Interstellar [DVD] [2014]

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As we learn at the beginning of the film, a group of 12 scientists traveled through a mysterious wormhole that appeared near Saturn, to see if the 12 planets on the other side could sustain human life. A few years later, the Endurance and its crew — including Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) and Brand (Anne Hathaway) — are going to visit the three most promising planets in the hopes of colonizing one. When they arrive on Dr. Mann's (Matt Damon) planet, the heroic scientist assures them his icy cold spot is the perfect place for humans to live. Christopher Nolan is a director whose name has, quite literally, become synonymous with realism. The Nolanisation of cinema, which made the gloomy streets of Gotham a bridge between the fantastical and the commonplace, now grounds countless fancies within the mud of our reality. With Interstellar, arguably his first ‘true’ science-fiction project, Nolan inverts expectation once again, with a film rooted in the mundanity of maths homework but spliced with the fantastic. Love is the one thing that we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Coop later realises that it is not a ghost, but a gravitational anomaly. The anomaly leaves messages in binary code: GPS coordinates that lead Coop and Murph to the NASA base. We also later discover that a message has been left in Murph’s watch by “them” (see below).

Interstellar Official Soundtrack | Full Album – Hans Zimmer Interstellar Official Soundtrack | Full Album – Hans Zimmer

Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar would be impressive in the ranks of contemporary hard science fiction films, even if for no other reasons than that there are so few of them these days and that its ambition is nearly unsurpassed. Professor Brand: [The anomalies] changed everything. Suddenly we knew that harnessing gravity was real. So I started working on the theory. Essentially, the gravity equation is Professor Brand’s attempt to control gravity. The gravitational anomalies observed by Coop, Murph and Professor Brand lead to a complete reevaluation of the scientific understanding of gravity. It’s not clear. There’s no title card at any point giving a date, and Nolan has been cagey about specific details. A clue comes from the early dialogue between Coop (McConaughey) and his father-in-law, Donald (John Lithgow), during an amateur-looking baseball game.

Wormholes don’t appear naturally, as Coop notes (and Kip Thorne confirms in his book). So it must have been placed there by someone, or something. Early in the film, we’re led to believe that a benevolent ultra-advanced civilisation has placed it there. Aliens, basically. Extra-terrestrial Samaritans. Brand: Maybe [love] means something more - something we can't yet understand. Maybe it's some evidence, some artefact of a higher dimension that we can't consciously perceive. I'm drawn across the universe to someone I haven't seen in a decade who I know is probably dead. Love is the one thing that we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that, even if we can't understand it. Yep. Matt Damon cameos as Dr. Mann, the leader of the Lazarus mission which first explored the foreign galaxy. Damon’s appearance, emerging from the cryo-sleep, came as a surprise to many audiences first watching; Nolan deliberately kept his involvement in the project under wraps. He was not involved in any of the pre-release publicity. Even if you're mostly able to follow the movie through its first two hours of wormholes, gravitational propulsion theory, and the relativistic passage of time, we wouldn't blame anybody if they got lost in the film's final hour. Not only does every major theme and theory of the film come to a head as the story builds towards its climax, but it also throws a major curveball at the audience in the form of an infinite, interdimensional library that literally comes out of nowhere.

Interstellar (4K UHD Review) - The Digital Bits Interstellar (4K UHD Review) - The Digital Bits

Born a year after the Apollo landing, Nolan grew up in the aftermath of the space race, when young eyes still turned upwards in wonder. Decades later, with the Space Shuttle decommissioned and children staring blearily down at the glow of their smartphones, it’s his disappointment at NASA’s broken promise that forms the driving force behind Interstellar. Interstellar travel – moving between stars and solar systems in the universe – is technically impossible. As Coop notes, “there’s not a planet in our solar system that can sustain life, and the nearest star is over a thousand years away”.Whichever camp you fall in, Christopher Nolan would like you to accept it as an important part of the film’s architecture. It’s discussed in a key scene between Coop and Dr. Brand (Anne Hathaway) when they debate which planet to visit first: Did you watch Interstellar and think: what the hell was that all about? Did the science leave you confused, the varying timelines leave you baffled, and the monologues on the power of love leave you perplexed and a bit tired? You don’t need a degree in astrophysics or the personal telephone number of Christopher Nolan to understand the film – just follow Empire’s trusty guide. Bauer Consumer Media Ltd, Company number 01176085; Bauer Radio Limited, Company number: 1394141; Registered office: Media House, Peterborough Business Park, Lynch Wood, Peterborough PE2 6EA and H Bauer Publishing, Company number: LP003328; Registered office: The Lantern, 75 Hampstead Road, London NW1 2PL The planets themselves are no less spectacular. Let The Right One In cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema (replacing Nolan regular Wally Pfister) captures the bleak expanse of southern Iceland as both a watery hell with thousand-foot waves and an icy expanse where even the clouds freeze solid. With more than an hour of footage shot in 70mm IMAX, you’ll want to park your arse in front of the biggest screen available to fully appreciate the spectacle.