I just walked out of "Interstellar".
Oh, dear God.
This is going to be spoiler-filled. In fact, I’m spoiling the WHOLE PLOT. So, if you haven't seen it yet and you WANT to see it, avoid. I will be honest: if you haven't seen it yet? Don't bother. Unless you're a movie completist, or are in the film industry in some capacity, give it a miss.
I'll be as upfront as I can: it's crap. Boring crap. Boring, self-indulgent crap. Crap that lifts from other, better movies. Crap that cost 200 million dollars, and has me wondering where the hell the money went. An addled mess, which I cannot believe Christopher Nolan directed.
You know how I don’t much like “Prometheus”? “Prometheus” is “ALIEN” compared to “Interstellar”. If you said to me, “If you watch “Prometheus” every night for the next year, we promise to destroy the negative to “Interstellar”, I would do it. There’s a very good reason Spielberg walked away from this script: it’s bloody awful.
“Interstellar” is, without a doubt, Christopher Nolan's worst movie.
Where to start? Where to start?
If you’ve seen “The River”. Or “The Grapes Of Wrath”. Or a multitude of misery-inducing indie movies about life in the American midwest, you’ll be familiar with this film. Because it’s set there. And dust storms sweep the plains.
Hang about.
This movie’s called “Interstellar”. It’s about The Future Of Humanity. It’s about Saving The World.
The planet is apparently dying here. We’re being told that the crops are failing one by one, by “A Blight”. Yet…really?
We only see a couple of ramshackle townships (which are apparently within a fairly short drive of a NASA launch facility!). There’s no mention of cities.
There’s no mention of OTHER COUNTRIES.
This movie is so muddleheaded, it sets up a “reality”, and doesn’t think it through.
Are these dust storms EVERYWHERE? If so, how are they affecting cities not just in America, but throughout the world?
What is the vector by which these dust storms are happening? What is happening to the economies elsewhere? The world seems to have the internet still, in some fashion.
So how is it that “Engineer” Matthew McConaughey doesn’t have an email address? Phone number? Any way of contacting him? He pays his taxes, he says. So how is it government employee Michael Caine (honestly, more believable in “The Swarm” than here) doesn’t know where to find him?!?
How is it, that given manufacturing has supposedly taken a nosedive, this script says “the world doesn’t need more engineers”. REALLY?!!
Because, if I was living in Thunderdome, and presented myself to Auntie, I’m pretty sure I could kick MasterBlaster out of a job. How is it, in a world with no more new goods, REPAIRING OLD MACHINERY isn’t a prized commodity?
Even better: crops are failing. Consequence? Well, presumably people are going hungry. (Fishing isn’t even mentioned in this movie. Presumably the planet Went Vegetarian at some point.)
So…there’s less food, and more mouths? What usually happens in those movies? Why, people grab their shotguns, loot the stores, and anarchy happens! Not in this one! Why, we’re told that there AREN’T ANY ARMIES ANYMORE. Because they can’t afford them. Whaaaaaa….?!?!
Really? So, no armies? So…no threat against anarchy? But everyone is still peaceable…and still PAYS THEIR TAXES?!?
And then here comes a corker! Crankypants Grampa John Lithgow admonitions son McConaughey (whose voice is so lethargic, had it been another actor cast, we might have lopped a good 40 minutes off the running time) to go look-in on a comely local wench “Because somebody needs to repopulate the planet”.
Huh…whuh..wha?!?! “Repopulate the planet”!? WHY? There’s no food and too many mouths to feed! Wouldn’t this be like China? Wouldn’t the government be imposing family size limits to ration food? WHY DOES THE PLANET NEED REPOPULATING!?!?
Not since “Slipstream” (another movie in which dust storms ravage the Earth) has the Future been laid out in such a cack-handed fashion.
So, anyway. Matt has a sequence where he chases a drone across a field. This sequence barely makes any sense, other than the fact Matt is such a whizzkid he can seize control of this mystery Indian government-encrypted surveillance drone and bring it down while it’s off target, and “Lost”, presumably because of some “mystery force”. Plus, it was something vaguely like action they could put in the trailer to make it look like something happens in this wretched film. (That was a good 5 to 10 minutes of time well-filled. Well done, Jon and Chris. My life is so enriched by this scene.) I’m guessing the “inspiration” for this was Neary crashing his truck through barriers in “Close Encounters”.
