'Interstellar' (2014) Review: The Confusing, Visually Stunning and Complicated Space Exploration Extravaganza (Spoiler Alert!)

If you just got out of the theater after 168 minutes of awe-inspiring graphics, Big Bang Theory-infused interpolations and visually stunning worlds and your first instinct is to scour the Internet on how all the time travelling, black hole crossing and deep space exploration was plausible, then you probably missed the whole point of Interstellar. The teaser trailers of the movie presented the premise that humanity was on the brink of extinction and the only way to continue life was to look into the stars and literally find one to inhabit.

At the onset of the movie we are presented with a dystopian Earth that is being troubled by Blight, a cataclysmic anomaly that is threatening life on Earth. The sandstorms have been frequent and devastating that all forms of crops are one by one failing to grow, with wheat and okra going out, and only corn remaining as the last sustenance. At front and centre is a father of two in Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a former NASA pilot and engineer who is relegated to farming after mankind has been reduced to satisfying basic needs.

Cooper unearths a secret NASA facility (via a series of fortuitous events) that is developing a massive space exploration campaign dedicated to finding a new planet to inhabit. The field of scientists is headed by Professor Brand (Michael Cane) who declares that "man was born on Earth, he was not meant to die here," as he explains the two-part plan to save the human species.

NASA has already sent a Lazarus expedition composed of 13 scientists through a black hole near Saturn to explore a new galaxy that can possibly be mankind's new home. The initial expedition has sent out a beacon on three separate locations (planets) that will need actual confirmation through a second mission. This is where the two part plan comes in.

Part A is to send the Endurance exploration to confirm the initial Lazarus mission while Brand and his team figure out a solution to cracking the fifth dimension (gravity) and send out a massive space station that can sustain a new life. The very facility that Cooper stumbles upon is the actual space station that Brand and his team are working on.

Part B is that if the Plan A fails meaning Brand does not figure out how to crack the challenge of gravity, Cooper and his team will find the habitable planet and repopulate it through a bank of fertilized embryos. The team will identify which of the three planets will be able to nurture life, restart the habitat and leave Earth for good, if the resources would no longer allow them to come back.

Here comes the tricky part, to get to the planets, Cooper and the Endurance spaceship will have to go through a wormhole and once on they are on the other side, the gravitational forces and the distance of the planets to the black hole dictate how much relative time is lost on Earth. Brand's daughter Amelia (Anne Hathaway) posits that on the first planet they visit, an hour's stay will be equivalent to seven years on Earth, given the proximity of the planet to the wormhole.

The first planet crosses the X mark on the habitable chart as it is a vastness of water with tidal waves rising as high as 100-foot-tall buildings. Amelia Brand and Cooper race against the waves and time as they try to get back to the mother ship. Upon embarking, they realize that the younger Brand made miscalculations and the mere hours they spent were now equivalent to almost 23 years of difference as compared to Earth time. Proof of this was the suddenly aged fellow astronaut Romilly (David Gyasi) and the video messages of Cooper's children, Murphy (Jessica Chastain) and Tom (Casey Affleck), who were now as old as he. Add complications to the matter was the rage-fuelled message of Murphy that dr. Brand knew all along that Plan A would never succeed and was used as a ruse get them to agree to the expedition and for people back on Earth to continue helping on the building of the space station.

Given the fuel constraints and the time relativity implications, the reluctant team has to choose between the two remaining planets of named after the explorations led by Mann and Edmunds. Cooper pushes for Mann's, a nearer planet that will allow them to travel back to Earth while Amelia Brand selects Edmunds with whom she has a previous romantic relationship. Cooper wins out after stressing the personal interest of Amelia into the decision. To their surprise, they arrive upon an icy, ammonia filled planet, seeming incapable to support any life form.

At Mann's planet, they find the lone survivor in Dr. Mann (played by the surprising Matt Damon) who declares he lost all hope of a rescue expedition and placed himself in an infinite hyper sleep. The team was tricked by Mann into thinking that there are surfaces of the planet that is habitable and convinces Cooper to join him in a guised exploration all the while planning to dispose him. After a struggle, Mann gets ahold of the probe ship and pilots the vessel back to the mother ship. What ensues is a race for who gets to the mother ship first with Mann losing out as his vehicle explodes whilst trying to force the airlock mechanism and as a result being obliterated to space bits while still explaning his motives mid-sentence.

Afterwhich, what transpires is an action packed finale wherein Cooper tries to manually attach their space vehicle to the mother ship as it spirals out of orbit. After they regained control, the final survivors Amelia and Cooper decide to push through with Plan B. Cooper decides to use the remaining thursters on the probe ships to push the mother ship in the last planet's direction. In the process of thrusting Brand's vehicle to the final planet Cooper sacrifices himself and he is thrown into the black hole itself. Now here comes the weird part.

