Intersteller (2014)

Plot of Intersteller: In the near future earth is in trouble. A virus is causing all agriculture to fail, leaving the inhabitants doing little more than trying to survive. Cooper, a former space pilot at NASA gets a mysterious message in Morse as part of a strange ghostly activity taking place in his daughter, Murph’s bedroom. Following the message he finds himself in a secret NASA location where a spacecraft is being prepared. He is recruited to fly it, despite his daughter’s distress. The objective of the flight is to go through a wormhole and land on one or more planets to which lone explorers have been sent. The head of NASA, Dr Brand, is developing a process which will allow a large spacecraft to leave earth, but in the meantime Coop, Brand’s daughter and a couple of others leave earth. They land on a planet where they suffer from time dilation, it is a waterworld, but when they get back to the mother ship 23 years have past. The move on to a further planet from which they have been receiving signals from Dr Mann. But it is an ice world, and Mann has been sending false data to encourage their visit, to allow him to escape. From now on their voyage is compromised, what to do?

Content: No sex or nudity. Just a couple of beers are drunk. We meet Coop’s family on a farm in the centre of a massive cornfield. There are dust storms. They capture a wandering drone. Books are pushed out of the bookcases in Murph’s bedroom. Once in NASA we meet the robots TARS and CASE, strange sort of blocky things. Once in the space craft we travel across space and, as it turns out, time. On the water planet they lose a crew member, it is extraordinarily vivid. Then the ice world is also amazing, their problem once they have been faced with Dr Mann’s mendacity, and Mann himself has accidentally blown up a lander and damaged the spacecraft, is that they are running out of fuel which will require TARS and Cooper in landers to sacrifice themselves. But that is not quite how it works out.

A View: I reviewed this film back in 2016, really before I had developed this more elaborate format, so I thought I would do it again, because having just watched it again I was really impressed.  It is No 19 on the IMDb best film list, was nominated in multiple Oscar categories,  and won Best Visual Effects. I understand that there was a lot of ‘rendering’ but real models and real structures were also used. The whole result is stunning, providing some amazing images which have remained with me. The family relationships are a bit schmaltzy, but they do have a place in the story. So well worth the cost of a download, but watch it on your large screen TV, not on your phone.

Fun Fact: In order to provide the farm location they planted 500 acres of corn, harvesting it in the end and turning a profit.