Interstellar Review

This review contains spoilers. So if you haven't watched the movie don't read it.

I have always been a fan of Space Operas. Floating through vast stretches of nothingness is a singular experience, I may never know that feeling for real but I am content with the virtual cinema experience. But making a good Space Opera is no mean feat. The visual effects and the technology have to be meticulously crafted to give an authentic feel. I can think of only a handful of films that have done that successfully. Kubrick's 2001 is of course at the top of the list, followed by Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity and Danny Boyle's Sunshine. And then Nolan decided to make Interstellar to reset the queue. Interstellar does complete justice to the word Opera, in fact it sets the bar quite high for future space films to reach. Nolan transported me to a hitherto unknown and unseen world from which I did not want to return. There were some breathtaking shots of Saturn's rings, the blackhole called Gargantua and mile high tidal waves that made me want to leave my planet and go on a space voyage. This was the most visually enhancing space experience I have had till date, and just a year back I had thought that Gravity would be difficult to beat ...

Let me give you a brief recap of the story. Sometime in the future the earth gets afflicted with Dust Storms and crop failures. There is food scarcity world over and the dust has become a permanent feature of everyday life. The American Govt has shutdown NASA as the need of the hour is farming and food production and not space research. And to drive the point further, the Govt has modified science textbooks to teach kids that the 1969 Moon Landing was fake, done just to rattle the Soviet Union and increase their space budget !! I loved this part. Coop (Matthew McConnaughey) is a retired NASA pilot who like everyone else is a corn farmer now. He lives with his 2 children and father-in-law. Coop's daughter Murph has an imaginative mind and she believes there is a ghost in her room who throws books from the shelves. Coop after ignoring her daughter for a while one day actually observes strange phenomenon in that room himself, but being an engineer he is able to understand that Murph's ghost is actually a gravitational anomaly. And one day that anomaly leads Coop and Murph to a secret underground location where NASA is still active. He meets his old professor Dr Brand (Michael Caine) there who tells him that this planet is not meant to be saved, its meant to be left. NASA, or whatever is left of it has been secretly working on a mission to find other inhabitable worlds where humanity can be moved to save them from extinction. To help them in their quest "they" most likely extra-terrestrial beings from a higher dimension have placed a wormhole in our Solar System near Saturn that allows you to jump through space-time to another galaxy far far away where there could be earth like planets. NASA has already sent 13 manned missions through this wormhole out of which they have been getting promising signals from 3. They ask Coop to pilot one last flight to save humanity, travel to these 3 planets and find a new home for mankind. If a suitable planet is found there are 2 plans to save mankind - Plan A where Dr. Brand will figure out a way to take the entire population of the earth to this new planet. And that would involve unlocking the secrets of gravity and jumping into another dimension. Plan B was to send some frozen fertilized human embryos with Coop's mission who would enable humanity to grow once again after everyone on earth are wiped out in case Plan A fails. Coop is to be accompanied by 3 scientists in his flight, one being Dr Brand's daughter Amelia (Anne Hathaway). Murph doesn't want to let her father go as she is scared he may not return, but eventually Coop leaves promising her that he will return 1 day. Coop and 3 others then set out for their journey into outer space, they travel through the wormhole and explore 3 planets one by one, the last of which becomes humanity's next destination.

A lot of things happen during Coop's space adventure which I have omitted for brevity's sake. Some of it made scientific sense and some didn't. As the film progressed the science became more and more obscure and slightly difficult for the layman to follow. Unfortunately there were some glaring mistakes in Interstellar's science which Phil Plait (an astronomer himself) has written about here. That's surprising considering that renowned astro-physicist and black-hole expert Kip Thorne was a consultant for this film. I suggest you to read Phil Plait's blog to understand all the scientific errors he has mentioned. I personally feel  a science fiction book/movie is allowed to take liberties with the science to a certain degree, if it serves the story's purpose but I was shocked/confused by 2 points which I will mention here and which Phil Plait has also mentioned. It was too high a leap of faith that Nolan was asking me to take, and I wasn't prepared for it -

1. 2 planets revolving around a giant black hole which are considered habitable with organic matter. Where did they get the heat and light from? Black holes are known to absorb all sorts of energy from their surroundings.
2. How did Coop manage to cross the event horizon and enter the black hole? His space shuttle should have been fried or torn to pieces when he attempted that. Even if I consider that the tesseract built inside the singularity was to protect him from disintegrating but I am confused how he even reached there. Although this part was central to the film's plot, maybe that's why Nolan just decided to go with it.
3. And I am adding a 3rd here as a bonus. The dialogue where Amelia compares love to a higher dimensional entity, something that we don't fully comprehend because we don't understand higher dimensions and hence dismiss as irrational. Duh ... I didn't like it.

And then there was the question of "they". The film implied that "they" were actually not higher dimensional beings but humans from the future who had unlocked the mysteries of higher dimensions and hence had built that tesseract inside the black hole which Coop uses to communicate with his daughter in the past. I thought a lot about this, and I am still confused. It's an example of the Bootstrap Paradox or the Ontological Paradox, a term frequently used in context with Time Travel. This trick has been used in several sci-fi films/books before, doesn't make it any less mind boggling. More details here.

The scientific glitches aside Interstellar's message was loud and clear, and that for me was the winner!
The message was two fold -

• The first was that human beings are capable of doing anything to survive, sitting and waiting to die is just not us. In a way Nolan was urging the scientific community to strive harder and explore the vast uncharted Universe, although we aren't faced with any imminent danger right now, but who knows what future has in store. If we want we can do it. Maybe all that we need is a leap of faith. True that Chris Nolan. I am with you on this. All the greatest discoveries in science have been leaps of faith - take relativity for instance. To this day people are overawed by it. Just because one crazy guy (Albert Einstein) had the vision and courage to take that leap of faith. 
• The second message isn't a new one but nevertheless a classic - love and human connection transcend the boundaries of space and time. A father will do whatever it takes, travel through black-holes, jump dimensions and what not to keep the promise he made to his daughter.

All in all Interstellar makes for one experience which will remain with you for a long long time. I am planning to watch it again, and again and again ...