Spoilers and Such.
Yet another post apocalyptic movie about what bastards humans are for destroying the world. But unlike such uplifting films as The Road Warrior, there is no hope left for life on earth. So we have to send out a team of intrepid explorers to find a new world for us to ruin.
Interstellar is like a lot of recent films. It has a mostly all star cast, amazing visual effects, a few tear jerker moments and a plot that makes no damned sense at all. The characters spend a lot of time talking about Relativity and Gravity and Equations, as if dropping in a few strands of real science could make up for the few strands of Paradox and Fantasy and totally made up for the film science that makes it all work.
The usual fall back position for sloppy writing like this is that we are supposed to ‘suspend disbelief’ as we watch a lot of clearly impossible things happen. And did we like it? Did it make us feel something? Well, I guess confusion is something. So yeah, let’s go with the Ok, I liked it, even if none of it made even the tiniest bit of sense.
Interstellar is basically a ship wreck story where we have replaced a long sea voyage into the unknown with a long space voyage into the unknown, our hero even mentions yachts at one time for reason whatsoever. The difference, of course, is that we know about oceans and boats and islands and such in the real world. None of the stuff in Interstellar exists outside the framework of the film. A planet orbits a black hole, a tiny ship creates its own gravity by spin, the future and the past are pretty much the same place, and Some Body Out There Likes Us.
Truth be told, Interstellar could be giving an accurate account of things that we don’t really know. These are things that we might never be known, such as what it’s like to go into a wormhole or a black hole. One of the major problems that they just kind of skip over has to do with our main hero going to a planet close to a black hole, where time moves a lot faster than normal. One of the guys stays on the ship and ages about twenty years. Ok, so what did he eat? We are told many times that everyone on earth is starving to death, so there are no food Replicators ala Star Trek. Even if he had wanted to stay awake all that time, there’s no way he could have. We even met another character a few scenes later that says he ran out of supplies pretty quickly and had to put himself into cold sleep.
Interstella was fun to watch and they did leave the door open for a sequel. Does it rank up there with 2001 or The Terminator or The Matrix or Alien? No, not really. But it is right in the same ballpark as Gravity.
