Cinemavenger

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Interstellar

Let me tell you about an amazing sci-fi film dripping with beautiful visuals and brimming with bring-you-to-tears emotional storytelling.  It takes place across centuries of time and immeasurable space.  It was written and directed by a visionary and features two of the hottest lead actors of the day.  This is a movie that will truly take your breath away.

Yup, Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain was pretty damn good.  I'm betting Christopher Nolan has seen it a few times, too, given that the parts of his nearly three hours long Interstellar that weren't obviously ripped off from 2001: A Space Oddysey, Contact and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy were at least "inspired by" if not outright stolen from Aronofsky's earlier, far superior work.

Interstellar is a perfect example of what happens when a director starts believing his own hype.  After making his bones with the intriguing mindfuckery of Memento, raising his profile with the best Batman movie to date, The Dark Knight, and cementing his status as auteur-of-the-moment with Inception, Nolan goes all Icarus and screws a pound full of pooches with this hokey, turgid, ass-numbingly dull cinematic endurance test.

Seriously, Interstellar is to Christopher Nolan as The Love Guru is to Mike Myers.

In the not too distant future, the Earth is dying.  Nothing grows but corn, and the big-brained, white lab coat types give us just one more generation before Homo sapiens goes the way of the dodo.  Humanity's only hope is to find a new planet to flee to before cannibalism and suffocation become the most popular pastimes.

Luckily, some aliens have placed a wormhole out near Saturn that leads to another galaxy containing a bunch of potential new homes for us ugly bags of mostly water.  Convenient that, eh? 

By the by, the fact that no one - not paternal Professor Brand (Michael Caine), his astrophysicist daughter Amelia (Anne Hathaway), pilot-turned-farmer-turned-pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) nor anyone else on the secret NASA save-the-humans team (Fuck those lazy whales!  Shit just got real!) - so much as bats an eyelash at the sudden proof of the existence of alien life is but the simplest and most elegant example of just how fucking inept this "big ideas" movie actually is.

And there can be no doubt that Nolan thinks he's touching on eternal truths and universal themes.  He has various characters quote Dylan Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" on no less than three occasions - each more laughable than the last.

Then there's the ending.  Even if you can look past the first two hours and 15 minutes or so of a movie that turns the desperate, last ditch efforts of a dying race to travel across galaxies dodging peril after peril in search of a new home into the most boring thing since your seven-year-old niece's school play (the one in which she played a rock . . . with no lines), you will undoubtedly get a rage boner (or rage sploosh for the ladies) when at the "climax" Nolan goes softer and squishier than Nicholas Sparks and has the balls to cloak it all in pseudo-scientific relativity hokum that makes as much sense as racing stripes on a dildo.

Don't believe the hype, Interstellar is the wrong stuff.

November 9, 2014