Interstellar

Finally watched this new movie that almost everyone is making a big deal about and it has been in the news for weeks: Interstellar. First of all Interstellar means something situated or occurring between stars. For someone whose first language is not English, I think, it is important to know what the name of the movie means, first. Second of all this has brought attention and interest because it is a Nolan movie and its lead actor is McConaughey. So what’s the big deal with this British guy, Nolan? He is the director of The Dark Knight series (or trilogy as most like to call it). The movie was a commercial success particularly because of the now deceased Australian actor Heath Ledger and of course the fact that the movie is about a superhero, Batman! Ledger, I guess had been walking on a ledge for too long and eventually carelessness or maybe just bad luck made him fall to his demise. No! That’s not what happened to him, unlike other starts! I don’t think he had a drug or alcohol problem. He was suffering from Insomnia. I had never seen his performance prior to The Dark Knight but I knew he had the lead role also in Brokeback Mountain, a movie about a homosexual cowboy and that has been filmed in Alberta.

Anyways I never liked The Dark Knight. I wanted to watch it when it first came out in 2008 or 2009. I lived in Coquitlam at the time. I didn’t as my roommate didn’t want to and I didn’t want to just go by myself. Then I purchased the DVD a few years after that for $10. I tried to watch the long movie a few times and although I like actions, I never was able to finish it.

The fact is Americans are obsessed with superheroes. There is barely any month passing without a movie about these fictional characters: Superman, Batman, Captain America, you name it! In my opinion too much of something eventually ruins its pleasure. Imagine eating Hamburger every day! How would you feel? I really liked the first Batman movie when it came out first in 1989 (Jack Nicholson, Michael Keaton) although I never had the chance to watch it in a movie theater. A bit of other following Batman movies were OK as well but then it became too much to handle and too boring. I thought I had a question about the movie and that was: Why did American who barely liked any foreign movie, liked this one? A good example of that would be Blade Runner. I liked it very much but it was not as big of commercial success as other American movies although it has Ford as its lead role actor. I found the answer very soon: The Dark Knight is about an American fictional character, Batman and it must be a big success and it was.

Let’s go back to Interstellar. Interstellar is a difficult movie to understand if you want to go to its detail. It’s difficult to understand even for the ones whose their native language is English basically because it discusses physics and astronomy matters. I found it tedious for that reason and I could not help looking at my watch every 45 minutes or so. But why did people go to watch Interstellar? Maybe because of the recent McConaughey’s success and also Nolan as the director. Maybe they were expecting something as god as The Dark Knight! I wanted to see what happens at the end because that’s what you want to see when you go to movies and then I had paid a little over $1! It would have been very disappointing to leave, had I left the movie house before it came to its end. The end though was quite disappointing for me: Time travel was the point. Every time Time Travel is introduced I find it confusing and messed up! You see things that you have done and made you to come here and you cannot do anything about that or … I don’t know. It is all confusion. The other problem with Interstellar is lack of enough excitement, something you normally expect in a science-fiction/space movie. Apart from a few scenes, that I liked very much, you don’t see usual challenges that astronauts face in their voyages but that could be because the movie focuses on scientific facts about travels between galaxies for search of new habitable planets. Visual effects are good. I specifically liked the spaceship and the walking robots but the sound sucked in the movie theater that I watched it (Scoriabank Chinook). I guess there was a technical problem and it had nothing to do with the movie. The sounds and music overcame the talking in the entire movie. That made it even harder for me to understand. Actors and actresses performances were all acceptable. I didn’t know Demon had a role until I saw him in the middle of the story but his character is woken up by the other astronauts from a long hyper-sleep has a minor evil role and then kills himself! I like the plot and story except for the time travelling part at the end. Although it might have been the entire purpose of the movie! This is what it is: People of earth are having difficulties on their daily life due to different issues including Dust Bowl and NASA secretly has this plan of sending astronauts to search for habitable planets outside our galaxy, if I’m not mistaken. Cooper, who is said excessively in the movie that is the best pilot NASA ever had, accidentally finds this NASA research and lunch location (maybe not accidentally. The coordination of NASA secret lunch pad and center is somehow given to him through a Morse code which will later, at the end of the movie is revealed that had been sent to them by him! Time travel games) and was offered this great opportunity of being the pilot of a NASA secret mission to the infinity and beyond!

I also wanted to mention this part that Demon appears and I almost forgot. Demon, as I indicated earlier, was visited by other astronauts, Cooper and Hathaway (One character name and one real name!) and woken from his long hyper-sleep. He was on this planet (or maybe a moon, I don’t recall completely. I should watch the movie again) which has 67-hour cold days and 67-hour colder nights and seems to be not much of a desirable place for Earth people to live their life there. In the beginning of the movie when the mission is discussed with Cooper, he is told that there are two plans for the voyage that they should consider: Plan A and Plan B. Here I’m again lost. I didn't quite get it whether they were there to save Demon and there was no Plan B or something else but Demon’s character gets in to a fight with Copper, breaks his Spacesuit helmet and tries to kill him but Cooper somehow (and magically as he is the lead role!) saves himself and goes back to the spaceship. Demon here seems to be trying to get to the main module and somehow makes this mistake of opening a hatch which depressurizes part of the module and kills him. Here the challenge becomes to going back to the travel module because that’s how they travel! Since Copper, again, is the best pilot NASA ever had, he manages to attach to the main module using his skills and help of the robot of trip, the character I liked very much. Here I guess again I was lost because I don’t remember whether the Black guy is in the module or somewhere else but that trip to the cold planet took them a few hours or days at the most but cost the Black fella and people of Earth a good 23 years! This again is part of this time travel thing and going through Black-holes and Wormholes! I guess they cause their trip to be much shorter.

The end of the movie is clear and obvious. Cooper is back (but not to Earth) while his fella astronauts are all gone. He actually is saved and he ages 110-years, I guess. His daughter who happens to become a NASA scientist and helped this journey to accomplish is now on a hospital bed surrounded by her family. They exchange a few words and show signs of affection and she asks him to leave because apparently parents aren't supposed to see their children’s death. And that’s the end of the movie. This last part happens on a sort of space station, similar to what is shown in Elysium, meaning that the mission has been accomplished and people of Earth are saved. This last scene was a bit lame because it was apparent that the director or production designer or whoever in charge of that part had not tried hard enough to create a little more real environment for the people who have left their habitat to have a better life. Or maybe the director wanted to stress that what the audience might have seen in Elysium is what they would get!

I have to watch this movie again to fill the gaps and understand it completely and I will. And yes it is definitely recommended. There is barely any science-fiction/space movie that I refrain from going to although there have been quite a few that I had been very disappointed at the end. One last thing: Interstellar is a rare movie that the audience can expect a sequel to. 

(Photo: Astronauts are walking on the surface pf  one of the planets that is supposed to be a habitable one for human. It turns out shortly after this scene that the plan is not what they thought it would be. The first one whose his spacesuit is a bit different from the other ones is Matt Demon)