If it has been a while since you last could credit any movie to possess blockbuster potential, you are in for a treat. Filmed for 2 hours and 47 minutes, Interstellar is one movie you would want to spend your weekend with. And for a change this movie is not made in 3D, so if you are in Pakistan you can relax your eyes and avoid the cheap 3D glasses that hardly serve any purpose.
The story shows a futuristic world wherein the earth has become a dying planet due to crop blight. The scientists at NASA then call on their former pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) to go on a mission to space to find a new planet for earth's inhabitants. Professor Brand (Michael Caine) then reveals that the way to travel there is through a wormhole. Previous mission had already found three habitable planets for humans through this wormhole. Brand then summons Cooper to pilot the spacecraft Endurance along with his daughter and biologist Amelia (Anne Hathaway) and others to recover the data that the previous astronauts had collected but failed to bring back.
After entering the wormhole, Endurance heads to the planet Miller, which experiences gravitational time dilation and each hour spent on it equals seven years on Earth. As they land on the planet, they find that it inhospitable for the human race because it contains nothing but shallow oceans experiencing enormous tidal waves all the time. By the time Amelia and Cooper return back to the spacecraft, 23 years have passed.
Because Endurance is low on fuel now, they can only visit one more planet before returning to Earth. While Amelia votes for Edmund's planet, the rest of the team votes for visiting Mann's planet instead. But as they land on Mann's planet, they find it to be frozen and unsuitable for life again. The movie then grips itself into an emotional turn of events that lead to Cooper venturing into the black hole where he finds himself in a tesseract of time which appears as a spatial dimension. He then communicates there with his daughter back home on earth and helps her find the answer to solve the humanity's predicament and evacuate it from the earth in time. Amelia on the other hand eventually settles on Edmund's planet which proves to be friendly for life.
As a die-hard Gravity fan, I've to admit that Gravity seemed to be just the trailer and Interstellar the actual show. This movie has all that it takes to be recorded in history as a timeless masterpiece. For the science geeks, this movie was nothing like Inception but actually very comprehensible. Because few people realize that this movie was not intended to be a fantasy, instead everything it postulated is actually real. Black holes and wormholes are not science fiction, but are backed by empirical and observational data. And the idea that time bends in space and thus hours spent inside a black hole equal years on earth, is not a new fact. But to extrapolate from that and show that humans can actually survive instead a black hole and see everything back in time is nothing but pure pseudo-science at the moment.
If you are an astrophysics maniac like me and love everything that happens outside the planet earth, this movie will shelve itself as an all-time classic in your library of dreams.
The writer is a digital media scientist, a movie buff and a cultural critic. Follow her on Twitter