calherewecome

Saturday night was date night for Paula and I. Time to go out to a movie without Mary K. We decided to go to see the movie “Interstellar” written and directed by Christopher Nolan. Starring Matthew McConaughey, Ann Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Matt Damon and Michael Caine. A team of explorers travel through a wormhole in an attempt to find a potentially habitable planet that will sustain humanity. That’s what IMDB says about the story.

The film is 2 hrs and 45 minutes long. When you add in all of the trailers and the adverts, you have 3 butt-numbing hours worth of entertainment. And Matt McConaughey didn’t say “All right, all right, all right” once and he kept his clothes on for the entire movie.

Warning: There are spoilers ahead.

I felt that I needed to suspend my engineering and physics training to believe the story.

So here’s what happens. McConaughey plays a corn farmer who is a retired NASA engineer and pilot on a dust bowl farm growing corn somewhere in the Midwest in the not too distant future. It couldn’t be too distant, because he was driving a recent model pickup truck. Think Kansas, Oklahoma or Nebraska. The world’s crops are all failing and the people’s survival on earth are at risk. So McConaughey manages to discover a super secret NASA installation that is planning on launching a space ship through a worm hole to a distant galaxy. My immediate question to myself, “How does one manage to keep something like that secret?” One would think that one would see big trucks carrying lots of stuff to the staging area. Nope, the spaceship just got built by FM. (FM stands for Fxxking Magic).

So the three astronauts (Matthew McConaughey, Ann Hathaway and David Gyasi) launch in a fancy space ship, off to visit strange worlds far far away. David Gyasi plays the character of Romilly, an black astronaut that you know is going to die before the end of the show. Our other two brave astronauts, you know will survive and return conquering heroes.

So moving right along, Our three heroes arrive at their first port of call which is planet with nothing but water. They find that the earlier visitor from earth had crashed and burned. You’d think that they could have figured this out with a satellite or radar or something, but no, Matt and Anne get in their lander leaving Gyasi behind to tend the store. So they manage to escape before a giant wave was about to send them to their watery graves.

At this point I’m wondering, how do they have enough fuel to do all this? I mean there are no gas stations out there on the Milky Way. The tank must be pointing to “E” about now.

But no, they return to the mother ship to find that Gyasi has aged 16 years while they only aged a couple of hours. Something to do with relativity I guess.

So they head on over to the other planet (named Gargantua). Which is an ice cold planet with nothing but mountains, ice  and rocks. You’d think they could find a planet with a bit more pleasant environment, you know like warm with palm trees? Nope they find an ice encrusted place. You’re not going to grow much corn there. No bars making Margaritas.

So now they find the astronaut from the previous mission (Code name: Lazarus) played by Matt Damon. For once, Damon is playing a bad guy. His character is intent on killing McConaughey. I’m not exactly sure why. But fight they do.

At this point, it begins to get a little weird. McConaughey gets in to  a space battle with Damon. Wait a second, where did they get a second lander to have a space battle? And somehow, McConaughey escapes into another dimension. He then commences to communicate with his teenage daughter by way of morse code. She manages to deduce some new theory from the Morse code. At this point, I am thinking, “When is this going to ever end?”

I begin thinking about Margarita I will be having with dinner at one of our favorite Mexican restaurants. So McConaughey is saved and is brought to new huge space station somewhere out by Saturn’s rings. Humanity is saved, everyone is reunited, forever and ever, McConaughey is the hero. Amen.

God it felt good to stand up and stretch. This film will likely be nominated for Academy awards at least for special effects and cinematography. Best Actor? I don’t think so. But the Academy doesn’t usually ask me, I’d give it about 2 stars out of 4.