Film Review: ‘Interstellar’ Looks for Salvation in All the Wrong Places

You’d probably need three viewings to make sense of the physics, mathematics, philosophy.
Mark Jackson
Updated:

“Six billion people, trying to have it all.” That line from “Interstellar,” the latest eye- and mind-boggling space-travel film from Christopher Nolan—explains it all.

Parasitic gobbling of Earth’s resources by humans, and the resultant wish to find another planet to gobble—we can’t get enough of that. It’s the No. 1 premise of futuristic space-travel movies.

Why? Because it’s true—we’ve eaten ourselves out of house and planet. Does that mean you should go see it? Will it solve our gobble problem? Do we really think, after NASA’s Antares rocket blew up last Tuesday, that we'll be able to fly a spaceship through a galactic wormhole out near Saturn? We haven’t even put an astronaut on Mars yet! It’s another 342,077,666.43 miles from Mars to Saturn! Fuggeddaboudit!

Article Quote: 'Interstellar' Looks for Salvation in All the Wrong Places

So probably not. Is it fun entertainment? Maybe. It definitely calls for a new rating category, though: “Rated A. For astrophysicists.”

Matthew McConaughey plays a former test pilot named Cooper (surely an homage to cocky test pilot Gordo Cooper of “The Right Stuff”).

MORE: 6 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About ‘Interstellar’

Coop’s a farmer now. The whole world’s gone dustbowl like “The Grapes of Wrath” on steroids, the “blight” having taken out the world’s wheat, okra, and (very soon) corn.

They never explain what the “blight” is, but maybe it’s a company like the one that brought us DDT, PCPs, Agent Orange, and GMOs—currently en route to handing us a global dustbowl.

Matthew McConaughey in "Interstellar." (Paramount Pictures and Warner Brothers Entertainment)
Matthew McConaughey in "Interstellar." Paramount Pictures and Warner Brothers Entertainment
Mark Jackson
Mark Jackson
Film Critic
Mark Jackson is the chief film critic for The Epoch Times. In addition to film, he enjoys martial arts, motorcycles, rock-climbing, qigong, and human rights activism. Jackson earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Williams College, followed by 20 years' experience as a New York professional actor. He narrated The Epoch Times audiobook "How the Specter of Communism is Ruling Our World," available on iTunes, Audible, and YouTube. Mark is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic.
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