Relativity Self-Taught for the Popcorn crunching Crowd

Rating: 5/10 (14 June 2015)

.Back to the Future, reloaded with a bigger budget INTERSTELLAR: viewed at Berlin Sony Ctr. Cinemaxx, FEB. 2015-- Cutting edge pseudoscience from Christopher Nolan. Nolan is noted for making wannabe sophisticated big budget big star films with big special effects that bedazzle the masses but don't hold up to serious scrutiny. interstellar is a perfect example. In this one Nolan plays around with advanced notions of theoretical physics and cosmology such as Einstein's Space-Time Relativity and wormholes leading into parallel universes. To lend authority to this exalted eye-over wool-pull he has consulted with noted Cal Tech physicist Kip Thorne, the go-to scientist for serious reflection on wormholes and possible other universes. What emerges is a pot-pourri of cutting edge wild ideas not too convincingly thrashed through the cosmic mix-master and coupled with a Back to the Future Midwest farm family back story that is mildly entertaining if you don't think about it too hard and just call it Science Fantasy, like Nolans other pictures.
Last years Best Actor Oscar winner, Matthew McConnaughey, is back from his winning cowboy with Aids impersonation to star as a good ole country boy farmer who happens to do a little astronaughting on the side. He is engaged by a most unlikely Michael Caine ( think "Alfie") in the role of a super scientist leading an ultra-secret interstellar project designed to find a new inhabitable planet for the remains of mankind to escape to, because as we learned from the early scenes back on the farm, the Earth is in the final stages of environmental collapse.The reason Caine's project is so tiptop secret is that they don't want to set off a global panic on our dying planet.
Well, to make a very long story short Mac goes off in search of an appropriate wormhole way out there in the greater interstellar beyond accompanied by a beautiful co scientist on board (Ann Hathaway) finds his wormhole, lives to tell about it, and miraculously returns to the original country homestead where he finds that due to Einsteinian relativistic time bending he is now younger than his grandchildren. (e =mc2!) In Part II maybe a few surviving earthlings will be shipped out to beyond the wormhole to carry on the propagation of our species on an exoplanet that is not dying. The details of how this is all worked out would require a report longer than the picture itself. But I must say that, at a commercial screening with a German audience, I was mildly amused and even found Mr. McConnaughey, whom I normally cannot stand, passably acceptable in a role that suits him. Old time actor John Lithgow was gramps in the rocking chair on the porch.
Give it five stars out of ten for half-speed (Halfassed) PseudoScience