Interstellar (2014): Starting Out at the End of the World
As Earth’s surface is turning to dust, a former NASA pilot is offered another mission, to help find a way to transport humanity to a habitable planet
Any Christopher Nolan film is bound to be two things: long and complicated. Interstellar (2014) is no exception. A long and complicated film is not necessarily a bad thing if the story is told well. Here, the answer is a tepid yes and no. It’s hard to quantify Interstellar on, say, a 10-point scale because, while it’s a good story with amazing visuals and a marvelous music score, the logic underlying the story is hard to follow. It lands somewhere between convoluted and just plain double think.
First, the story. The movie starts out with a series of interviews where elderly people talk about the world before interstellar pilot Joseph Cooper’s epic voyage. Now the crops are dying, and dust is everywhere. Cooper is a farmer who grows one of the last remaining crops: corn. In short, planet Earth has turned into Illinois.
What happened?
It’s unclear what has caused this natural crisis. The only hint offered is that something called “blight” is destroying plant life. We learn nothing about blight except that it feeds off nitrogen. That information, presented all by itself, raises some questions; many crops use nitrogen, and some that even take it out of the air. So why is corn the only survivor? The story does not stay here very long; we are simply told vague things that amount to “the planet is rejecting humanity.”
Recently widowed Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) has two kids, Tom and Murphy. Both kids are very smart but Tom isn’t quite smart enough to go to college, which condemns him to becoming a farmer like his dad. Murphy (Mackenzie Foy) finds herself in trouble with her teacher because she challenges the moon landing. But now the challenges are different; the teachers are claiming that man never went to the moon.
I’m not really sure why this scene was written in. Perhaps the writers were trying to focus on the fact that Cooper, now a farmer, was once an astronaut because he naturally becomes very upset when he learns about the rewritten textbooks. Perhaps it was social commentary on the arbitrary nature of the school curriculum, warning the audience that the government will change its teachings based on the political needs of the time. Perhaps it was just trying to insult people who don’t believe the United States went to the moon. In any event, it’s apparent that Cooper’s kids are not going to find success through education.
Enter the ghost
Murphy is also claiming that there is a ghost in her bedroom. Cooper doesn’t believe her, but he tells her that she can’t simply claim there’s a ghost. She must record her observations of the anomalies in her bedroom and come back to him, which she begins to do.
Later, while the family is enjoying a baseball game, a large dust storm blows in and forces them to return home. Murphy had forgotten to close her bedroom window, and when she and Cooper run up to her bedroom, they see something odd: The dust has landed in a pattern on the floor.
When Cooper looks carefully at the pattern, he realizes that it’s binary code. He translates the code in the dust and discovers that it is the coordinates for a specific location on a map. He marks the location, then drives off to find out what’s there. Murphy, of course, sneaks into the truck and he is forced to take her along.
By nightfall, they find the location, which is surrounded by a chain-link fence. When Cooper tries to cut through the fence, someone tases him and takes Murphy. He wakes up in an interrogation room where a giant rectangular robot named TARS begins to question him.
Cooper goes back and forth with the robot until he meets Dr. Brand (Anne Hathaway) who takes him to his daughter. She is with a group of men in a conference room, and Cooper recognizes one of them, Professor Brand (Michael Caine) , who is Dr. Brand’s father.
Professor Brand explains that he and the people inside the facility are what’s left of NASA. Cooper’s arrival is fortuitous, he learns, because it turns out that NASA needs a pilot for a special mission:
Again, there seems to be a great deal of backstory that the audience isn’t given, which raises all sorts of questions. From the little that the writers allow the viewer to know, it’s apparent that Cooper did fly for NASA but crashed at some point. Was he fired because of the crash, or was he laid off when the government shut down NASA? And once NASA was reinstated, why didn’t Professor Brand try to find Cooper earlier if he was needing a skilled pilot for a particular mission? No answers are given.
Things get a little strange when the academic gathering learns that Cooper found NASA by following the coordinates written in the dust. They all conclude that They have chosen Cooper for the mission.
Cooper asks who They is, but Professor Brand refuses to say more unless Cooper agrees to pilot their spacecraft. Once Cooper agrees, they go on to explain that They are some kind of group that can manipulate gravity. That was how They’d sent the message in the dust.
They have also opened a wormhole near Saturn. It leads to another galaxy that has a grouping of potentially habitable planets. That is again very fortunate because it turns out Earth is about to become uninhabitable altogether. Even the corn is about to die, and the generation after Murphy will probably all suffocate.
Plan A and Plan B
Professor Brand has two plans to save mankind. NASA has already sent explorers out to the grouping of planets on the other side of Saturn’s wormhole, and these explorers have sent back messages identifying three planets that have the best chance of sustaining the human race. The first part of both plans is to find out which planet is the best candidate.
After that, one of two scenarios will take place. Plan B is the simpler and more tragic of the two possibilities. Cooper and his crew will carry embryos on their ship during the mission. If they cannot save the people of Earth for whatever reason, the astronauts will begin raising the embryos on whichever planet turns out to be the most habitable. However, everyone on Earth will die.
Plan A involves betting on Professor Brand. It turns out that NASA’s new headquarters is a giant spaceship, and this ship is meant to transport the people of Earth onto another planet. But the ship is far too large to fly out of Earth’s atmosphere unless Professor Brand can find the equation that will enable humanity to manipulate gravity. He says he’s very close to finding the answer and tells Cooper that by the time he returns to earth, the problem of gravity will be solved.
Because the stakes are so dire, Cooper feels he must join the mission — not that the worshipers of They have given him much of a choice anyway — but Murphy is very unhappy. He tries to patch things up with her before he goes, but Murphy isn’t having it. She even tells him that the ghost sent her a message, which says “Stay,” using morse code. It’s been pushing the books off the bookshelf to communicate. Cooper doesn’t believe her and gives Murphy a watch to remind her of him. But Murphy realizes that Cooper has no idea when he’ll return and becomes inconsolable. Cooper says he’ll come back and leaves Murphy’s bedroom while the little girl is still in tears.
Cooper then says goodbye to everyone else and returns to NASA. He and his new crew leave Earth’s atmosphere and… we’ll cover what happens then next time.