Following a scene (which rather horrified me) in which Mac visits his bright daughter’s teachers, and we see that textbooks have been altered to show that the Apollo moon landings were faked (seriously!), Mac has to address his daughter’s insistence that “Poltergeists” (Cf: “Poltergeist” and “Signs”) are knocking things over in her room.
Guess what? Something weird IS happening there! In fact, dust is being laid out in weird ways, and coins are falling onto the dust rows! “It’s gravity!” intones Mac, solemnly. (Although Gramps Lithgow, in maybe his worst screen performance ever, could care less.) Nobody seems PARTICULARLY fazed by this.
Nor are they fazed when, in a scene lifted from “Close Encounters” (but which makes less sense) Mac roars off into the night with his daughter after getting “co-ordinates” for a secret NASA base. Willickers!
The base has robots guarding it, which come along on the ride later. The robots are shape-changing metal slabs, which utterly fail to do anything to convince they’re more than puppeted hollow fiberglass slabs. They reconfigure themselves somehow physically. (I get the feeling that Jonathan Nolan, tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth, saw the pretty cool gold trapezoid robots in “Demon Seed” forty years ago, and decided to fuse that with HAL and Teddy from “A.I.”, only with a snarky personality that says lines of dialogue that were red-pencilled from episodes of his “Person Of Interest” for being too lame.) These robots must have been a good idea on paper, but they honestly suck in the film.
So, there’s Michael Caine. And Mac comes-to after being subdued, to essentialy glower at people sitting around an executive board table. I was pleased to see William Devane, because he’s always good value for money.
He still gets bugger-all to do, but: hey. This scene is essentially a lamer version of Neary being interrogated in “Close Encounters”. Warner execs must have had a sense of deja vu seeing the rushes, as they basically got the same scene earlier in the year in “Godzilla”.
Once again, nobody seems particularly fazed by the story of how Mac found this base in the middle of nowhere. In fact, this whole establishment — even though it IS NASA — is being run on faith.
I was utterly confused as the plot rambled through, making NO sense.
Wait: this is the last of their Endurance ships?
What were the others? Where did they go before this?
Wait: there were missions that went off prior to this to these target planets?
Wait: why is there a swanky conference room literally next to the rocket blast area of a launch pad?
Wait: WHY are they making a CONCRETE space station, on Earth?
Wait: if these space-glider thingies Mac can fly can land and zip up from planets with higher gravities than our own in orbits around various types of black holes, what’s the usefulness of having it mounted on a typical Saturn-esque launch vehicle?
Wait: there’s a plan to recolonise other planets with pre-fertilised eggs in cold storage? In what womb, incubator, or host are they going to come to term??!
I got exhausted at keeping up with just one bad and ill-conceived idea after another.
Anyway: lo. We come to the crux of the story. “Aliens” (it’s presumed) have opened a wormhole around Saturn! (You may recall that Arthur C Clarke’s book version of “2001” had the Monolith in orbit around Saturn, but this was changed by Kubrick to Jupiter, as he wasn’t sure at that time he could convincingly recreate Saturn.
Not that I’m inferring that this is where Jon Nolan lifted this from. Not at all. No: I’m flat out SAYING IT.)
So, this NASA mission has been off and running sending people off to other planets. Yet: NASA cannot locate Mac over the past several years (eye roll), although Michael Caine insists that Mac is the BEST PERSON TO FLY THIS MISSION.
Presumably there was a backup pilot, seeing as they seem ready to fly what seems like the next day. (For a movie banging you on the head about passage of time, it doesn’t seem very adept at portraying chronological events.) In fact, NUMEROUS TIMES during this movie, everybody is ready to go zooming across the galaxy.
Yet NOT ONCE is a launch window mentioned. EVER. (For those of you who’ve never thought about it: this is space travel. This isn’t going down to the shops.
You need to calculate your fuel, and your mass, and all kinds of things. How long the flight will take. And as planets MOVE, you need to actually point yourself at WHERE planets WILL BE at the end of the journey. None of that makes much impression in this movie.)
There are various sops to relativity mentioned. Mac’s daughter behaves like a spoiled brat, and sulks in her room while dad is packing to leave…POSSIBLY FOREVER.
