Christopher Nolan’s new film, Interstellar, is a near-future tale of astronauts departing a dying Earth to travel to Saturn, then through a wormhole to another galaxy, all in search of somewhere else humanity could call home.
It’s a gorgeous, ambitious work, with outstanding performances from a star-studded cast augmented by high-fidelity visual effects and a soul-stirring score. Watching it in a sumptuous 70-millimeter format on a super-sized IMAX screen, you’ll feel like you’re right there with the crew as they clamber around hostile alien planets and make daring orbital maneuvers. And, when they are forced to confront the personal sacrifices they’ve made to go on their relativistic journey, you may momentarily find a speck of dust in your eye. In Nolan’s film, love truly conquers all—even the deadly gravitational field of a supermassive black hole and the yawning gulfs between the stars. I recommend you see it.
If you watch movies for what they do to your mind rather than to your heart, though, the film may leave you less than starry-eyed. Despite being heavily promoted as hewing close to reality—Caltech physicist Kip Thorne wrote the first version of the story, and served as a consultant and producer on the film—some of the science in Interstellar is laughably wrong. Less lamented but just as damning, some parts of the story having nothing to do with science lack the internal self-consistency to even be wrong.
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