Posted on 10/27/2014 11:38:50 AM PDT by dennisw
Directed by Christopher Nolan (Memento, Inception, the most recent Batman trilogy) and written with his brother and frequent collaborator Jonathan, Interstellar takes place in a near future that harkens back to the recent past — like the 1950s Midwest or maybe the Dust Bowl, but with laptops and drones. There’s very little exposition; through telling details and offhand comments, you get the sense that there’s been an environmental disaster followed by a famine, and that humanity has scaled back its ambitions to bare subsistence. People farm corn — the one crop left unravaged by blight — watch baseball games in half-empty stands, and flee towering haboob dust storms announced by air raid sirens.
Matthew McConaughey plays Cooper, a NASA pilot who has turned to farming — like everyone else at the time, an odd cut to faux-documentary footage informs us. He lives in a ramshackle house, complaining to his father (John Lithgow) about humanity’s diminished horizons and doting on his daughter Murph, played by Mackenzie Foy with a believably teenage mix of mischief and exasperation.
McConaughey eventually leaves Foy and Earth behind to scout out a new home for for the human race, but it’s their relationship that grounds the movie. As action-filled as Nolan’s films are, they can sometimes feel abstract, like symbolic sublimations of some offscreen mental trauma. So many of his characters get their motivation from some prior loss — the dead wives from Memento and Inception, the dead parents of Batman — that they then work through according to the game-like rules Nolan excels at, whether those rules are imposed by amnesia, consciousness, or a supervillain. But Foy is an actual character, not a cipher, and the relationship between her and McConaughey gives the film an emotional heft that Nolan’s other work sometimes lacks.
(Excerpt) Read more at theverge.com ...
Some more of this review:
The biggest danger the shuttle crew faces, however, is time. Time isn’t just running out — it’s compressing and stretching as they travel through space. The Nolans use relativity to create some original and urgent crises as the shuttle crew figures out how to best spend their shifting time. Time is a resource, like food or water, Hathaway warns. The time differential between the crew and those they left behind also gives rise to the movie’s most melancholy scenes. In this respect it feels less like Space Odyssey and more like Homer’s Odyssey, with McConaughey getting detained and delayed as time passes and things go wrong back home.
As in 2001, things get trippy toward the end. Without revealing too much, I can say that after a series of mostly comprehensible events, it swerves into either deeply theoretical physics or sentimental spirituality. Possibly both. The shift is jarring, but also visually interesting enough that I mostly went with it.
another eco-wacko film... yay... :p
Have you ever seen any eco movie that wasn’t wacko?
It sounds very not interesting.
Like everything Hollywood, no doubt a festering overgrown swamp of scientific inaccuracies.
"Silent Running"?
I stopped reading right there.
I will definitely watch this, but I will be sure to steal it using BitTorrent.
Politics aside....the earth could potentially become hostile to human life. This movie is just another apocalyptic scenario. Will there be some PC environmental message to it? Probably. If the people behind the movie are smart, they will not be obvious about it.
I’m not familiar with that movie. There are a number of freepers that believe any eco movie Hollywood puts out, is going to be wacko.
I read the review, and it seems like I’ve seen this movie before. Oh! Yeah! THELMA AND LOUISE.
As long as we reject cheap energy and refuse to use GMO food, a disaster is certainly possible.
that was super wacko
You’ve never seen “Silent Running?” It’s the movie where Bruce Dern first lost his mind.
They all copy one another and I am tired of it.
I don’t recall seeing it. I’ll look it up.
This was the 70s. The plants were dead due to overpopulation. That was the “in” thing then.
The 70s are sort of fuzzy for me. I remember what I did, but not much about how I thought.
There was also that global cooling and coming ice age thing.
how many limousine “I got mine” liberals are zpg worshipers? (zero population growth.
We should name them. I think Bloomberg and gates are in that group.
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