Cooper ends up in the Tesseract or the wormhole's singularity where time and space become infinite. The three dimensional representation of the Tesseract to Cooper was at the back of his daughter's bookcase. There, Cooper interacts via coded messages with his now grown up and scientist daughter by means of binary ciphers. With the robot TARs also inside the Tesseract, Cooper relays the information gathered in the singularity to relay to his daughter the missing pieces to unlock the barriers into the fifth dimension. Murph has a eureka moment aided by her father's code and finally unlocks Plan A.

After completing his mission, Cooper is thrust to the outer orbits of Saturn and coincidentally saved by an orbiting space station. Waking up in a hospital bed, he is stunned by the revelation that it is decades since his imprisonment at the Tesseract and humankind has advanced through the research work of his daughter, who is now more than a hundred years old and dying. They even named the space station after her and rebuilt the old farm they had back on Earth. As Cooper gets a final chance to visit a dying Murph, he is told by Murph to begin his voyage anew as no parent should be made to see the death of their child and that there is nothing left for him there (suggesting he go find Amelia on the third planet).

With no other voyages to conquer, Cooper hops on a spacecraft with his old buddy TARS and sets off to find Amelia. The closing shots reveal a mournful Amelia by her lonesome beginning the mass repopulation task set by Plan B.

Confusing, Complex, Confounding

Director Christopher Nolan is known for creating pieces that is meant to make audiences analyze, argue and infer given his previous works in Memento, The Prestige and Inception. His latest one must be the hardest to crack given the volume of scientific jargon aided by an actual expert in Kip Thorne and the complexity of the subject - time travel.

The fundamental question that viewers will pose after leaving the theater is who invented the Tesseract's singularity? An intelligent guess would be humans themselves so evolved that they were able to crack the secrets of the fifth dimension due to Murph's findings. The "They" in the movie are actually advanced humans who set up the singularity for Cooper, paving the way to his collaboration with his daughter. This would seemingly create a paradox wherein the events of the future changes the past with no direct effect on the actual timeline. As explained by Romilly, human's three dimensional perceptions limits their understanding on how space, time, gravity and other dimensional forces works in a wormhole. With the way we think everything as linear limits our ability to grasp a closed loop timeline (timecircle for that matter).

Another plausible explanation would be that the population boom initiated by Amelia might have cracked the code and created the Tesseract but it would be in conflict with the time relativity theory in the first place. If the new humans on Edmund's planet were the ones to build it, many years would have passed on Earth's side of the story and the planet soon extinct to ashes.

This would instigate a good old fashioned debate on the chicken and the egg. If it was the future people who made the Tesseract, their advancement would have been aided by Murph's discovery. However, Murph discovery would not take effect if the singularity was not available in the first place. This all the more creates the confusion but all points lead to the suggestion that there are not "alien" or "god-like" beings who aided in the construction of the Tesseract. In fact, Chris Nolan points to the "it was us all along" suggestion when he revealed that it was in fact Cooper who shook Amelia's hand the first time they went into the wormhole.

Nevertheless, Newton, Murphy and Einstein theories aside, the film delivered on its premise that what makes man survive is instinct. As Mann (Damon's character) villainously says to soon-to-be dying Cooper, it is the final images of a father's children that will push him to live on. True to form, the bond of Cooper with his daughter Murph is what paves the way for humanity's salvation.

The Oscar winners and nominees were stellar in their roles particularly McCounaghey who displayed the Texas every man who withstood the allure of fulfilling his dream and being present for his children. The Oscar best Actor ("Dallas Texas Buyers") showed the full length of his arsenal in the scene when he just came back from the first planet and realizing that his youngest daughter was the same age as he. His laughing while tearing up segment deserves another Oscar nomination at least. Hathaway, while did not have much exposition in her character's background was effective in delivering the role of a young scientist and daughter who was trying to keep the balance between sympathizing with a family man and the objective to repopulate the earth. Her Eve-like ending at the end, encapsulates the rupture of satisfaction and dissatisfaction between accomplishing the mission and probably ending up all alone the rest of her life in a strange planet. Jessica Chastain and the young actor who played her younger self were spot on in a daughter who harboured ill-feelings over a father who chose a suicidal mission over his life with them.

All in all, "Interstellar" was effective in developing the longest long distance relationship in cinema and it was not even romantic in nature. It just reinforced that after all, a father's love for his children can never be measured by time, gravity or space boundaries.