Interstellar, which premiered on Nov. 7, proved to be an amazing, yet very confusing movie. The director of the film, Christopher Nolan, is primarily known for directing the Dark Knight  trilogy and Inception. He is also known quite well for leaving audiences very confused at the end of movies, and viewers usually need to research topics online to fully understand the content of his films.

The movie starts off in the distant future with the main character,  Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), on his farm. His wife passed away a few years back, and he lives with his teenage son Tom (Timothee Clement), his 10-year-old daughter Murph (Mackenzie Fox) and his father-in-law Donald (Jon Lithgow). Before Cooper became a farmer he was a pilot for NASA, but then retired to pursue farming so he can provide his family with food.

At this time in the future (the date is not given), Earth is shown to be quickly running out of food and resources and mankind is starting to die out. A lot of people, like Cooper, have resorted to farming as a life because it means food on the table. But as the years go on, many crops are starting to die out. Throughout the beginning of the movie, Murph continuously bugs Cooper about a so-called ghost in her room that keeps knocking over her books. He finally goes and takes a look and realizes that it is a gravitational anomaly that seems to be giving messages. They realize it is binary coding, and Cooper and Murph figure out the coordinates then head for that location on a map.

When they reach the destination, they are kidnapped and taken inside. It turns out to be a top-secret NASA building that is trying to save Earth. They recruit Cooper and a few other members of NASA such as Romilly (David Gyasi), Doyle (Wes Bentley) and Amelia (Anne Hathaway) to embark on an interstellar journey through a black hole to a new galaxy in search of a new planet that can sustain life and save the human race. They go through the hole and reach the new galaxy, and find three planets which they name after previous astronauts sent years earlier with the same mission. The planets are called Miller, Mann and Edmund. They decide to look at Miller’s planet first, and send a crew of three out the four members down to look around. Amelia also discovers that for every hour they spend on Miller, seven years passes on Earth, due to Miller being so close to the black hole and time being different because of the gravitational pull.

When they reach the surface, they discover it to be all water, and there is nothing useful for them there. A large wave starts to form, and before they can all get out safely, Doyle is killed and Cooper and Amelia are forced to leave Miller’s planet. Once arriving back on the ship, the pilot who decided to stay, Romilly, tells Amelia that she was wrong, and for that hour they were gone 23 years passed in Earth time. Cooper’s children are all grown up now.

The crew realizes they will not have enough fuel to venture to the remaining two planets and make it home, so they choose to go to Mann’s. Upon arrival, they meet Mann and find his ship to have crashed. They also learn that Mann created the data of this planet himself in order to be saved, and after a long fight about this and Mann’s future motives, Mann kills Romilly but then also dies himself. Amelia and Cooper are all that’s left and they decide that they should go inside the black hole to figure out the gravity equation being worked on back home that could ensure Earth’s survival. Cooper ends up sending Amelia back to Edmund’s planet so that she can find life, and he ventures inside the black hole himself.

Inside of the hole, Cooper’s ship is torn apart, forcing him to eject. He finds himself inside of an odd room that has no gravity. With his robot companion, TARS, he realizes he is inside of a room built by the future humans where time and space are no longer linear and are tangible quantities. He tells his young daughter the answer to the equation, which he finds in the room, allowing her to guarantee a safe travel of the entire population of the Earth through the black hole to Edmund’s planet. Cooper later wakes up on the space station while it is traveling, and is now 124 years old. Cooper’s dying, daughter ensures him that mankind is on the way to safety at Edmund’s planet with Amelia waiting for them.

Lot to take in, isn’t it? That’s how Nolan’s movies usually are. The intensity of Interstellar matched no other movie, with there being suspense in literally every moment of it. On the one hand, some of the things in the movie were difficult to understand without a large knowledge of quantum physics and astrophysics. But, on the other hand, if a high school student can see it and then understand it after some quick Google searches, so can anyone else. McConaughey’s performance was spectacular. He was able to deliver a wide array of emotions through Cooper’s character and did it very well.

The movie was very long, almost three hours, and is very difficult to have a movie keep a fast-paced style for that long. The first hour or so of the movie was a little slow, and basically included Cooper discovering this chance to save humanity deciding and whether or not he should take it. Once he takes off in the shuttle, the film starts to take off as well. All in all, fantastic movie, fantastic actors and fantastic plot if you can wrap your mind around it. It definitely is one of those fun brain exercises. Rating: 9.5/10