I have a very low attention span — especially when it comes to a nearly three-hour movie. However, I was engrossed in this film.
This weekend, I got the chance to see Interstellar. I’ll admit, I was apprehensive going in. Space is scary and I’m not a big Matthew McConaughey fan. And, as my friends will tell you, I have a very low attention span — especially when it comes to a nearly three-hour movie. However, I was engrossed in this film. I might even say it’s one of my favorites I’ve seen in a long time.
Here’s the two-cent version of the plot: Cooper is a pilot and engineer-turned-farmer who is summoned by NASA to go into space to find a new place for the world to live since their planet is slowly turning to dust. The team will visit up to three planets that members from an earlier crew had discovered and will ultimately try to rescue them. Cooper also has a brilliant daughter who becomes a large part of the film.
These planets are located beyond our solar system in a wormhole, which is a “shortcut through space time.” It’s very science-y and was explained nicely in the movie as space getting folded, allowing travel to be quick and for the traveller to bypass a lot of time and space.
If I’m wrong on explaining this topic precisely, forgive me. I’m only a journalism student.
To be honest, space is a little scary. I can hardly wrap my brain around commercial air travel, let alone missions throughout the galaxy and beyond. This movie does a lot with time relativity. On one planet they visit, one hour is seven years in “Earth time.”
Kip Thorne, a famous expert on black holes, even did the science aspect of research for this movie.
Science and technology go hand-in-hand, and as a tech junkie I was excited as soon as I left the theater to see how accurate the movie was to science.
On Twitter, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson pointed out a few things wrong with the movie. However, this pales in comparison to his complaints with the movie Gravity. Many of the points were about the decisions made in the movie more so than science, but others talked about the interstellar science behind black holes.
In a Mother Jones article, astrobiologist David Grinspoon gave his critique of the movie: “The science is spotty.... They paid a lot of attention to relativity and space-time. And yet there’s this whole other theme about what happens to the planet, what happens to the Earth, and these other planets. They go and find planets and there are conditions on them [not consistent with science]. The planetary parts of the film, I thought, were really weak.”
I loved the movie and I’d recommend it to anyone. Even if all the science isn’t spot-on, the movie inspired me to do a little bit of research about space and I learned a few things. Take it for what it’s worth and enjoy a truly fascinating film.
Sophie Kruse is a junior studying journalism. Did you like Interstellar? Email her at sk139011@ohio.edu or tweet her @kruseco
