length earlier. Then there's the idea of sacrificing one's life with one's family for the sake of humankind - although it's possible that Cooper went along with the journey not to prevent the extinction of man but merely to save his kids' lives. You can also think about what must have had happened in a person's psyche during a 23-year wait alone in a spaceship (Romilly), or during a considerably longer wait asleep on a distant planet waiting for rescue that may never come (Mann). Then there's the regret of leaving Cooper starts to have after seeing the video from his quite rapidly aged daughter, and the lie of hope Professor Brand told his astronaut daughter to make her leave the dying planet. Not to mention the closing of the plot circle near the end where Cooper gets stuck in the fourth dimension.
And then there's the mindF of the ending where Cooper reunites with his daughter, now an elderly.
The movie really gives your brain a workout when you try to wrap your head around the behavior of time. Once you've got it figured out, you get to the psyhological parts. And once those are done with, the philosophical questions rise: did Earth really die - was the space journey necessary? Did they manage to keep humankind alive and if yes, then for how long? Was saving the species the right thing to do? Would the universe have been better off if humans had died with their planet? And did humans arrive originally on Earth precisely this way - fleeing from a dying planet through a wormhole?
RK
