While people argue about whether Christopher Nolan’s latest blockbuster, “Interstellar,” is good or scientifically sound, they don’t seem to notice that it’s just another big-budget show that makes catastrophic climate change seem like the new normal.
The movie, which came out on November 5, shows a future in which the Earth is running out of food because huge dust clouds are covering it. Nolan’s movie doesn’t say outright that the disaster was caused by people, but its ambitious plot is mostly about people trying to find a new place for the human race to live.
“The movie is based on worries that are still very real in the world today. But really, it’s about asking, “What is humanity’s place in the universe?” Nolan said this in a recent interview with The Guardian. “I think it’s great that we have to deal with something so dramatic, and I think it’s important that we have to deal with it. In real life, it would be a lot better if we chose to deal with that problem.
Matthew McConaughey, who won an Oscar, plays the pilot of a top-secret NASA mission to explore faraway planets to see if they can bring back life. In Nolan’s alternate universe, the famous Apollo moon missions are written off as elaborate hoaxes, and the space programme has been forced to go underground. This is similar to the way climate change deniers talk about how global warming is a myth.
In the trailer, the character played by McConaughey says, “This world is a tragedy.” “It has been telling us for a while to leave.”
Even though some people in America, like some Republicans in Congress, still don’t believe that climate change is real, it’s clear that Hollywood does. The success of Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” in 2006, which at first seemed unusual, may have been the start of a greater political and social awareness of global warming. “Interstellar” is a natural next step in this direction.