Theatrical Reviews: Interstellar

Imagine if you will a Christopher Nolan movie that utilized few if any of Nolan’s narrative strength’s.  The Neo-noir settings are replaced by a “space odyssey” rip-off, the complex philosophical conclusions are replaced by head-strong optimism and the whole thing is underwritten with gutless black and white morality.  The movie you are imagining probably looks a lot like Interstellar.

For the majority of interstellar the film works really well, it has a good pacing and a clear setting.  Sure there are a few lame plot failings and unconvincing emotions, but these are acceptable flaws for a film this grandiose.  No, Interstellar mostly fails in its pay-off.

The movie spends almost two hours or so building up to something.  These astronauts are trying to get through space to save humanity, and have to make lots of tough decisions along the way, and it’s all very emotionally resonant.  It even mostly works from a scientific perspective, as time slows and speeds at different ways as the gravity increases and decreases around them.  It’s all very exciting, and surprisingly smart.

But then we get to the ending.

The final scenes of Interstellar involve Mathew McConaughey’s character blasting himself into a black-hole (for no good reason.)  This black hole leads to a giant tesseract within the 5^th dimension that allows him access to his daughter’s book shelf on earth which he then uses to send a message back through time that she uses to save the human race.  Once the human race is saved they somehow construct the tesseract that McConaughey is in, so that they can make sure that he can influence the past so they can survive until the present.

Anyone who knows even a little bit about black holes can point out a few point of total complete nonsense in this.  On top of all this McConaughey is convinced that all of this is possible because the love that he feels for his daughter (who is at that time over a hundred years old) is not actually a standard emotion, but a tangible real force that travels through the fifth dimension, like some kind of quantum entanglement of the soul.

So scientific fiddle faddle aside, the movie ends when the world is saved by the power of love.

There are a lot of smart thought provoking ways that this movie could have ended, but this was not one of them.  It almost seems like an ending that was written at the last minute.  After hours of thoughtful and well paced sci-fi procedure, the movie takes a giant romanticized dump on the audience.  Worse, it takes a romanticized dump that is pretending to be 2001: A Space Odyssey.

One might watch the movie and come away saying that it's ending is complex, but it's definitely not.  The movie does a poor job describing it's shoddy ending in the hope that you won't realize how silly it is.  It also assumes that you don't know how black holes work (hint:  If light can't escape a black hole then people don't even have a hope of getting near one without being crushed.)

It's very sad that the movies quality engines fail during the third act, because the rest of the movie, especially the stuff with the astronauts in space, is incredibly good.  It's probably good enough that I should ignore the bad stuff.  But those flaws are just to glaring to ignore;  To watch Interstellar without noticing any of what's wrong with it may be nearly impossible.

There are quite a few things in this movie that made me question the decision making skills of the characters involved, but I would have forgiven them all if the movie could have ended on a high note instead of a stupid one.  If you’re okay with a movie that sells itself on scientific accuracy and resolves thanks to the quantum mechanics of love, then you’ll probably like Interstellar fine.  I unfortunately cannot get past it.  This whole movie was a build up to an epic conclusion, and the build up worked great; the ending however was so dense that it sunk the whole movie down to the depth's.  I recommend you turn your brain off right after Matt Damon's character dies.

Thanks for reading!  It spent a solid headache trying to understand what the ending of Interstellar was about, and I didn't really explain it all here.  If you have any question, I'll be happy to answer any emails, messages or comments you leave for me.  You can reach me at atchleyosaurus@gmail.com!