[Busts aren't really meant to be read before seeing a movie. But this is one of those stories that appears to swallow its own tail. So you might want to prepare yourself before wrestling with it in the wild.
Remember, in a bust, facts are presented as they are relevant to the plot, which is not always the order in which they are revealed on screen.]
Interstellar (2014) is a science fiction film directed by Christopher Nolan, starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, and Michael Caine.
In the end, theoretical physicist, Jessica Chastain, receives critical help, via her intrepid astronaut father, Matthew McConaughrey, in solving an equation that enables the evacuation of the remnants of humanity from an Earth that has become uninhabitable.
Growing up with her widowed farming father, McConaughey, a former space engineer and test pilot, forced into agriculture when environmental catastrophe resulted in the world-wide collapse of civilised, industrial society, young Chastain is convinced that her bedroom is haunted by a poltergeist, in reality McConaughey trying to communicate with her from the future, trapped in a higher dimension behind her bookcase.
Dismissive of his daughter's paranormal interpretation, following several machinery failures he attributes to a gravitational anomaly, McConaughey determines that a pattern of lines left on her bedroom floor after a dust storm are the result of the anomaly and represent a set of geographic coordinates, that lead him and his daughter to a secret space research facility headed by his former boss, theoretical physicist, Michael Caine.
Explaining that they are humanity's last desperate attempt to escape the doomed planet through a wormhole in space that has mysteriously appeared near the orbit of Saturn, McConaughey is re-recruited by Caine onto the program, despite the pleas of his daughter, who correctly figures out that the message future McConaughey is trying to send himself, is that he should stay.
Following in the tracks of a number of loan pathfinder astronauts sent ahead, many years previously, McConaughey pilots his small crew through the wormhole, identifying three worlds that deserve further investigation, the first of which proves disastrous to the mission, when their landing craft is swamped and almost destroyed by gigantic tidal waves whipped up by the extreme gravitation of the black-hole at the heart of the system they have arrived at.
Having lost one of their party and despite only being delayed on the planet by a matter of hours, due to the time-warping effect of the nearby collapsed star, on their return they find the crew-member left in sole charge of the mother ship has aged by decades, much of which were spent in sleep hibernation, having almost given up hope of ever seeing his crew-mates again.
Driven to despair by recorded messages that reveal his young son, left in charge of the family farm, is now older than him, with children of his own, McConaughey, desperate to find a suitable planet and return home, determines their next target should be the world showing most promise, which turns out to be a bleak, frozen wasteland.
Reviving the planet's pathfinder from an indefinite period of hibernation, McConaughey discovers, too late, that he faked the data used to lure them to its surface, knowing that it was his only chance of rescue, given the true nature of the mission, which is to find a home, not for Earth's doomed population, but for an embryonic seed bank that they are carrying with them, that Caine's scientist daughter, Anne Hathaway, is in charge of, a fact confirmed by Caine's deathbed confession to Chastain, who grew up to become his successor on the program.
Only just managing to save it from total destruction, after the pathfinder, attempting to commandeer the mother-ship using the crew's lander, instead knocks it towards the planet's atmosphere, McConaughey, resigned to the fact that return to Earth is now impossible, resorts to a suicidal navigational maneuver in order to ensure Hathaway and the genetic cargo reach the third target world, that leaves him and one of the mission's robotic assistants hurtling into the black-hole.
But, far from being ripped apart by its extreme gravity, McConaughey finds himself not only able to communicate via his space-suit's intercom with the robot, whose instrumentation he had configured to study the nature of the singularity, but also with his daughter, who has been drawn back to the family farm, looking for clues that might help her solve the gravitational problem Caine was struggling with.
Realising that he is somehow responsible for his inter-dimensional state in which he can reach back in time to his daughter, McConaughey succeeds in first directing the pair to Caine, and then communicating the robot's analysis of the black-hole's secrets through the flittering second hand of his stopped wrist watch parting gift to her, at which point the super-dimension collapses, transporting him, via a brief encounter Hathaway experienced as the crew originally passed through the wormhole, back to Saturn, where he is miraculously rescued, along with the mission robot, and taken to an artificial satellite, named after his daughter, that acts as a staging post for humanity's evacuation of Earth.
Reunited with his dying daughter, now barely a third her age, she encourages McConaughey to resume his space odyssey and seek out Hathaway, who is shown to have succeeded in establishing the human genetic outpost, on the far side of the wormhole.
Although the cast, when interviewed, resort to describing Christopher, and his writing partner brother Jonathan Nolans' movie as "epic", which it is only in terms of running time, the impression left by what is undeniably a very entertaining bit of hokum, is of having watched a pair of master magicians perform an extraordinarily elaborate conjuring trick, that you are certain could not possibly be real, but which you are at a complete loss to explain.
I must confess that a particularly jaundice review of this film, in a magazine named after the people from the city "So good they named it twice", had prepared me for the worst excesses of Nolan pseud'ness. And yet, despite that, or maybe because of it, I find myself wanting to declare, in my most "Cockneyfied" accent:
# Clap 'ands, stamp yer feet
Bangin' on the big bass drum
What a picture, what a picture
Um-tiddly-um-pum-um-pum-pum
Stick it in your fam'ly album #
(I'm pretty sure that must have been the chorus Nolan sang to fire his actors up before each take ;)
Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_(film)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_a_Sixpence_(film)