In fact, she sulks for 23 years, refusing to come to the video link. Yes: 23 YEARS!!!!
This is after she’s changed her mind and ran off after dad’s car as he’s driving off, only to go have another strop. I guess it was Launch Window Time, which is why dad had to leave so suddenly. (He must have really hated Lithgow, too, as he barely says goodbye to him.)
So, off they go. Yada-yada. In a three hour movie, we’re told they went to Mars, and headed off to Saturn. You’d think we could have seen about 30 seconds of this while some dialogue was being said, but…noooo.
Suddenly, we’re at Saturn and the Monolith.
Whoops, sorry. “Wormhole”. Before you can say lickety split, we’re plunging on through.
I keep seeing reviews filled with physicist Kip Thorne’s name being cited like some kind of talisman, as if to say: “Look! The scientific community endorses this!”
What UTTER BOLLOCKS. If Kip Thorne ever becomes capable of public speech, I hope he publicly disavows this turkey. Because people won’t be taking his research very seriously anymore off the back of this.
There’s NO sense of occasion here.
Nobody seems to remark on the wonder of any of the stuff they’re doing. They’re going through a wormhole! Oh, wow! Except…we already know several people have done this, because (and it’s very hazy exactly how) they’ve sent back “messages”. So it’s apparently doable.
If you’re tired of reading this, I’m tired of writing it, believe me. I’ll hurry this up.
They go to Planet One. It’s Waterworld. Except the water is apparently only 6 inches deep, and this “NASA Craft” zooms from orbit from the mothership, barely registering heat as it goes through the atmosphere, and right down to the surface, where…there’s some junk from the previous failed mission.
And the NASA lander touches gently down on teeny-tiny legs like a delicate little helicopter. (I used to think about the Planet Of The Apes Icarus from the original movie, and wonder how they were supposed to get back from ApeWorld.
After seeing this movie, I guess they had the same manufacturing plant.) Literally SECONDS pass…and then there’s trouble.
At this point, Jon Nolan pulled down his copy of “The Abyss: Special Edition” from his shelf, as that giant wave that threatened the world in that at the end makes a reappearance. (Good job there were no waves in all the time before they got there to sweep away that wreckage, eh!)
They escape. There are fatalities. Nobody seems particularly bothered. (Characters barely interact with any emotional investment in this movie. I just read an interview with Nolan talking about how warm and emotional this film is. Gee, I’d hate to be his family.)
It’s on to Planet Two now.
More guff is talked about. Apparently, Anne Hathaway’s former love is on one of these planets from the advance mission, and so she admits that’s her reason for wanting to got there next. (Oh, did I forget to mention Hathaway is in this? She’s all cute with a little short haircut. Looking at her made the pain of 169 minutes of this drivel more tolerable.) So, they get there. This is frosty-world planet with FROZEN CLOUDS. (Really, just an excuse for Nolan to reuse the mirror city image from “Inception” on an vista spread.) And - hey! The mystery man in hypersleep (they actually call it hypersleep, as it was in “Alien”) turns out to be Matt Damon. Who, it turns out, is nutty as a fruitcake and cowardly murderous to-boot.
I’m guessing this particular strand was filched from both Danny Boyle’s “Sunshine”, plus that bit in “The Black Hole” where Ernst Borgnine’s cowardly Booth tries to escape in “The Palomino”. [Sidebar note here: the storytelling is so muddy and confusing, and characters don’t really communicate or emote, so I couldn’t figure out if Damon was supposed to be the one that Hathaway was in love with. If so…huh?
If not…why doesn’t she have a little weepy moment about the fact she’s basically made a lot of people’s lives ruined over her selfish actions?]
Damon escapes with one of the implausibly-powered space glider-thingies, and tries to steal the mothership.
His astronaut training really sucks, as nobody seems to have told him about the dangers of not getting a proper docking seal on your ship. Stuff explodes! (Well, something had to happen in this movie.)
I wasn’t part of the “Gravity Is The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread” brigade, but even the most minor scene in that film is better than what happens here.
