When the first teaser trailer for Interstellar came out almost a year ago, the specifics of what this movie would be about were left undeniably mysterious.
“Our greatest accomplishments cannot be behind us, but our destiny lies above us,” narrates Matthew McConaughey over found footage of NASA expeditions and an awed public.
Two minutes and one single tear later, I was hooked.
What director Christopher Nolan promised all those months ago is delivered in heart-racing, devastating glory. Interstellar is a grand sci-fi epic that captures the fragility of modern environmental ethics and how humankind seems hell-bent on destroying itself.
McConaughey plays Cooper, a father and trained engineer in the not-so-distant future. His present-day depicts an irreversible Depression-era landscape. Resources are critically low and dust storms are rising. Higher education is no longer available to the general public, and the Apollo space missions are dismissed as propaganda hoaxes of the bygone past. Effectively, the film targets exactly what we take for granted now.
To rectify the seemingly global situation, Cooper has no choice but to team up with the last remnants of NASA to discover a new planet for the human race to call home.
It’s incredibly difficult to not be mesmerized by space travel in movies: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Apollo 13 and Gravity are all testaments to this. But the journey here into interstellar space to find another inhabitable dimension will engross even the most stubborn of viewers. What we normally perceive to be simply the science and technology of it all is transformed into visual poetry with discernible biblical implications.
When the crew lands on a planet completely covered by water, a towering 1,000-foot wave hurdles toward them. Its gargantuan-ness would put the imagery of the great flood and Noah’s Ark to shame. Other poetic themes are prevalent throughout the film.
At the start, Cooper looks out onto the corn fields that make up his livelihood. It’s a sea of life still holding on to a dying planet, yet he vocally resents these circumstances that reduce him to Earth’s caregiver instead of its explorer. He even says, “This world’s a treasure, and it’s been telling us to leave for a while now.”
This statement gets to the bottom line of our sense of environmental ethics. We place more, if not all, intrinsic value on human life and even the technological life we create over the Earth’s sustainability or condition. The treatment of the film’s talking, sarcastic robot TARS (Bill Irwin) is one example.
Though TARS plays an important role within the otherwise all-human crew, and even frequently saves them from certain death, Cooper and co-explorer Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway) can’t help but view it as only a tool or a resource to exploit. Likewise, Earth is viewed as an inert thing we can just take from without considering its “life.”
But this ideology is confronted with the extreme monkey-wrench of a scenario—would a person be willing to sacrifice his or her family for the greater good?
Cooper appears to make this sacrifice when he leaves behind his two children, even when a few hours in another dimension can mean decades have passed on Earth. Events that lead the expedition to go south eventually test Cooper’s willingness of sacrifice. He’s told by the others: “You can’t just think about your family. You have to think bigger than that.”
In Interstellar’s scope, human emotions and free will are our ruin. As a result, we can destroy each other in an infinite number of ways.
Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema and the effects team magnificently create visuals that most of us will never actually see in reality. At times, it’s a choreographed dance of sleek space crafts; other times, human morality transmutes across the galaxy like a modern Bosch painting.
Without a doubt, Interstellar is a beautiful warning.
