Interstellar (2014) – Dir. Christoper Nolan

It’s the future and the earth can no longer sustain life due to a crop blight. While most look for solutions on this planet, NASA pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) continues to dream of worlds beyond our own. Given the situation on Earth, we can no longer wait until we are ready, we must act now or face extinction.

A strange occurrence in Murphy’s (Cooper’s daughter) bedroom leads her to believe there is a ghost. But Cooper recognizes this ghost as gravitational waves with binary code. These messages lead Cooper and Murphy to secret NASA installation where Cooper is reunited with his old professor John Brand.

Here Cooper learns of the severity of the crop blight and of the NASA’s Lazarus missions – an extreme attempt to find a new planet to call our home that involves traveling through a wormhole and exploring three potentially habitable planets called Miller, Edmund, and Mann after the astronauts who originally surveyed them. These planets orbit a black hole named Gargantua.The first astronauts were sent on this mission after the convenient appearance of a wormhole.

The wormhole is said to have been created by alien intelligence and without it, this mission would be impossible. It is interesting to note that this is the second paranormal explanation in the movie. Murphy calls her gravitational waves a ghost, and the best explanation we have for the wormhole is alien intelligence. It is proposed that these aliens are humans who are now fifth dimensional beings.

Thanks to bustle.com, I have a better understanding of these 5 dimensions. http://www.bustle.com/articles/47537-what-is-the-fifth-dimension-in-interstellar-how-to-understand-the-films-complicated-physics

Start with a finite point. 1st dimension is a line. 2nd dimension is a plane. 3rd dimension is space (inflate the plane), 4th dimension is time (we’re already getting tricky). But with time, if you were able to see all incarnations of an object over time, you would have something that looks like past, present, and future incarnations shown like a flipbook. The tesseract in Interstellar is an attempt to convey visually the 5th dimension.The fifth dimension is the face of every possibility that could happen to you, a physical being in time. It’s a dimension of possibilities, from my limited understanding, and leads to our concept of the multiverse, where (to read from wikipedia) set of infinite or finite possible universes (including the Universe we consistently experience) that together comprise everything that exists: the entirety of space, time, matter, and energy as well as the physical laws and constants that describe them.

Interstellar is a movie about our potential, humanity’s greatest achievement – love, the relativity of time, our hopeful evolution of humankind, our individual flaws. Interstellar spends a lot of time challenging our concept of time. We tend to think that we are trapped, and that time is a constant, that we are born, we live and then we die. But time seems to me, one of the most misunderstood concepts. And though we may know that time is relative, it is something very different to see a realistic visual of the fluidity of time, because currently, we have theories and measurements but that does not change our daily lives and the way we live by time. A puzzle that we have yet to conquer and make our slave, but something that interests me very much.

And I haven’t even begun to touch on the emotion of the movie, the realism and beauty of the visuals, the brilliant sound mixing (that so many complained about), and why it means so much to me. Maybe next time.