Nolan Countdown Part 9 - Interstellar

Hello everyone and welcome to Some Like It Scott's latest limited series: Nolan Countdown. Each week in the lead up to Christopher Nolan's latest film, Tenet, the two Scotts and countdown special guest, Jay Habib, will be working their way through Christopher Nolan's full filmography in chronological order, starting from his humble beginnings making "budget" films like Following and Memento, all the way to his most recent days making mega-blockbusters like his Dark Knight trilogy, Inception, Interstellar, and Dunkirk. This time, Jay Habib has actually seen these films (quite a few of them, quite a few times actually), but there will be fresh takes, crazy theories, and deep conversations about one of the most interesting auteur filmmakers of this generation all along the way. Join us each week!

 

On the penultimate episode of the Nolan Countdown, Scott, Scott, and Jay revisit Christopher Nolan's turn at an epic space opera in the form of 2014's Interstellar. Set in a near-future 2067 where Earth has been ravaged by crop blights and dust storms and humanity is only a generation or two away from extinction, Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is a widowed former NASA-pilot-turned-farmer and feels unfulfilled by his existence. He lives together with his father-in-law (John Lithgow) and his two children, Murph (Mackenzie Foy and later Jessica Chastain) and Tom (Timothee Chalamet and later Casey Affleck). One day after Cooper discovers a strange phenomenon in Murph's room, he decodes the geographical coordinates of a secret NASA facility working on the top secret Lazarus Project: an attempt to find a future home for humanity somewhere else in the universe. Led by one of Cooper's former mentors, Professor Brand (Michael Caine), the Lazarus Project is in its final stages of preparation for the Endurance spaceship to make its voyage to a wormhole near Saturn that should lead to another galaxy with potentially 3 planets viable to sustain human life. And Cooper is in luck because they're in need of a pilot of his quality. Torn between staying to protect his children and trying to find them a new home amongst the stars, Cooper ultimately chooses to join the mission, along with Professor Brand's daughter, Amelia (Anne Hathaway), and two other crew members, Romilly (David Gyasi) and Doyle (Wes Bentley). The Endurance's quartet will have to overcome years of travel and a new universe worth of threats to save humanity, all with the knowledge that if they fail, humanity may very well be doomed. The countdown trio discusses a plethora of topics, including the film's organ-centric score, its mix of practical and visual effects, its scientific accuracy, potentially career-best performances from McConaughey and Hathaway, and whether the themes Nolan's aspiring to explore are effectively covered.

 

Sign up for our newsletter here!

 

Patreon: www.patreon.com/MediaPlugPods

Twitter: @MediaPlugPods