INTERSTELLAR: A Movie Review

 Video Source: Prime Video

The movie 'INTERSTELLAR' is set in the future, when humans are nearing extinction on earth because most food crops like wheat and okra have become extinct due to ‘blight’, though corn is still farmable. According to Dr. Brand, a NASA scientist in the movie, the ‘next’ generation of humans might be the last one on earth. To make things worse, there are frequent ‘dirt’ storms that prevent people from leaving home. Layers of dust enter people’s homes and settles on furniture and kitchen utensils.Cooper is a farmer and a former pilot. Implied within the story is the notion that humans have made great advances in technology and are ready to venture into other parts of the universe to save themselves.

Cooper’s ten year daughter ‘Murph’ has been noticing strange occurrences in her room – books falling from shelves and a slow falling dust leaving a pattern on the floor of their library. Murph thinks it is a ghost. However, Cooper quickly deciphers this as a ‘binary’ string that is code for coordinates of a place. The coordinates lead him to the hideout of NASA. There he meets his mentor Dr. Brand and his daughter.

According to Dr. Brand, there are two plans to save humans. Plan A is to look for a new habitable world outside the galaxy and Plan B is to freeze fertilized human eggs and hope for the best. To investigate the viability of Plan A, NASA had sent a dozen astronauts earlier thru the wormhole. Cooper is asked to follow in their footsteps. Cooper reluctantly agrees to pilot the spacecraft with Brand’s daughter to the distant galaxy. At home, Murph is very upset with him because he is leaving her.  Cooper explains to her that when he returns, she might be his age because people age slowly in outer space!

 Cooper pilots his spacecraft to a Wormhole near Saturn. That Wormhole leads to planets of another galaxy light years away. Upon entering the Wormhole, the spacecraft is uncontrollably driven to the other end of the universe and is ejected into a new world made up of a black hole called Gargantua and three planets named Dr. Man's Planet, Millers and Edmonds. This part of the universe will cost him in terms of time – one hour here equals seven years on earth!! After some misadventures, the team realizes that they do not have enough fuel left to return to earth. So Cooper wisely decides to send Dr. Brand’s daughter to Edmonds planet and risks himself being sucked into the Blackhole Gargantua due to its immense gravitational pull. As Cooper ejects from his vehicle and tumbles down in the dark inside Gargantua, a ‘Tesseract’ opens for him – he is able to see 3-d video snippets of himself and his daughter from the day he left her until the present. He is only allowed to have minimal communication with her– he shoves the books on the shelf forward in a pattern and teenage ‘Murph’ thinks a ghost is trying to communicate with her. You see, desperately in tears, Cooper is trying to alter the past. He screams ‘don’t let me go’ but Murph cannot hear him. This is the part we saw in para 2 above!

 Then Cooper looks for that part of the Tesseract where Murph is a grown-up lady and tries to communicate with her by moving the second hand of the watch he gave her before leaving. Murph recognizes the Morse pattern and is overjoyed that her dad is back! Her dad, inside the tesseract is overjoyed that his daughter Murph has been chosen to save the last of humans and he helps her do just that by passing gravitational data from the black hole via Morse code. This will help Murph solve the gravity problem that senior Brand was working on before he died!! The result is that humans will overcome gravity and will be able to fly to other planets like Edmonds in larger numbers on space stations. Cooper station is one example of that!

 Rangers find Cooper orbiting Saturn alone after the Tesseract closes and move him to ‘Cooper Station’, also orbiting Saturn. There he is reunited with his old, sick daughter Murph on her death bed surrounded by relatives Cooper has never met!! You see, the hours spent rescuing parts of an old vehicle from its watery grave on Miller's planet and the encounter he had on the frozen Mann's planet with Dr. Mann himself had cost him dearly in terms of earth years. The hours spent inside the Black hole and the Tesseract additionally cost 50 human years! As a result, he could not see his daughter grow up or spend any time with his family and friends! Now Murph is 91 years old while Cooper does not look much older than when he left earth. Murph and his son Tom, who had already passed away, have their own family branches.  Cooper seems satisfied that the human race will survive due to their efforts. The movie ends as Cooper gets ready to fly to Edmond’s planet to meet female Dr. Brand and perhaps start a human colony there. Gravity plays multiple roles here you see!

Notes: This movie is based upon scientific facts of Cosmology. I have deliberately avoided going into the technical details of Wormhole, Black Hole, Tesseract, Spacetime, Five dimensional beings etc. This is so that we can follow the story smoothly. The story is of love between a father and daughter and their separation for a higher purpose, which was to save humans from extinction.

The heartfelt tears that the father feels, lost in the womb of Spacetime, and his love for his child overcome the limitations of human existence. Hans Zimmer’s musical contribution enhances the emotional parts of the movie. Modern sound engineering has raised the quality of piano keys! You see, the piano tune that plays in the background again and again at appropriate places in the movie rhymes with some lines of the song, as well as some portions of the piano tune, of an old Bollywood song ‘Dil Ke Jharoke ..’ from the 1968 movie ‘Brahmachari’. This is a song of separation and anguish!! Cooper even likes the Indian drone he captures because of the better solar cells.