San Diego Movie Review “Interstellar”

If you’re looking for a place to find a real San Diego movie review?  Well, here’s the place.  Today we’ll review Interstellar.

In the near future, Earth’s oxygen is beginning to run out and humanity has devolved into a farming society in the new IMAX sci-fi film Interstellar, directed by Christopher Nolan (Inception). Natural resources have been depleted, natural disasters run rampant, and humans face extinction within a generation.

After receiving a mysterious binary message written in dust, ex-NASA pilot and mechanical engineer Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) and his daughter Murph stumble upon a secret NASA base led by his former professor.  There, he learns that a wormhole had been discovered near Saturn, leading to a distant galaxy harboring three potentially habitable planets.  Cooper is recruited as the pilot of space station Endurance, where he will travel with a small team of three scientists and two robots to find a suitable planet for humanity to colonize. However, his decision to leave breaks his daughter’s heart, because the mission is estimated to take more than 40 years.  Cooper vows to return to his daughter, but at what cost?

The visuals for Interstellar are breathtaking.  The sounds are so loud I could feel the reverberations in my seat.  When the rocket launched, I could feel the low thundering rumbles, and when Cooper drove his van through the vast cornfield, the sound of snapping stalks and foliage added tremendously to the realism of each scene.  It is apparent that the filmmakers of Interstellar tried to push the realism as far as it could go to be accurate to real world physics, attempting to simulate the visual effect of how light bends around a black hole, showing the way that low gravity affects objects, and taking into consideration that sound doesn’t travel in space.

Even with all the positive aspects of the film, Interstellar has one critical flaw: the ending is utter nonsense.  To force this movie into the mold of a happy ending destroys the laws of physics, logic, and most importantly, all of the suspense that had been rapidly building up over the course of this 169-minute film.  Personally, I think if the film had ended earlier at the 5th dimension, it would have been perfect.  I give Interstellar 3.5 starfish.

Moral: Humanity will always find a way.
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Perry Chen is the youngest award-winning film/ entertainment critic & animator, artist, speaker, and entertainment personality. He started writing movie reviews at 8 using a kid-friendly starfish rating system, under the guidance of his mom Dr. Zhu Shen and his 3rd grade teacher Ms. Harris. Perry’s debut on the CBS Evening News in 2009 made him a national sensation. He has been featured extensively on local, national, and international media, including NPR, Fox, CNN, NBC, The Guardian, The China Press, and many more. He has interviewed prominent filmmakers at film festivals, red carpet premieres, and press junkets. He won a prestigious “Excellence in Journalism Award” at the San Diego Press Club in 2010 as its youngest member. Perry currently writes movie reviews for the Animation World Network, San Diego Union Tribune, Amazing Kids! Magazine, and his own Perry’s Previews website with a combined readership of over 2 million worldwide.  Perry and his family live in the community of Carmel Valley San Diego.

Dr. Zhu Shen’s love for the movies started when she was a young girl, growing up in China during the Cultural Revolution where watching movies was the only entertainment available to the masses. Her journey to become a filmmaker took a convoluted path. She studied medicine at Peking Union Medical College before coming to the US and earning a Ph.D. in biochemistry from University of Colorado, and then an MBA from Cornell University’s Johnson School. She is a producer of the upcoming documentary feature “Average Joe on the Raw,” about journey into raw food and health. Dr. Shen is also an award-winning biotech executive, author, speaker, China business expert featured on national and trade media including CBS, Fox, Business Week, Pharmaceutical Executive, and more. She has worked at IBM, Bayer, Chiron, Immusol, and is the CEO of BioForesight, consulting on cross-Pacific life science business. *Photos of Perry Chen and Zhu Shen by Brian Bostrom.