Interstellar
Director: Christopher Nolan
Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Wes Bentley, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, David Gyasi, Michael Caine
Rating: (M)
Four and a half stars (out of five)
Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) once was an astronaut but it was decided that we could not afford the luxury of space exploration when the economy tanked, so he redeployed as a farmer.
People have to eat but with all the crops failing and regular dust storms making the air toxic, even farming seems hopeless.
Then his old life reaches out to him.
The space programme was not really decommissioned, just sent underground.
Cooper is needed to fly one last mission into a wormhole that conveniently opened by Saturn, offering humankind our best chance of finding habitable new planets.
But as much as he has always been drawn to the wonder of exploring space, Cooper only agrees to the mission after he is satisfied that he will be able to return for his children if he finds a new Earth.
Cooper carries a certain amount of emotional baggage, which could have been pretty corny, but McConaughey and the actors around him are good enough to sell it.
Interstellar is a long movie with a faithful treatment of difficult scientific concepts at its core.
It is often beautiful with its imagining of what other planets would look like.
It is also honest in its depiction of what the vastness of space could do to the puny human brain.
For most of the journey I was fully engaged but by the end it was just too much.
My puny human brain could not cope with the vastness of this movie.
- Christine Powley
