First Review in Years

Rating: 8/10 (20 August 2015)

Okay, I don't know where to start, except first and foremost I am from the older generation that thought The Breakfast Club was a great teen movie and Matthew McCounaughey appealed to my crowd, despite his Texas drawl, so I'm picky about which movies I go to and have been for more than a decade now, since most movies have become cookie cutter. I don't know much about Christopher Nolan except the Batman series. But are a huge fan of Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg, which this movie seemed to steal a lot from.
I initially went to this movie for three reasons: (1) A coworker of mine and sci-fi buff told me about it (2) I love sci-fi. And (3) one of my favorite old actresses, Ellen Burstyn, had a role as an elderly woman of the main character's daughter. Wanted to see her in it. But her role was reduced to like next to nothing.
So me and my wife went and saw the movie. In the opening scene you see Ellen Burstyn in age makeup, even though she's looking good in her early 80's today, giving a speech about her life as a young farm girl and several other Southwestern/Midwestern prairie twanged old country people giving speeches about the hard world they lived in. Is this about The Great Depression? So you see this simple farm family going about their lives and a young girl telling her dad about a "ghost" in her bedroom and the family chasing after a drone. I didn't see the point of this, but then the main character, Cooper, goes into the principal's office for a meeting and they rule out his son to be a farmer. I'm like, what? I didn't realize this movie was set in the future, even though he's driving a 2010-ish Dodge Ram pickup. And those old folks must have been children when this was set. Okay, fine.
So Cooper leaves his family because he feels called to explore space for an inhabitable planet for mankind because Earth is dying and soon enough, space travel is revealed to be claustrophobic, lonely, unpleasant, and dangerous.
I sit through the whole movie wondering when Old Murph (Ellen Burstyn) will appear and sure enough she does at the very end. It turns out those old folks interviewed are living on space stations in the 22nd century! Cooper wakes up on a space station after an unsuccessful mission with no fanfare, even though he's been missing for over 80 years, but only gone a little more than two years his time. And Cooper reunites with Murph on her deathbed for 2 minutes after spending most of his mission trying to get back to her and she tells him to leave and carry on with his mission, because she has her family with her, which none of them care about Cooper, nor does he care about them.
I found this fascinating with the fact it's not set more than several decades in the future with American society looking downright primitive today, but space travel far advanced than what people have now.
BTW, I'm the one that wrote the plot synopsis of this movie.