By Kyle Osborne
I’m not saying that the Emperor isn’t wearing any clothing, but Director Christopher Nolan is walking through the town square in a razor thin thong that his most rabid fans (whose hero worship borders on a proprietary bent) are mistaking for a three-piece suit.
“Interstellar,” Nolan’s “Epic” (that means long—2 hours and 47 minutes) film about space travel as a way of finding a new, permanent home has some dazzling visual moments that sure look cool on the big IMAX screen, but they’re nearly over shadowed by a slow pace, corn ball dialogue, and incoherent “science” that’s heavy on the physically impossible.
The first 15 minutes of what is ostensibly a prestige picture really aren’t so different than the beginning of “Transformers 4,” if you think about it. Just plug in Matthew McConaughey into the Mark Wahlberg slot, and the rest of the down home set-up in the cornfields of America seem rather familiar.
It’ll take nearly an hour before the film reaches lift off, and what we’ll learn as we waddle down the merge lane is that we are in the not too distant future, something called “blight” has killed most of the crops and a Dust Bowl reminiscent of the one in the 1930’s is making life miserable, killing the food supply which is, naturally, thinning the herd of humans on Earth.
McConaughey, a former rocket pilot is, in the most impossibly coincidental way, tapped to ride into space, along with a scientist played like a post-pill popping Judy Garland by the ever glassy-eyed Anne Hathaway, a couple of other crew guys and an awkwardly built robot with an attitude. So far, this movie is seemingly going for high-camp.
Meanwhile, Michael Caine, the scientist behind the not-so-great scienc e, and the father of the Hathaway character, is back at base, writing out whatever it is he’s calculating with chalk and a chalkboard because….why? We have space travel technology but not a decent laptop or a corn tortilla? So many, many things don’t play by the rules that the movie has set for itself that even small things become implausible.
Can one set aside all cynicism and just “go with it”? That’s an excellent question whose answer is, at least for me, “Yes, it things make sense within the context of the fictional world that’s been created.”
In the new (and far better) movie “Big Hero 6,” a teenager rides through the sky on top of a marshmallow looking robot, fighting off villains with panache—and it all makes perfect sense in the movie. So, please believe me, I’m not trying to be a jerky critic.
McConaughey, so excellent in “True Crime” and “The Dallas Buyers Club” seems to fall too easily into a one-note thing that we’ve seen in dozens of his previous films. Jessica Chastain is mostly seen in cutaways that gallop to a dead-endish kind of thing where Nolan cranks up Hans Zimmer’s score to an eardrum crushing level—cutting back and forth between Chastain on Earth and McConaughey in….well, in a dimension that I won’t divulge here. But it’s so goddamned LOUD that you think there MUST be some momentum building to SOMETHING.
My seat actually shook and rumbled from the booming bass and the uber-sonic score. My eyes opened wide to marvel at a planet that seemed to be all water, and another that was all ice. But my heart barely budged. The more distance I get from the film, which I saw five days ago, the less fondly I remember it.
I admire Christopher Nolan very much—but every great director ends up with at least one clunker. Let’s hope this is his—that thong can’t hide much more.
Interstellar is rated “PG-13”
I felt the same way. Aside from the Batman films (I’m one of the few that doesn’t like them), I love Nolan. Interstellar just didn’t do it for me. It wasn’t just plot points or moments that were head scratching or unnecessary but characters as well. The son who loved his father and stayed in touch with him becomes an ugly thankless role. I had questions about some aspects of the film but, unlike other Nolan films, I have no desire to see Interstellar again to figure them out.