Retrospective Film Review

Interstellar (2014) — Space, Time, and Love in a modern sci-fi masterpiece

A farmer-turned-astronaut leads a mission to find a new home for humanity as Earth becomes uninhabitable.

Before recently, I’d only seen Christopher Nolan’s science-fiction epic once, 10 years ago this month. I wasn’t sure what to make of it at the time. Parts confused me (as most Nolan films do initially), and I thought certain acts were too long or clunky. However, after revisiting this film on the big screen, I can confidently say that it is a mesmerising piece of ambitious cinema, and perhaps Nolan’s most heartfelt work.

It’s 2067. Crops are failing, and humanity is losing hope. Farmers begrudgingly toil over land that yields no harvest. Everyone avoids facing the conclusion that the Earth is dying. But as Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) soon discovers, mankind may have been born on Earth, but they were never supposed to die there. A former astronaut, he is sent on a mission to explore far-off galaxies, traversing wormholes to survey potentially habitable worlds. The future of the…