I wanted to say I largely agreed with DiFabio on this occasion, but I feel above all you nailed it with that sentence Deckard.
Yes Nolan's ambitious, but I agree that it came at too high a price here, and I'm not sure if that's due to his inability to balance the two, or whether it's intentional, because I for one find a lot of the moral and political content in, but also surrounding the film, BS. And Nolan's very explicit about it in interviews.
What do you mean 'We're not meant to save the earth, we're meant to leave it?' Whether we stay here or not is at first purely a practical assessment, and secondly, I feel this film's message of the fundamental moral goal of having to explore is honestly just nonsense. Exploring isn't a moral goal, it's a practical means and an enriching endeavour. But it's not some code humans should live by, and even if it was, Nolan defends that notion very poorly.
This movie, and especially the marketing surrounding it, is blatantly ignoring a lot of existing science and research that positively states we could survive here for milions of years, if we ****ing got our act together and kept our planet in shape. If the film wants to setup a lackluster premiss of equating being pro-science with 'we gotta be explorers', okay within the film, fine, it's thin, and calously done, but fine, it's your film it sets up the plot you want, I'll accept it. But Nolan is REALLY hitting that note hard in his marketing campaign for this and in the real world that's just narrow-minded nonsense. I'm sorry but I can't agree with some fundamental pseudo-moral idea of 'it's in our nature to explore so we should focus on making space technology'. No, we should focus on getting our act together and keeping this world, which has great beauty to it still, intact. And there's plenty of research, science and ways that both emphasise that possibility, as well as actually make it possible.
I'm fine with a fatalistic premiss for story purposes, but Nolan is using it, in and outside the film, as a forced justification of sacrificing a lot of things in order to go play space cowboy. That's where I get off honestly. I didn't buy it in the film, but I sure as hell don't buy it outside of it. This film is way too much on the nose, it's forced, and it ends up doing what Deckard said, sacrificing quality in a multitude of artistic aspects of the film.
Though yes the robots rule. They had a much larger and cooler role in Jonah's OG script though. His script wasn't human-centric, and involved saving more than just the human race. It had a very different emphasis, and a way more ambitious, yet technically laid out use of time dilation. I think I'd much rather have seen Spielberg making Jonah's script. But that's a typical hindsight opinion.
the use of time travel was also MUCH better in Jonah's script. In Jonah's script there actually is a time machine and they send back the drone Cooper finds in the beginning, and the thing he rips out of it has the gravity data, that in Chris script gets transferred by more code from that tesseract thing.
For those disappointed in the narrative of this film I suggest looking it up. If you want a funny audible summary of it, check out the screenrant podcast about Interstellar, at 2:14:20. It also explains a few odd things in Interstellar that were setups for payoffs which Chris ended up cutting out of it. Chris immensely simplified Jonah's script. Imo not for the better.