Blu-Ray/Movie Review: Interstellar

 

Interstellar was the first major movie written and directed by Christopher Nolan after his Batman trilogy ended. The basic plot of this movie is that in 2067 the Earth is becoming more and more uninhabitable because of a planet-wide blight/dust bowl, which is making it harder for food to grow. Matthew McConaughey plays Coop, an ex-astronaut turned farmer who is recruited for a mission to pilot an expedition to a series of possibly habitable planets to which advance scouts have already been dispatched. To get to the prospective planets, the ship must travel through a wormhole that opened near the planet Saturn. This requires him to leave his only child, Murph (played by Mackenzie Foy at the beginning of the movie, then by Jessica Chastain later on) on Earth, promising her that he will return. The rest of the cast includes Nolan veterans Anne Hathaway and Michael Caine, as well as Wes Bentley (from American Beauty), John Lithgow, Matt Damon, Casey Affleck, and David Oyelowo.

The blu-ray has a ton of great extras, and the A/V quality is stellar. The most comprehensive extra is an almost hour-long documentary on the science of Interstellar, in which Nolan explains what they did to get as much of the science correct as possible. This included using a physicist as a consultant to do things like help create the CGI black hole, and how the time aspects of the movie would work. Then, there are a series of 14 making-of featurettes titled Inside Interstellar, which details the process to make various aspects of the movie, and then the three trailers for the movie are included.

Overall, the movie is great. It is well-written and very well-acted. As an engineer, I like that they actually get a lot of the science correct (although some of it is embellished for dramatic effect), and they get concepts like gravity around a black hole and the resulting time dilation effects correct. McConaughey and Chastain are definitely the standouts, as they get the most material to work with, but the entire cast does a great job with their characters. It is an awesome movie and definitely worth multiple viewings.