Interstellar is a movie directed by Christopher Nolan, arguably one of the best directors of this age. He has made amazing movies but Interstellar is a lightyear away from being one of them. Even before it was released, Interstellar received hundreds of 10-star reviews, people wanted it to be the best movie ever and thus they convinced themselves that it was. That is why it won the awards and is ranked high, because people wanted it to be that way even before it was released. Either that or they were complete morons. Now the generic response to criticism is that “You didn’t understand the science!”, on the contrary I understood the science and it really was accurate and spot on, and the score was decent at best. The acting for the most part was great, they were able to sell some really horrid dialogue. Everything else however……not so much. Interstellar is about love, Nolan reiterates that several thousand times throughout the movie. It also has, good and evil and exploration. Instead of a space thriller like Star Wars however, you get a boring three hour long waste of your life.
  

The movie starts by introducing us to a doomed world where the people can no longer grow okra and have to rely on good corn to survive. In this world people force everyone to become farmers to grow more corn and not scientists who can maybe fix the problem. They tell us that people are dying and that food is running out but we never see anything of that sort. In this world lives Matthew McConaghey starring as Cooper, the man never addressed by his first name. Cooper is a pilot turned corn farmer living with his father in law(John Lithgow) and Mackenzie Foy playing his 10 year old daughter Murph (Get used to that name you’ll hear it a lot, 79 times to be exact). He also has a son but no one (including himself) gives a rat’s fart about him, not even you. He (by means I cannot tell you but assure you are ridiculous) finds out about Secret NASA, yes…. SECRET NASA, who want to fix the problem by moving to space and not just fixing the problem on Earth. They are headed by Nolan’s favorite old guy, Alfred...I mean Michael Caine as Dr.Brand who made a space ship out of concrete (no joke). It turns out that Dr.Brand knew Cooper and it also turns out that they were just about to go on a space mission and they needed a pilot, lucky them. A wormhole appeared and on the other side there are three planets that could sustain life that they need to explore. Funny that the wormhole is near Saturn, who was the god of agriculture and time. They quickly slap together a team made up of Cooper Dr. Brand’s daughter (Anne Hathaway) two extras and a pair of walking, talking, joke telling ATM’s. They skip any training whatsoever so Cooper can have a five minute good-bye to his daughter, forget about his son and finally get into space after just 44 minutes of run-time. The shots of the space craft look terrible however. It seems like Nolan stuck a camera on the wing of a toy spacecraft and just swung it around and around. They meet a planet with knee deep water, a very icy planet, a guest feature and a planet that actually looks habitable, but they visit that last because that makes total sense…right?
   

Interstellar is a galactic mess. Nolan repeatedly bangs us over the head with the main theme of the movie, love. Like any old Hollywood cliché the main theme of the movie is love, which Nolan so subtly tells us a billion times.

The first time I hear about love transcending space and time it alright I guess, but when half the dialogue revolves around it, it’s like Nolan thinks his audience is so dumb that his need to be reminded what the central theme is every few minutes. Nolan also has the characters explain science to their fellow super smart scientists as if they were talking to 4 year olds using every metaphor and piece of symbolism he can. Speaking of the dialogue, it is horrible. The only way Nolan pulled it off was by getting the best actors in the business to read them. Either that or play Hans Zimmer really loud and have the character mumble away. Another thing is that Interstellar doesn’t really show you anything it just tells you what to feel. When the director wants you to feel awed, he doesn’t show you the view, he shows you a close up of Matthew McConaghey looking awed.  He also has the characters clearly stating their motives throughout the film. It’s as if he thinks we too dumb to understand. The sound mixing is terrible, drowning out the horrendous dialogue, I mean it’s hard enough to catch up on McConaghey mumbling about gravitational anomalies, quantifiable connection, five dimensional beings and Murph’s bedroom (at the same time), but with Hans Zimmer sleeping on the organ in the background (background is an understatement because that music is basically all you can hear) it’ll give you a god-darn headache. The plot is choppy at some times and drawn out at others leaving you disorientated, thinking “Wait he just ____ three seconds ago and now they’re _____“. It is a movie that has remarkable scientists forgetting how to open air hatches, scientists who never realized that a  water planet near a black hole would have large tidal waves due to gravity until the waves arrived, old guys reading the same poem over and over again, trucks with flat tires driving through corn 10 feet high being able to keep up with a flying drone, burning corn, robots with humor settings, ghosts, the Yankees as a travel team, bad fathers and all that scientific accuracy going down a black hole towards the end. This movie is basically Third Encounters of a Third Kind, Blade Runner, Contact, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Dust Bowl blended together with a little bit of science and the Hollywood cliché of love triumphs all. How this movie won an Oscar for originality is beyond me.