It's a sad fate for creative people. First you make a masterpiece or two. The entire industry bows at your feet. Now you're making your next work but you've lost the all-important advantage of critical feedback, because there's nobody left who has the guts to tell you when you're making something fucking dreadful. It happened to George Lucas with the Star Wars prequels, it happened to Peter Jackson with the Hobbit movies, and now it's happened to Christopher Nolan with his new blockbuster train wreck, Interstellar.
As the name suggests, this is a film about interstellar travel. However, we don't actually get to see any of that for at least the first half hour of the film. Instead we stay on Earth with a series of pastoral scenes that would be more at home in a daytime soap opera than a Hollywood blockbuster. Presumably, Christopher and his co-writer/brother Jonathan Nolan didn't feel confident that they could get the audience to connect with the characters unless they spent a good deal of time establishing them. This is a good idea in theory but with this film's wooden dialogue and bargain-bin stereotypes, even another three hours probably couldn't have gotten me to give a damn about anyone on the screen.
So, after a half hour of corn farming, the story finally takes off into space. Things will get more better from here on, right? Nope. Once the ship is through the wormhole is when it becomes painfully clear that we're watching a film produced from a first-draft script. I could complain that none of the scientists in this movie talk like scientists, but frankly the broader problem is that the people in the movie don't talk like people. Half-baked Deepak Chopra-style musings on the nature of time and space are shoehorned awkwardly into the dialogue. Characters' emotions and motivations are not shown through action, but outright stated to the camera. And it's beyond me how Anne Hathaway managed to get through her atrocious monologue in which she states that "love is the only thing that can transcend time and space" without barfing.
The film's plot has more holes than a colander, but still somehow manages to be broadly predictable, probably because it draws so heavily on cliches established by earlier, better films. There are trippy wormhole sequences but they aren't nearly as interesting as in 2001. The banal second-act "twist" attempts to replicate the sense of existential isolation from films like Moon and Dark Star, but falls far short. And the silent space action sequences are a poor man's Gravity, with none of the deft editing and spatial geography that made that film work.
Indeed, it's apparent that Nolan's style as a cinematographer has gone backwards. He's still able to competently frame a shot, but Interstellar has none of visual inventiveness of Inception nor the kinetic energy of the Batman films. Instead we get interminably long "action" scenes where nothing happens except the frenetic cutting of shots and the drone of obnoxiously loud space organ music, forcing an artificial sense of "tension" down our throats.
Which brings me to my single biggest complaint about the film: it is so god damn long. The one moment of true empathy I found with the characters was in the scene where McConnaughey's daughter is frantically looking at her watch, since that was what I'd been doing for the past two hours. Like Peter Jackson, Nolan seems to be under the impression that the way to make a movie 'epic' is to take an average-length story and then make everything twice as long as it needs to be. A competent editor with the balls to stand up to Nolan could easily have cut 20-30 minutes from the film just by downsizing each scene. A really good editor could have cut another 30 minutes by excising Matt Damon's subplot altogether. This wouldn't have saved the movie but it would have saved me some time.
Interstellar has been hailed as another "thought-provoking" and "mind-bending" science fiction film, but it has neither the emotional nor the scientific depth to stand alongside the greats of the genre. It's a superficial carnival ride through the realms of hard sci-fi, flashing one concept after another before the audience as though trying to dazzle us with quantity rather than quality. And this is the quality that makes a movie not just boring but insufferable: it's stupid, but it thinks it's smart.
