Delicious
Interstellar (2014) directed by Christopher Nolan at 169 minutes is a long movie by Hollywood standard. A future world is plagued by food shortages due to routine crop failures, vast dust clouds engulfing everything and the earth’s atmosphere becoming increased with Nitrogen; all put together nearing extinction for life. In this background, (as always in Hollywood) a secret NASA project works on two plans to save humanity. Gets a mangoidiots rating of ‘Delicious’.
Plan A is to find a way to do a mass transport of the entire human population by winning over gravity; Plan B is to seed a new human colony through a handful of humans and frozen sperms & eggs. For either of the plan to work, they need to identify another planet similar to earth which can sustain human life. For that, they are helped by a wormhole near Saturn which can transport spaceships to another galaxy, which is expected to house 3 potential candidate planets. A set of brave explorers undertake the (almost) hopeless journey. The movie is about how they brave the odds and save the world – that last part of the storyline reminded me of Bruce Willis‘ starring Armageddon (1998).
Near the end of the movie, we get to see a brilliant visualization of the fifth dimension.
It’s very difficult to wrap our heads around the concept of a fifth dimension, the visualization shown (not scientific) helps.
The main characters – Cooper, Amelia and Murph are played by Oscar award winner Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathway and Jessica Chastain (from Zero Dark Thirty). Two supporting characters – Grandpa (Donald) is played by John Lithgow (seeing him on screen always brings a smile to me, due to his role of Dr Dick Solomon in 3rd Rock from the Sun) and Dr Mann is played by Matt Damon (who starred in Elysium, a similar Sci-Fi movie and comes as the love interest of Ms Liz in 30 Rock).
I liked the approachable and fairly accurate explanations of scientific concepts like Black-Hole, Worm-Hole given in the movie. The film goes a bit slow for the first 60 minutes, which is needed to build an emotional connection to the main character, it then starts to pick speed, with the last 30 minutes bringing us to the edge of our seats. This movie is a must-watch!
As an Indian I was happy to see the scene where Cooper catches a low-flying Drone made by Indian Air Force, flying for over 10 years.
Matthew McConaughey
If you like to learn about the science behind “Interstellar” check out these 5 TED videos and this article talks about how the movie was shot. Update 11/Nov/14: Check this article in Huffington Post.