Last Saturday afternoon at 2 PM, as I walked out of the theater after nearly three hours of an interstellar experience, the broad daylight of the town was quite contradicting to the otherwise dark and dusty reality I had just witnessed. Okay, who am I kidding? There was no broad daylight outside. It was just the standard dim twilight that you find during a typical Danish November. And things haven’t gotten better in the past week, the sun has been largely missing, and the end of the world (read winter) is coming. 

Nevertheless, as I began to return home, only one question haunted me: “Did I like the movie?” I hadn’t quite settled on that one immediately, probably because of the notion that “I should like the movie, it is from Nolan after all.” And then I remembered, how his last, The Dark Knight Rises was a big disappointment. Finally, it hit me. If I am asking myself whether I liked something or not, and if I have to evaluate such a basic feeling, then probably I didn’t like it and am just finding reasons to like/appreciate what others have already endorsed. 

Interstellar, then I figured, was a long, weary, and ambitious drama that tried to hit me at so many levels that it succeeded at none. It wanted to grasp and then explain so much of everything that in that pursuit it lost its basic coherence. 

Major spoilers ahead. Read only if you’re a semi-lunatic. 

The Good

I can’t praise enough of the aesthetics and the overall spectacle that Nolan managed to create with every object he chose to portray.

#1 The spaceships, the worm hole, the black hole, the space colony, the tesseract - everything was fine-tuned to scientific precision and artistic awe. That the rendering of the black hole for a few minutes worth of footage led to novel scientific knowledge shows how Nolan essentially is a perfectionist and visionary.

#2 Bordering on the edge of fantasy, the film managed to pull off quite a number of neat tricks extrapolating on layperson’s current understanding of the exotic physics of space, time, and gravity.

#3 Then there were few exciting scenes which allowed me to jump happily on my chair: like when Cooper saves the drifting, rotating Endurance, the final explanation of the books falling from the book-racks and the crazy locomotion of the robots, running and all. 

The Bad

What bugged me, though, was the loose plot and shady storytelling stitched together with vague characters. Characters who were less interesting than the TARS robot itself. Most of the time, when the actors weren’t busy quipping cheesy dialogues, trying to teach physics to an invisible audience (or reciting Dylan Thomas), their voices were conveniently subdued by the burgeoning background score. 

#1 Interstellar tends to convey that “love” transcends all dimensions. It’s really “Guilt” and “Desperation” that transcends, it seems. Cooper is guilty of leaving his kids alone and Amelia is desperate to see this other stranded space guy. 

#2 No sooner that Cooper hops onto the ship he plans to drive like his truck, he’s already keen on returning back to his kids. Confused priorities, I guess. And meanwhile, Amelia (who is supposed to be very smart and all, daughter of this crazy scientist who runs NASA alone) is secretly inclining to risk everything just so that she can have her romance. And yet, these bunch of emotional fools represent the “best” of humanity. 

#3 What was wrong with this Dr. Mann. I have not seen anyone more stupid than him in the entire movie. Every action he took, was stupid. Think about it. And he too, was the best of the best. Oh, well. 

#4 And Romilly? Why was he there in the movie? Okay I get it. For diversity. I see. Then there’s no need to develop his character. Right. He served as a nice prop to show the passage of years. Just for the sake of diversity, you could have thrown an Asian guy in the crew too. No, no, wait, that’s too much diversity. It’s kind of an American movie, you see. The point is to show how Americans have been pioneers, etc and how much they love baseball, etc. 

#5 The ending is the worst part. All this time, the movie builds on this emotional drama of a father returning back to his daughter on time and when daddy finally returns back home, the daughter is, very anti-climatically, too old to pass for anybody’s daughter. While this nicely explains the side effects of space/time travel, it fails to draw a nice ending. And on top of that, Cooper looks at her for a few seconds, and suddenly, he is now drenched of all the fatherly emotion which has been driving him crazy all the time. Instead, his manly passions overpower him, and feeling happy that he has gotten rid of his parental duties (by simply evading them), he’s immediately reminded that he, a pitiable, widowed husband, hasn’t slept with a woman in like 100 years (technically), and now must seek out the only hot woman in the universe he has been craving for all along. Lo, and behold, he jumps on another spaceship in a cowboy style (very American, you see), hunting for his lady love. “Desperation”, not love, truly transcends all dimensions. 

#6 But the movie doesn’t end here, the worried audience is pacified by the information that Amelia is indeed single and ready to mingle (her lover is sort of dead). This makes for a happy ending, in which a father who initially set out to square things with her daughter, ends up abandoning her completely while running after a woman he may not get. I’m sure they’ll get together fine in the sequel just like newly married couples do on a lonely planet, although Cooper must be ready to change a hell lot of diapers every day for the army of children that’ll be waiting for him. Kids, you see, they never let you have fun. That’s the overall message. 

Okay, I’ll stop here. Maybe I’m being too harsh. But then, this is Nolan, we’re talking about here. From the guy who made excellent films like The Memento, Insomnia, The Prestige, The Dark Knight, we certainly expect more. It’s not uncommon for a genius to occasionally make blunders under the limelight and burden of corporate investors (look what happened to Peter Jackson and the hobbit series). So, as all geniuses must, at some point in their lives, Nolan too needs to reinvent himself - for the better.