If you want the short version without spoilers, here, I can save you
reading further, it was terrible, I hated it, I seriously thought about walking
out...
Everyone who doesn’t mind spoilers, read on...
I’ve been looking forwards to seeing Interstellar since I saw the first
trailers about a year back, for a number of reasons. The first of which was the whole premise of
having to go beyond the limits of our world and our own lifespans, to explore
far beyond what we’ve ever managed to before.
Then there was the director, Christopher Nolan, a man who hasn’t really
turned in a bad film since he started, and was the lead man on many of the
films I’ve enjoyed over the last few years.
Then there was the cast, not a bad actor or ham amongst them and all of
them at the top of their game.
All in all it looked like a film that couldn’t fail...
The premise is that some form of blight has come upon the world, and
all the crops are dying out, the history books have been re-written to show
that the moon landings were faked to try and fool the Russians into spending
more money, rather than the truth of what happened and the whole world has
turned it’s gaze inwards to try and keep us all alive a little longer rather
than turning our gaze outwards at the possibility of doing something on a
planet other than this one.
From a social engineering point of view, all of the effort directed
towards getting people to start farming rather than aiming their sights any
higher and wanting to learn things like science or mechanics made perfect sense
and set up a strong image for the beginning of the film. Through a series of events that could only be
described as supernatural, Cooper (Matthew McConnaghey) and his daughter Murph
(Mackenzie Foy in the first of what will surely be many roles) are drawn to the
remains of Norad, where NASA are still working towards sending people into
space. Dr Brand (Michael Caine), Cooper’s old boss, is heading up the task
force towards sending people out to find new planets to live on via a wormhole
that has been found some years ago out in the orbit of Saturn.
Slight suspension of disbelief required at that point, convenient
wormhole found at the right time, but okay, we can go with that.
So onwards with the mission, kids left behind while the heroes go off
into space with two different plans, the first to find a habitable planet to
move the rest of the human race on to, and the second to take a whole colony of
people along to the new planet to establish a new race out amongst the stars.
A little like Titan A.E.?
Yeah, very much so, but they got through the wormhole and found that
the first planet was a little closer to a massive black hole than they thought it
had been, to the point at which gravitic distortions would cause every hour on
the planet to be seven years out beyond the effects of the gravity.
It was at this point that disbelief needed gravity of its own to remain
in the air...
I’m not a scientist, and there may be people out there who can tell me
this is all accurate, but gravity needs to be strong to affect the pull of
time, and immensely strong to affect time in any meaningful sense beyond
seconds (as has been seen from flights around the earth), so here’s this
immense world next to an immense black hole, that they land on and suddenly
every minute is more than a month in real time. But despite this immense
gravity, they can still walk around on this planet, that has immense waves
every few hours that literally scour the world clean of everything but the
water but still leave it shallow enough to walk on between waves...
So they get off the planet and 23 years have elapsed in real time while
they were repairing their ship on the ground and the method they use to repair
the ship could have been done less than a minute after they landed with equal amounts
of success.
Then we get back up to the main ship and find that the kids have got
older and bitter and because they were down there that long, the ships fuel
supplies have been running out steadily and there’s not enough fuel left to
reach the other points.
If the Mission Impossible soundtrack had started up at this point, I
wouldn’t have been surprised...
So they go to the next planet and find that the astronaut who’d landed
ahead of them (an uncredited Matt Damon), has actually gone nutbar and just
wants to go home, to the point that he’s willing to doom the whole human race
to do it. Between that and the
revelation from earth that plan A was never going to succeed because the
variables weren’t right and Dr Brand had known about that when he sent Cooper
into space, I’d lost all faith with humanity as presented, we’re either myopic
luddites who just want to grow crops till the world ends, or we’re self serving
psychotics or liars...
Remind me again why we’re supposed to be rooting for ourselves...?
So Cooper plans a black hole slingshot move (I’ve seen star trek, the
enterprise does that with no problems, but where’s the enterprise when you need
it) and in the process, ends up in the black hole.
And that’s when it got really
weird...
Remember those supernatural things that occurred at the beginning of
the film? Turns out those were Cooper
himself after he falls into fifth dimensional space and starts being able to
travel between time and space to send messages by moving books and altering gravity
to send messages to his daughter still on earth...
At this point I’ve lost the will to argue, particularly when he finishes
sending “Equations too complex to be sent” via Morse code down the seconds hand
of a watch that he left for his daughter.
This of course is all leading up to the point where Cooper is reunited
with (now very old and close to death) Murph so he can fulfil his promise to
her, made over eighty of her years ago...
This for me was the greatest problem in the film, and as you’ll note
from everything so far, I’ve had a few with this one. Here they are, reunited after what’s been
eighty years for her and effectively less than a fortnight of awake time for
him, and this is his daughter, who meant everything to him, and they speak maybe
ten sentences before she tells him that she doesn’t want him to see her die, so
he needs to go off and find a life for himself, ideally with Anne Hathaways
character who’s still out there in the new galaxy.
And he does...
WTF!!!!!
I’ve only got one kid, he’s been with me his whole life, and while
there’s the theory that it’d be difficult to reconcile the idea of the ten year
old you left behind with the octogenarian that’s laying in the bed, both actors
played it like it was the most emotional thing that they’d ever had to go
through, and from that perspective, Old Murph has had 80 years of abandonment
to finally tell her dad where to go, but he’s been gone two weeks...
I don’t like walking out of films, in truth, I’ve never done it, I
believe that if you’ve paid the money, then you should stay to the end, if only
to get your moneys worth. But in three
or four places, when they were playing for the cheap emotional punches and Hans
Zimmer was punching the music in at ten times the volume required, I really did
think about it...
So, while it may be a fine film for some, not for this man. Certainly not as a parent and absolutely not
as a man who likes films that are well put together and don’t have multiple deus ex machine moments within them. Overhyped, overloud (in places it was like
standing next to a rock concert speaker), and overcooked, I never thought I’d
say that about any film that Christopher Nolan made, but those are three hours
of my life that I’m not going to get back and in the time it took to get to the
terrible ending, I could have seen any two of my favourite films twice...
My honest opinion, he’s done better than this before and I’m sure he
will again, the visuals are stunning, but I believe that in time, people will
remember this in the way they do Avatar now,
phenomenal in scale, but lacking in the very thing that it was supposed to be
all about...
Heart...
