Oh, if we just had the time to find, relocate and ruin a new planet! Interstellar is a film that plays with time. A lot. On multiple occasions, we are treated to paradoxes like the classic one where a man travels at the speed of light and returns a year later to find his baby is a grandfather. And, consequently, I saw all 169 minutes of Interstellar and while I was just three hours older, I came home expecting my daughter to be in her forties. Or that’s what it felt like.
Like Avatar before it, Interstellar is a huge loud hot mess. It is the very first pic I’ve seen for which the IMAX effects actually detracted from the experience – for as much as I felt like being on a carnival thrill ride when action took place, the background noise 
was consistently too loud to catch all of the dialogue. I’m sure some of it was important. Well … maybe not; I’ll get to that.
The earth is doomed as doomed can be. And the farm family Cooper is down to corn. Wheat failed the world seven years ago. (How is beer still available?) This is the last year for okra. No okra? Hey, maybe the future won’t be so bad after all. Humanity is down to searching outer space for a new home to destroy – do you think alien cultures are making their own ID4-type films warning about us? Luckily, Matthew McConaughey is available and expendable as he fills his days quietly bitching out high school counselors and wrecking crops to collect a toy surprise. Seriously, the world’s food supply is down to select farmland and you’re destroying an acre or two just to chase windmills? Good thing humanity isn’t doomed or anything.
Several hours later in real time, we get to outer space so we can introduce a love interest (Anne Hathaway), a minority (David Gyasi), a Hal 2.0 and a pretty far-fetched plot — a worm hole has magically appeared next to Saturn just in time to lead humanity to some possibly inhabitable worlds. Astronauts Cooper and Co. get to pick one.
First off, I’m confused by the fact that Matthew McConaughey doesn’t remove his shirt in almost three full hours of screen time. I swear, it’s like he didn’t even try – there wasn’t even a hint at shirt removal. Who are you, McConaughey? You win an Oscar and suddenly you’re too good to take off your shirt?
I’m really bothered by the obvious errors in the film. Cooper names his daughter, the one who is an essential key to species survival, “Murphy” after “Murphy’s Law.” When the daughter challenges that such a name is a symbolic albatross, Cooper corrects her stating that it just means possibility, not disaster.
Um, no. It doesn’t. Murphy’s Law is: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
You’re the best pilot on Earth, the sole hope for man and you don’t know the difference 
between Murphy’s Law and the Law of Averages. Or maybe it was just the Nolan brothers who didn’t know, or any of their production assistants.
There’s also no military in this version of reality. The reason for this is hinted as humanity being too busy trying to feed itself to wage war. This seems a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature. Let me settle this right now – if lack of food production reaches such crisis that every corner of the globe is affected, I can guarantee that soldier will be the #1 profession in each and every country remaining on the planet. Don’t believe me? Look at Africa.
So who cares? Why is this important? Because this, like so many Nolan projects (Memento and Inception immediately come to mind), is aggressively and almost deliberately confusing, constantly daring fans to misunderstand. And it is VERY clear that the research portion of Interstellar has been half-assed.
As the action in Interstellar is not nearly as compelling as Memento, Inception or any of his Batman trilogy, the errors leave me a little cold, and wanting for a human to help me through. McConaughey decided to play this one quiet, taking his new stardom to the level of underplay almost like a card player trying to slough off an unwanted potential trick by failing to follow suit. This is fine if the eye is drawn to anybody else in the film, but aside from the malleable starfish robot, it isn’t. Yeah, you’ll be in tears when he has to leave his daughter behind, but the story follows him, not her. And before we know it, she’s been replaced by the icy cold Jessica Chastain.
It’s not that Interstellar is bad. It’s not bad; it’s just that it has already received roughly 2.998 x 108 times more attention than it deserves. There is a valiant attempt here to say something almost original about human life in a totally bright and confusing way. I wish it hadn’t taken so long to get there. On the day I saw Interstellar, I saw four films. Interstellar was worst of the four and it wasn’t close … and none of the other three are making my top 10. If this movie speaks to you, I challenge you to view anew the film Interstellar obviously wanted to be – 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Surviving the earth takes some copin’
“Shirtless Matt is the man” we’re all hopin’
Gonna take time
To find the right clime
Is the rent-a-center planet now open?
Rated PG-13, 169 Minutes
D: Christopher Nolan
W: Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan
Genre: Our screwed future
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Nolan homies
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Scientists
