I first saw Interstellar in 2020, and I have watched it countless times. The film, directed by Christopher Nolan, was released in 2014. At the time, the reviews weren’t good, but fans like me have come to love the heartwarming story and stunning visuals.
It is a story about perseverance and the sacrifices one must make for the greater good. It is also about how love transcends time and space. The movie starts in the future on Earth, where a devastating blight caused a worldwide food shortage. Consequently, the main characters eat mainly corn. Dust storms blow across the country because the environment is damaged and the soil is dehydrated.
Cooper, a central character played by Matthew McConaughey, is at a baseball game one day when a dust storm begins. He and the others rush home. Cooper finds weird dust patterns forming in his daughter’s room. He deduces that the pattern spells out coordinates. When he heads to these coordinates, he finds America’s last NASA base. Cooper was the world’s best pilot before flying was outlawed. NASA recruits him to guide a spaceship that goes on a mission to solve the world’s hunger problem.
Throughout the movie, we feel sadness, happiness, anger, betrayal, fear, and the emotional seesaw keeps going.
At one point, Cooper and his crew get stranded on a planet where time passes slower than on Earth. The ratio of one hour on this planet equals seven years on Earth. Disaster strikes, and the team ends up losing 23 years. The mission is unsuccessful. After they leave this planet, Cooper checks the videos that he has received and sees his kids all grown up. His daughter is now his age.
The team goes to the next planet and gets betrayed by an astronaut named Dr. Mann, who landed there at least 10 years earlier. Dr. Mann steals their ship and accidentally blows up the docking station in space. Things look grim.
Cooper decides to sacrifice himself to save his one remaining crewmate and jumps into a black hole, but he discovers that there is some sort of structure inside made by a more advanced being. This structure turns out to be the inside of Cooper’s daughter’s room. Once he realizes that he can communicate with his daughter from the past, he tries communicating normally but can’t. He then realizes that the answer is love. He uses a watch that he had left her to communicate data his daughter needs to help solve world hunger. After passing out, he wakes up in the future and visits his elderly daughter on her deathbed.
It all comes together to form a masterpiece. Christopher Nolan masterfully creates the feeling of emptiness in space, the acting is stellar, and it really adds the cherry to the already fleshed-out world that Christopher Nolan curates here.
Overall, Interstellar sits on my list of movies that are a must-watch for anybody.
