Say what you want about Christopher Nolan, but he's the 21st century heir to Steven Spielberg's blockbuster legacy. Everybody loves him because of The Dark Knight Trilogy, but he's actually one of the few directors who can turn an obscenely well-funded project into something cohesive and daring. If any other director than him (and maybe J.J Abrams) would've done INTERSTELLAR, I probably would've never watched it, because the premise sounds like an excuse to create a giant, epic, weepy science-fiction penis of a movie and despite my long standing kinship to his work (I have a VHS copy of MEMENTO after all), I unfortunately think that it was indeed a giant, epic, weepy science-fiction penis of a movie. Sometimes, you just can't save things by swinging as hard as you can.
Sometimes around the year 2080, Earth is going through a catastrophic crop blight and humanity is threatened to go extinct. The majority of people, including former militaty pilot/astronaut named Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) have turned to farming for survival, but it puts even a great strain on the crops. Cooper is widowed and father or two, Thomas (eventually Casey Affleck) and Murphy (eventually Jessica Chastain), who is convinced there is a ghost haunting her bedroom. Since Murphy and Cooper (not Tom) are both geniuses, they figure out that this ghost is an unknown intelligence sending them coordinates to a NASA site in binary code.
Turns out the NASA has been trying to figure out the survival of humanity for all these years and has really ramp-up the search for a new, habitable exoplanet. The last piece to their puzzle was finding the proper pilot, their very own Chuck Yeager, trained and willing to spend years of his life in space. When Cooper is thrown unto their lap by a freak occurrence of destiny, of course he's not willing to let his kids fend for himself on apocalypse Earth, but since he's a man of vision and great compassion, and all, he sacrifices himself (and his family) for the greater good of mankind.
I'm sure you're wondering what the fuck is that metal thing, too. It's not a monolith!
The science is not the problem in INTERSTELLAR. The movie is hell-bent on showing you how cool and uncanny (and somewhat simple) the theory of relativity is, and it does. The sequences alternating the crisis situation on Earth and Cooper's team exploring the first two worlds are fascinating. It's bold, cowboy-like sometimes (could I have avoided the science-fiction cliché of diving through a black hole? I'm not sure) and ridiculously complex towards the end, but it really commits to the scientific theories that are part of its storyline. It'll satisfy your inner nerd.
What bugged me (or should I say the main thing that bugged me about INTERSTELLAR), was that the heavy scientific aspect is concealing a pretty weak script. I might've read that wrong, but what is the interest in this movie, outside of the weepy bond Cooper has to his daughter? No other character is interesting. It's not that hard to write a decent support character. Nolan's done it before. You just need to give it one trait that contrasts with what he does. In INTERSTELLAR, everybody is Scientist X, selflessly vowing his/her life to the survival of humanity. Especially the co-lead Anne Hathaway, who's character has as much personality as an empty Tupperware container without the lid on. Maybe I'm reading too much intoit, but I felt like INTERSTELLAR was giving me a big fuck you for not having reproduced yet.
I get it, though. I get how this kind of movie is written. Everyone who's ever tried to write fiction has this story that's so important to them, that they lose all perspective on it, and always end up writing weepy bullshit because of that. It's why editors are important, ladies and gentlemen, they are the gatekeepers of narrative quality. When you get as popular as Christopher Nolan though, people stop criticizing you altogether. It happens to Stephen King sometimes, too. They just want a part of you, to be a part of your success, so since INCEPTION was just a spectacular success, I'm sure nobody even gave a second thought about letting INTERSTELLAR go into filming without a healthy round of edits.
It might hurt some butts that I say that, but it's a bloated and self-important movie that manages to remain watchable through spectacular and scientifically accurate scenes of epic grandeur and a rewarding inherent causality, even if its thematic conclusion is just about the most ridiculous, self-centered, narrow-minded and unscientific pile of crap I've ever heard. I'm no gatekeeper of scientific integrity here, but I'm pretty sure the hypothesis that saves everybody in INTERSTELLAR is debatable at best, and refutable within 20 seconds by people who know what they're talking about. INTERSTELLAR was not a joyless viewing for me, but it was most definitely a frustrating one.