At this point, Jon Nolan reached for his copy of “Apollo 13”, because — as the out-of-control spacecraft section plummets into the “stratosphere” (how it didn’t burn up to get to that point is never really mentioned, particularly as this planet has a 1/3 higher gravity than Earth), Mac has to — MANUALLY!!! — dock with an out of control spinning spaceship (Jon Nolan again thinking of the Orion docking sequence from “2001” as he stole like a bandit.)
This sequence had me saying “Oh, come ON!” out loud in the cinema.
Let’s ignore the spin (in the stratosphere!) that he puts his aerodynamic glider into.
Let’s ignore the HAIL of debris from the explosion hitting his ship (and apparently not damaging it).
Let’s ignore that he SUCCEEDS. He then “applies retros” to slow down the station. I don’t claim to be an aerospace engineer, but an enormous object exhibiting mass plummeting through the stratosphere of a planet, that’s just having force exhibited to a docking tunnel…
I’m going to go with the engineering stresses involved being so great, that thing’s going to tear itself apart.
At this juncture, I lost the will to live.
The short version on the rest: there’s some cross-cutting back to Earth.
Various people die because of the relativity involved around flying about neutron stars (oh: did I mention the manual slingshot Mac plans about a neutron star? Han Solo has nothing on this guy.), and finally they plunge into the black hole.
There’s some dialogue lifted from “2010” about joining their thrust to achieve this, and then there’s some plot points about the poor slab robot saying goodbye just like HAL in “2010” as he drops back into the black hole, observing all the way. (Later, he’ll somehow talk to Mac inside the black hole just like HAL did with Bowman in the later “2001” Clarke spinoff books.)
Mac’s ship’s fuel cell goes critical, so Mac ejects.
Despite that HE’S IN A FREAKING BLACK HOLE (“Space: 1999” even managed this more plausibly.) And in some of the lamest visuals I can ever recall seeing, Mac finds himself in this movie’s version of an “Alien Construct” (it’s in quotes for a reason.) The otherworldly travel visuals in “Contact”, “Star Trek The Motion Picture”, and even “The Abyss” were far more compelling, and wherever Kubrick is now, I hope he’s grinning smugly that “2001” is still better than this turkey.
Turns out Mac is trapped in a space-time effect.
One so lame, it could have been summoned up by Stephen Moffat in “Doctor Who”.
I am absolutely astonished that when Mac begins to communicate with his younger and older daughter, The Beatles “All You Need Is Love” didn’t come on the soundtrack. To say that I was astonished and insulted by the third act of this crap would be an understatement. Love wins. Yay. And Mac wakes up on a space station.
Where they have nifty Buck Rogers-esque spacefightergliderthingies.
But apparently nobody has thought to go rescue Anne Hathaway.
[Edit: Production values are okay. I still want to know where the fricking budget went. Zimmer is on full-on Philip Glass ripoff mode with his music, with the "Main Theme" -- two notes again, like "Man Of Steel" -- basically being the first and last bars from "Also Sprach Zarathustra" from "2001", like nobody would notice.
Photography is adequate, but Nolan regular Wally Pfister was off directing the dreadful "Transcendence", so he's not on this one.
Special effects...aren't. "Tree Of Life" had better space visuals.
Honestly, there was stuff in "Battlestar Galactica" more impressive than this movie.
This movie was shot on FILM...well, I hope you guys that get to see it on IMAX have a blast, as I saw a digital release, and it didn't look that great to me.]
Horrible movie. I will never watch it again.
I’ve bored myself writing this piece.
I just want to go to bed.
This is Nolan’s worst. I’m going to bed.
You’ve been a lovely audience. See a good movie this weekend.
Don’t see this one. And if you come back and say nice things about it, I’ll shout at you and likely defriend you.
Here’s a sobering thought: Given that Warner Bros. produced and distributed all three films of Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, it definitely wanted a piece of Paramount’s “Interstellar” action. As told by The Hollywood Reporter, the price for joining their rival’s project with Nolan was Warner’s stake in future instalments of two potential cash-cow franchises: Friday the 13th and South Park. Paramount will also have co-finance rights on an A-list Warner property which has yet to be determined.
So now Paramount has a partner on a potentially-risky original sci-fi project, and Warner gets to stay in the Nolan game. The catch here is that Paramount has to develop movies for both franchises within the next five years.
Facepalm.
lame and overused.
