For two and a half hours I waited for something to pump energy, concept, or even engaging visuals into this bloated Hollywood block buster.
And for two and a half hours I waited in vain.
Interstellar is excruciatingly bad. Bad, B A D! Why do I say this? Here’s why! It pops up on our collective event horizon after the following truly engaging films: Alien, Contact, 2001, Gravity, The Right Stuff, Star Wars, hell, even Star Trek, to name but a few. Christopher (Inception, The Prestige) Nolan has gotten his knickers in such a twist paying homage to these earlier, far better films, that he seems to have forgotten that we’ve all seen them too.
We know about wormholes. We’ve seen spaceships leaving earth’s gravitational pull. We’ve watched scientists writing equations at the blackboards that somehow explain how relativity works. The very people who would be willing to sit through a new, highly-hyped sci fi film—for two and a half hours!—would be savvy about these basic space voyager tropes. What was Nolan thinking?!!!!
The only person who seemed to have forgotten these concepts was Nolan himself. And at this point, let’s agree not use the word “director” to describe him.The film bombs, crashes and burns for several key reasons: arguably the worst script this ambitious a film has ever been saddled with (it took seven years and two brothers to pen it); flawed casting (Matthew McConaughey is just not up to the task, no matter how much he sobs and flexes the tendons in his neck); and a postmodern collage of concepts, a bit from here, a bit more from there—every great film of the past is quoted, badly, in Interstellar. The poor actors are simply not given any ideas to work with. They speak their lines, but we cannot believe them for a minute.
“Love is the answer,” McConaughey moons as he drifts around in a trippy 5-dimensional space that looks a lot like something out of Tron. Are you kidding me? Okay. I’ll try to calm down and be more specific.
Interstellar tries to unpack too many detached ideas in its lumbering 2 1/2 hours. Environmental decay, family strife, father-daughter bonds, robot allegiance, gravitational pull, NASA technology, space/time anomalies. (It might have made a decent TV mini-series, with a better script and more focused director.) The film makes clumsy homage to Kubrick, e.g. the robot who saves everybody’s butt is shaped like the monolith in 2001. But Nolan’s no Kubrick, and he would have done well not to keep reminding us of that far better film.
The visuals are tired, even when they’re appealing. We’ve seen those white NASA space suits umpteen times. The technological apparati are non-sensical. And, I kid you not, huge rolling swells of organ music do most of the heavy lifting as far as intergalactic denouements go. Think 2001 crossed with Field of Dreams made by first year film students.
Shockingly inept, Interstellar deserves as much condemnation as possible. It’s hard to believe that it’s this bad. But it is.
