Christopher Nolan is a visionary filmmaker famous for producing intelligent blockbusters such as Inception and the Batman Trilogy. His latest ambitious project is a sci-fi space-travel epic clocking in at nearly three hours. With a budget of $165 million and an all-star cast, it is not surprising that it is already a big box office hit. But beyond entertainment, the film also explores some big questions.

I went to see the film the same day space history was made when the European Space Agency landed a space probe on a comet 500 million km away from earth. With the gap between space science fiction and scientific space reality ever narrowing, these questions carry extra weight. The following reflections do not include any spoilers no information given will exceed what is revealed in the trailers.

1. Can our planet sustain us?

The set up for Interstellar is yet another dystopian future. This time it is not a plague, an alien invasion or a meteor that threatens humanity's fragile existence, but a global food shortage. Farmers have become the world's heroes and the central character is a retired astronaut-turned-agriculturalist: Cooper, played by Matthew McConaughey.Interstellar raises important questions for us as a planet with a population now well over seven billion. Are our food sources resilient enough to feed our population?

Unfortunately the movie raises the issue of global hunger by focusing on a US family in the Midwest. A film about people starving in Sudan or a family forced to scavenge for food on the rubbish tips of Manila would probably not have been as compelling. Global hunger is already an issue in our world affecting over 800 million people each day, but it seems it is only a crisis when the USA is threatened this betrays the myopia of our western culture to poverty.

Environmentalist George Monbiot has criticised the film for not mentioning climate change for fear of upsetting a US audience. It reminds us that Hollywood's sensibilities do not just determine how a film plays in the USA, but how the global movie-going audience is continually shaped by an America-centric view of the world.

Having raised the challenge of our planet's inadequate resources, the film's solution is not global co-operation. Nor, surprisingly, does the hope of the entire planet rest on the shoulders of a single white hero, as in so many other Hollywood apocalyptic scenarios.

"We are not meant to save the world, we are meant to leave it" Professor Brand

The film takes a strange ecological approach. We have consumed our world so we now need to move on and consume a new one. Monbiot recognises that this is actually not a new theme it also lies at the heart of other exodus science fiction plotlines such as Battlestar Galactica, Red Planet and even Superman. Where has this idea come from? How widely held is it the view that it doesn't matter how badly we pillage our planet's resources? As Christians we must ensure that the subtleties of the film do not either blind us to the reality of food shortage crises around the world, or the responsibility to care for our planet and its people.

2. Is time travel possible?

View original post here:
Krish Kandiah: Five big questions raised by Interstellar