Movie review: ‘Interstellar’

Delaney Norton, Hi-Times Editor-in-Chief

“Interstellar” is set in Earth’s near future, where the human race is struggling to find crops that continue to grow in the deteriorating air quality. Civilization has regressed to the point of schools’ solely bringing up farmers and teaching that space exploration was a government conspiracy.

Matthew McConaughey plays Cooper, a former NASA pilot who now runs a farm with his teenage son, daughter and father-in-law. By discovering what appears to be gravitational waves leaving binary code in the daughter’s room, they find the coordinates to a secret base for NASA’s last-ditch effort, for which Cooper is recruited to pilot a mission to find a habitable planet to save the human race.

The mission involves traveling to a black hole that has appeared next to Saturn, which leads to a solar system with a whole group of planets with the potential to live on. The previous mission’s members were considered martyrs, as they went directly to these planets to issue the initial go-ahead to come there.

“Interstellar” is both dystopian and science fiction, and while you have to make several leaps of faith when scientific theories are such a major part of the plot, these theories are seamlessly interwoven. The movie actually feels complete and leaves viewers interested in human potential rather than wondering about unanswered questions.