*1/2
Some people say that humans are destroying the planet.
I don’t think that’s true. Generations ago, doomsayers said that the earth was becoming overpopulated. Today, we are easily feeding a much larger human population with fewer farmers.
When I was in elementary school, news anchors warned us that hairspray and discarded McDLT containers were depleting the ozone layer. Thirty years later, I can still go outside without sunscreen.
When I was in middle school, science teachers told us in no uncertain terms that human excess was causing global warming and it was getting worse every year. However, check tomorrow’s low tem-perature on your Weather Channel ap: we can agree that the earth has not become unlivably hot.
That said, the planet WILL actually become unlivable sometime in the long term future. I wonder what humans will do to try to survive?
I know what they won’t do: it’s all documented in the ridiculous, disappointing new movie “Interstellar.”
The story begins in the late 21st Century. Increasingly bad dust storms have made growing food much more difficult. The people left on earth have been forced to become farmers out of necessity.
Humanity has one last hope: driven by mysterious supernatural forces, Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) stumbles upon a secret NASA project to fly a space ship to another galaxy to find an-other temperate planet for humans to colonize.
How is it possible, you may ask, for humans with 80-year life spans to get to planets that are thousands of light years away? Simple: Cooper and his crew travel through a worm hole near Saturn that was intentionally put there by super-intelligent aliens from the fifth dimension. That, by the way, is perhaps the most comprehensible and least far-fetched thing that happens in this bloated three hour movie.
“Interstellar” is writer/director Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight trilogy, “Inception”)’s first misstep as a filmmaker.
I don’t know whether to call it over-ambition or arrogance. Either way, Nolan tries to explore way too many sociological themes Đ love, family, individualism vs. collectivism, the effect of time on the psyche Đ and he doesn’t make any profound points about any of them.
Nolan’s best films – “Memento” and “The Prestige” Đ are elegantly crafted masterpieces that I have been delighted to watch over and over again. For “Interstellar,” once was more than enough.
Right now, earth seems to be far away from catastrophe and doom. But considering how quickly Christopher Nolan went from a brilliant filmmaker to a pretentious hack, things could degenerate quickly. Maybe we really should start exploring possible ways for humanity to colonize other planets. I mean REAL ways; not the kind presented in “Interstellar.”
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