Nerd Movie Reviews

Intersteller review part 4

Story recap (spoilers incoming.  Skip to part 5 if you want to miss them):

I’m going to do this blitz style with extra sarcasm and want to run a counter on all the sub plots that surface like a whale breaching but then never appear again like this (0).  Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is a farmer and ex NASA test pilot who is haunted by a crash for like the first 15 minutes of the film but then fortunately forgets it in time to progress the plot (1) (everyone knows the greatest test pilot is Hal Jordan.  Ferris Aircraft image courtesy of the Green Lantern t shirt category).  His son is smart but in spite of Coops desire has been rejected by college and is basically forced to become a farmer (2).  They live in the near future where a crop blight (or something) has caused most of the population to die off and everyone is a farmer (3)(note-in spite of this being in the future they all pretty much run around in early 21st century cars and technology except when the prop guy decides he wants to create a super advanced Lego robots).  His daughter Murph gets into trouble at school for bringing in evidence that man landed on the moon when the new “edited” history says it was all faked (4).  Apparently NASA is illegal or something because everyone hates science and anything that doesn’t just grow more food (5).  There is a ghost in Murphs bedroom that keeps knocking books down and one day writes some map coordinates in the dust.  These lead Coop and Murph to the nearby NASA headquarters where they are spending hundreds of billions of dollars while the world starves without anyone noticing (5).

So Coop gets captured by the Lego robots and finds out that NASA is trying to fly though a wormhole (if you have ever read A Wrinkle in Time this will feel awfully familiar) to find a new planet for humans to live on and have already sent through 12 ships (build on which budget exactly?).  They are going to send through one more ship and Coop is THE ONLY HUMAN WHO CAN FLY THE SHIP EVER!  He leaves his kids who come to hate him (6) and goes into suspended animation along with Anne Hathaway and a couple of red shirts.

They arrive in a system with three planets orbiting a black hole (???) and apparently have no way of evaluating the planets from space or even talking to any of the humans who have already landed there.  The closest one has the one hour to seven years time dilation (???) so they try to do it quickly but instead lose like 20 years when they discover the planet is covered with knee deep water and tidal waves (kind of what you might be able to see from space normally).  They then only have enough fuel to hit one more planet and have to chose between one or the other.  Turns out that Anne Hathaway was in love with the guy on the further planet (7) and believes that love is as powerful a force as gravity but is outvoted so they can go to the closer one.

Meanwhile, back on Earth Coops son has been driving the same pickup truck for 20 years and has a wife, a sick kid, and a burning hatred for Coop (8).  Murph (Jessica Chastain) was adopted by the scientist in charge of the whole project and now is a super scientist herself.  She is trying to figure out how to get the super ship off the ground using gravity while the head scientist and father of Anne’s character (Michael Caine) has been lying to everyone about the theory.  She hates Coop too (9) but wants to figure out the problem.

Meanwhile back in space the crew land on the closer planet to find the Dr. Mann (Matt Damon) still alive and waiting for them to come down and set up a new colony.  He claims that while the frozen clouds that they are all on (???) have lots of chlorine down on the surface it is habitable but is lying for some reason (also wouldn’t any amount of chlorine be bad?  Ever heard of mustard gas?).  He wanted to be rescued so sucked them all in.  He attacks Coop but then blows himself up trying to get aboard the main ship after killing off the other red shirt.  Coop and Brand (Anne) get aboard the ship and are pretty much out of fuel.

They figure out a way to get to the last planet by using the thrusters on the two remaining shuttles and by having them drop off (I don’t want to go back on science but the simply having something fall off your space ship will not make it go faster).  Meanwhile Brand thinks if they can get data from inside the black hole they might be able to solve the gravity problem Murph is working on.  They fly off and first send one of the Lego robots into the black hole and they Coop himself for some reason.  Good thing the tidal gravity alone wouldn’t be enough to tear him apart, or the heat in the accretion disk or for that matter tiny bits of matter traveling at massive speeds.

I hope you are all wearing eye protection because you are going to have a lot of loose plot threads flying together all at once.  Coop successfully enters the black hole but instead of being rendered down to his base elements find himself inside an Escher cave that allows him to see any time he wants to as long as it is inside Murphs bedroom.  Here is the massive twist: it turns out he was the ghost inside Murphs room the whole time and can push books off the shelf but can’t otherwise communicate with her.  He figures out how to tell her about NASA and eventually gives her the clues she needs to solve the gravity problem after Murph burns down her brothers crop (10).

He eventually falls out of the black hole (that can happen, right?) and is picked up just outside of Saturn in the future.  Humanity now lives in giant space stations (wait a minute!  If they could create self contained environments in space for humans why didn’t they just dig a hole and do the same thing on Earth?) and Murph is an old lady.  He steals a ship to go looking for Brand, who ends the film by herself raising a colony of test tube babies on a desolate world while feeding them rocks and boogers.

(continued)

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