Imagine 2001 Where All the Trippy Parts Make Sense

Rating: 10/10 (19 December 2014)

Earth is dying. There's no moralizing about what we did, but a plague is destroying our crops and our atmosphere. Wheat was wiped out last year and okra is dying this year. Since my lifetime consumption of okra would barely fill a salad plate, I had a little trouble picturing that as apocalyptic. Former astronaut Cooper (McConaughey) stumbles onto a super-secret NASA facility and is recruited for a mission through a wormhole to try to find a habitable refuge for humanity. What does a wormhole look like? Well, since it looks the same from all directions, logically, a sphere. The problem is that the three potential refuge worlds all orbit a black hole, whose gravity is so intense that time slows dramatically. On the innermost, an hour on the planet equals seven years on earth, meaning the astronauts can't dawdle lest time run out for humanity on earth. As one physicist pointed out, a gravitational field that intense would probably rip any planet to bits. The inner planet is a water world with gigantic tidal waves. The explorers come back to find that 23 years have passed on earth. The next planet is an ice world inhabited by the sole survivor of a previous mission who has lost it. Cooper sends his ship and crew off but decides the answers lie within the black hole. Inside he finds a tesseract that can access any point in space and time. He realizes it was built by some vastly more advanced human civilization in the future, and uses it to send information back to his daughter, enabling her to solve the equations that will make humanity's escape possible. Cooper returns and wakes up in a colony orbiting Saturn, where he is reunited with his now-elderly daughter. This is not a very visually arresting film, indeed, it's very monochromatic. But it has a complex and non-linear plot, the tesseract is convincing, and it's a very interesting exploration of the time paradoxes of space travel and their human meaning.