In director Christopher Nolan’s haunting, bold new film, monoculture (the cultivation of a single crop) dominates in an environment that can no longer sustain crop diversity. Even though corn is that one crop, it no longer thrives, and sudden, gigantic dust storms smother the population.
Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is a former NASA pilot who now runs a farm. He lives with his son and father-in-law, but is closest to his daughter, Murph (Mackenzie Foy), who hears voices and thinks her bedroom is haunted. They discover that the “ghost” is some kind of signal from another planet, supposedly created in a wormhole by alien intelligence. Murph is frightened and upset when her father rejoins NASA.
Accompanied by a crew, Cooper and Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway) take off in the Endurance, a spacecraft that will track astronauts who had previously gone to seek new worlds. But what will they find?
McConaughey excels as a father and NASA expert. Christopher Nolan demonstrates, once again, his considerable futuristic, apocalyptic, “otherworld” abilities to tell a complex story that means something.
The considerable amount of science in the film held my attention. But what fascinated me was the main character in the film: time. Philosophy tells us that time is a mental construct with roots in reality, meaning it does not really exist. It is an easy step to consider God, for whom all time is the present. For God, there is no past or future.
The film shows that time is a gift with moral implications. How we use time will determine the future of the world.
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