As a child, most are fascinated by the idea of aliens and space travel. The sun, the moon, and millions of other planets constantly swirling around us! Incredible to contemplate, really. Of course, countless of novels and film adaptations have been made in honor of outer space and its infinite possibilities. Adventures, thrills, exploration and tension is around every corner throughout such films. Specifically, a recent film around 2014 of this very genre called "Interstellar" takes a stab in the world of sci-fi.
"Interstellar" follows humanity’s last effort to find a new habitable planet. A farmer stumbles upon the coordinates to a top secret government project where he is enlisted into a crew to be sent through a wormhole in hopes of finding a new galaxy and string of planets to call home. In a series of complicated turns, the protagonist, Cooper, captains the Endurance shuttle and is forced to not only find other life, but also his fellow explorers who have been lost in space. Time is not on their side, and tensions are high between Cooper's duty to humanity versus his petulant daughter.
Towards the end of the film, Cooper learns that he has been betrayed and was sent out as a last effort to deliver human-celled life forms onto a new planet, without helping humanity back on Earth by finding them a new home. Of course, Cooper fights back the commands from NASA. Problems circling the space shuttle arise, and Copper is forced out into space to lighten the load on the ship. The plot thickens when he is pulled into the wormhole and sees the world as it really is.
A bit comical in its portrayal of a wormhole, Cooper lands in a sort of illusion mirror that lets him look at the world. In it he sees his daughter at the their house, and by interacting with the wormhole material for the first time, Cooper is able to send his daughter a message that indeed there is another side to the wormhole. Like most sci-fi films, that is the cliffhanger. Which, irritatingly enough, leaves me with many questions!
The overall plot of the film was entertaining and disturbingly accurate for what our future holds here on Earth. Even more disturbing, the easily manipulative, lying and deceiving NASA leaders do not surprise me at all. The idea of a wormhole, and the construction of it on the screen as interpreted by the director of the film, was a bit comical. The idea itself is not incredibly far fetched, but the execution of it was less than realistic. Of course, that offers up the question -- What does a wormhole really look like? For all intents and purposes, "Interstellar" was a film too similar to it’s predecessors.