Review: Interstellar

Earth is slowly letting its inhabitants know—through dust storms—that life on Earth is no longer sustainable. Farmers are needed desperately because the food supply has been steadily depleting for years. The only way to save the human population is to leave the planet… forever.

Now, imagine being an ant on this gigantic place called Earth. Imagine how incredibly large everything must seem—from rocks, to people and to mountains. Now imagine that largeness multiplied hundreds of millions of times. That is how small the human population is compared to the Milky Way. Again, multiply that largeness by hundreds of millions of times. That is how small the human race is compared to the entirety of space. It’s hard to wrap one’s mind around it. Interstellar gives the moviegoer a chance to try and wrap their mind around the fact that the human race is pretty much obsolete when compared to just how ginormous the final frontier is.

Put together an all-star cast—Matthew McConaughey (Cooper), Anne Hathaway (Brand), Jessica Chastain (Murphy) and Matt Damon (Dr. Mann) and combine it with an action-packed movie. What do you get? An exciting, tear-jerking, emotional roller coaster. Interstellar succeeds in drawing in a diverse audience because of how multidimensional it is— there’s action, romance and family.

The movie is a whopping 169 minutes, which isn’t surprising considering it is a science fiction film. The best thing about it being over two and a half hours long is the fact that it doesn’t seem like the movie lasted even an hour. The action-packed sequences set in space keep the audience attentive and ready to find out what happens next. Cutting together the scenes from space and the scenes back on Earth creates a visual that is very pleasing to the eye and the mind.

McConaughey and Hathaway’s acting really stands out in Interstellar. Their relationship as Cooper and Brand is dynamic and tumultuous at best and while their relationship plays a major role in this film, the relationship the audience will be rooting for is between Cooper and his daughter, Murphy. Murphy, at 10 years old, is distraught that her father is leaving—there is a “ghost” in their house warning him to stay. In the second half of the movie, Murphy—older and wiser, played by Jessica Chastain, realizes it was someone close to her helping her out in figuring out how to save the human population from becoming extinct.

Interstellar is a wild ride from beginning to finish and the audience will leave the theatre satisfied and maybe a little brain-dead because of just how big the ideas are in this film. Action, heartwarming family reunions and realizing just how tiny humans are can be found wrapped up nicely in the gift that is Interstellar.