[Grounded Sci-Fi] Interstellar [The Space Trilogy]
This time it’s this film!
Interstellar
Let me introduce it!
As for why the title says Space Trilogy when Interstellar isn’t a sequel to anything at all — that comes at the end of this post.
First up, the synopsis!
The near future. Plant life is dying off across the whole planet, the weather has turned extreme, and humanity is facing extinction.
Cooper, a former astronaut, runs a corn farm together with his father-in-law, his fifteen-year-old son and his ten-year-old daughter Murphy (Murph). Murph believed the books falling off the shelf in her room by themselves were the work of a ghost, but one day Cooper realises it might be a binary message sent by someone using gravitational waves. Cooper and Murph decode the message and reach the secret facility it points to, only to be taken into custody for having come into contact with top-secret material.
The organisation turns out to be what used to be NASA, now running the Lazarus Mission, a search for a second Earth. And it has already found planets that could be candidates. They talk Cooper into joining the mission as a pilot, to go looking for a planet that could become a second Earth, and over his daughter’s objections he leaves Earth behind.
Two years later, Cooper sets down on one of the candidate planets, but…
Next, the characters!
Number 1
The man on the right
• Joseph Cooper (played by Matthew McConaughey)
A former pilot, devoted to his family. Earth is in famine now so he had been farming, but his flying is valued and off he goes into space.
Number 2
The girl on the left
• Murphy Cooper (played by Jessica Chastain)
Joseph’s daughter, and everyone calls her Murph. She was a little girl when her father went into space, but as an adult she becomes an outstanding physicist and works on things like building space colonies.
Right then.
This film. Put simply, it’s a sci-fi film that goes at it in deadly earnest.
Technology built on theoretical astrophysics, warping, black holes and so on — it’s a film made with enough care that a science student at university would go “ah! I sort of know this one!!”!! It brings 2001: A Space Odyssey to mind.
For instance…
• The depiction of the various planets is seriously real
• It takes into account that time runs differently from how it runs for the people back on Earth, the time dilation effect
• It cuts deep into the idea of “gravity” as something sitting in a dimension above time
• Massively appealing artificial intelligence
And so on.
Piled high with everything I love. And the balance of the human drama is just right too. No heavy-handed insistence on family love or anything like it, and it moves along briskly, so it never gets dull to watch!
On top of that the director is Christopher Nolan. The Inception man~. And The Dark Knight!! I love The Dark Knight!!! Every film this director makes has wonderful setups planted in it! The ending this time is a surprise as well.
Right, so the reason for calling it a Space Trilogy. Gravity and The Martian came out either side of Interstellar, and on top of that they have things in common,
• Films aiming for realistic sci-fi
• Gravity and Interstellar both have gravity as their theme
• The Martian stars Matt Damon. And Matt Damon makes a surprise appearance in Interstellar as well. And he’s annoying, too.
It makes for a really interesting set. And because they all lean towards realism the vocabulary that comes up overlaps as well, so catching that “ah, that turned up in the other film too” while watching is a pleasure in itself. So if Interstellar is on the list, the other two come recommended as well.
Best line
“Love is the only thing that transcends time and space.”
