Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar shows you how to look at life from a new perspective of love, analyses ARJUN PEREIRA
From time to time, I watch sci-fi films, and what better than Christopher Nolan’s path-breaking Interstellar? It’s been almost ten years since its release, yet it remains a mind-bending film worth watching and understanding in present time both for its riveting screenplay (co-written by Christopher and his brother, Jonathan Nolan), its strange plot, epic scale of the film, and the sonically pleasing background film score. But it is way more than just a plain sci-fi film, for it makes you think about the future of humanity on Earth. The film’s time period is set to around four decades later, away into a dystopian future.
It is 2067, and a catastrophic blight and dust storm threatens to wipe out the human species. Given the way, climate change has now become a reality, this might just as well come to pass. The effects of the dust storm cannot be mitigated and its consequences are getting insidiously worse, leading to famine, disease and panic for Earth’s human population. The lead character, Joseph Cooper, a former NASA test pilot, along with an expert crew of astronauts and scientists is assigned the exciting messiah-like task of finding a new hospitable and safer home for humankind in a faraway galaxy.
Along their intergalactic journey from a futuristic Earth space station, they must travel through a wormhole in space (a hypothetical tunnel between two distant points in our universe that cuts travel time by millions of years) corresponding to Saturn, put there by ‘four-dimensional beings’ from the future. Sci-fi aficionadoes can’t possibly ask for more—Nolan’s plot is quintessential science fiction!
But here’s where human emotions as we know them on earth reign supreme with the film emphasising how love eventually transcends the confines of space and time no matter how distant and far-fetched two humanoids can be from each other. Love is the one superior quality that binds human beings on Earth and in the entire universe.
The protagonist, Joseph Cooper and his daughter, Murph, also a key scientist in the film, through their duplicate watches, which he gives her before embarking on his perilous outer space journey, rescue Earth’s inhabitants when Cooper relays to her the complex equations that will consequently solve gravity manipulation problems and enable humankind to escape extinction by building brand new colonies in outer space.
Love, that emotion that only humans can know is the greatest kept secret in this universe, the secret that will eventually free the human species of all its suffering and misery. The film inspires you to look beyond the mundane and go far beyond the petty realities of life on Earth. Perhaps, you are enmeshed in a pointless rivalry with someone. The plot will help you see the bigger picture in the resolution of such problems that can be intuitively solved.
Can the film be a harbinger of times to come on Earth? After all, art, such as this path-breaking film can sometimes be an indicator of how we can look deep within ourselves and find solutions to resolve problems on Earth as a collective species. Perhaps, we must learn to respect our beautiful but wounded planet, including all animals, plants, insects and other sentient beings that co-exist with us.
The film encourages you to travel beyond your home, for its only by stepping out of your comfort zone that you can experience new vistas and make brand new discoveries that can alter your present and future and inspire you to look at life from a new perspective.
Interstellar is available on several OTT platforms and has a stellar cast of Mathew McConaughey, Jessica Chastain, Anne Hathaway, Michael Caine and Matt Damon among others. It is cinematographed by Hoyte van Hoytema and the film score is by veteran composer, Hans Zimmer. It’s worth watching, so get down to it on a weekend or whenever you are free and in the mood for something stimulating.
Arjun Pereira, a writer and editor, is also a singer, composer, lyricist and guitarist. He loves the outdoors and is often seen enjoying a vigorous game of tennis, mornings or evenings. He has worked for several leading publishing houses and corporates and loves to travel, soaking in new experiences and cultures. His subjects of interest are sports, spirituality and music.