zondag 19 april 2015

Interstellar - review

The Earth is slowly dying, destroying all the crops in the fields and covering everyhting is small layers of dust, causing humanity to starve out and suffocate.

The sci-fi blockbuster of 2014, directed by Batman`s Christopher Nolan, falls in the category of `intelligent science fiction`, as everything is more or less accurately explained how it would be happening.

When a former NASA pilot Cooper gets recruited by the now covert operation NASA, he is send out with three scientists aboard the last spaceship to travel through a black hole and seek out a new world to relocate humanity on.

However, the mission has been flawed at it`s core, as the lead scientists plan is not to relocate, but repopulate a new home, unknown to Cooper to leave mankind behind to die on Earth.  This leads them to some spectacular prospect planets, one time distorted one covered in giant waves, another all frozen.

On this frozen planet, they save one of the initial 12 scouts, Professor Mann, but he turns out to be a coward instead of the `greatest of them all` as he kept sending the signal in order to get himself saved.

So far, this movie which lasts almost three hours had been a visual spectacle in a style reminding of Kubrick`s masterwork 2001: A Space Oddity.  But the final half hour is to much.  Cooper returns through the black hole... in only his spacesuit.  He gets caught between dimensions, connecting dots of how he got to NASA in the first place, and arrives just in time to see his daughter on her deathbed, before returning to the scientist he left behind on the other side and who has found a habitable world.

It`s a pity though, it would have been imho a far stronger ending had we seen Cooper and Brand leave on the journey of no return to this third planet, never to be seen again, while the signal data they passed on granting the solution to the Earth problem and allowing mankind to expand into the solar system.

Is this a good sci-fi movie?  Definitly, it mixes the far away reality to current day `almost possible` technology, making it all believable.  Until that infamous last half hour...

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