Film: Jessica Kellgren-Hayes

Watch this space

There are more synapses in the human brain than stars in the galaxy. There are more bad science fiction films than… something that adds up to an awfully large number!

From appalling plotting to terrible dialogue, utterly hilarious make-up and costumes that shouldn’t have seen the light of day, even the casual film watcher has probably seen their fair share of awful Sci Fi. But, don’t despair, there are more than a few gems out there. I personally am quite keen on a good film that blends human stories with science that is more than a little erroneous. From the 21st Century: Cloverfield (2008), Her (2013), Serenity (2005), Gravity (2013), Children Of Men (2006) and I’m not ashamed to throw Wall-E (2008) in there!

Then there are the classics: Metropolis (1927), Forbidden Planet (1956), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) then the Alien series, Star Wars… Back To The Future… Terminator… The last one was for Joseph.

As is the film pick for this week’s PostFeature. Joseph was so enthused by the prospect of Matthew McConaughey in space (he has quite the ‘man crush’!) that we are dedicating the entire episode to the actor’s newest film, Interstellar, and dubbing it Space Week! We’ll be looking at the film alongside other greats set in space and quite possibly walking around as if we were in moonboots.

We’ll be walking around as if we were in moonboots

Interstellar is based on an idea from theoretical physicist and Caltech professor Kip Thorne; who might be referred to as a ‘science-world celebrity’. His work focuses on gravitational physics and the effects of black holes on space-time. In 1988 he published a paper called “Wormholes in space-time and their use for interstellar travel,” positing that time travel was possible via tiny warps in space called wormholes.

Think about it like an apple: an ant crawling on an apple could get from one side to the other by crawling around on the skin of the apple, or it could go through a hole in the apple, clearly a much faster route. Now imagine that the apple is the universe. Essentially, that is time travel.

In Interstellar, a group of explorers – headed by McConaughey’s Coop – make use of a newly discovered wormhole to transcend the confines on human space travel and conquer the distances involved in an interstellar voyage. Set in the near future, Earth has been devastated by drought and famine, causing a scarcity in food and extreme changes in climate. Our travellers are in search of a planet that can sustain life. However, once through the wormhole, one hour is the equivalent of seven years back on Earth. The mission will be pointless if the people on Earth are dead by the time they pull it off. And Coop must decide between seeing his children again and the future of the human race.

It’s a race against time! Hopefully it will be as brilliant as that synopsis makes it sound. Tune in to PostFeature this week to find out what we thought.

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