Interstellar

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I want to love all Christopher Nolan’s movies since I am such a big fan of Memento, the Batman trilogy and Inception. Then there was Insomnia which I have no desire to ever watch again. I feel like Interstellar might fall into that pile, even though I did enjoy parts of it. As a whole, it left me feeling underwhelmed.

Matthew McConaughey stars as Cooper, a former NASA pilot, who lives in a world where most of society has given up on science due to something humans have done where the only food that can still grow is corn and not for much longer. He manages to stumble across a secret space station right around the corner from where he lives (convenient!) and they ask him to pilot a mission through a worm hole to find a suitable planet for humans to inhabit. There is no guarantee he will make it back from the mission so he can decide to do it to save mankind, but might not ever see his kids again. On the off chance he does see his kids, many years possibly could have passed. Due to a bunch of science talk that I have no idea is accurate or not, but have no problem believing for a movie, time way out in space near a black hole goes by much slower for those near it than those back on Earth.

It is quite the set-up for the movie, and it takes a really long time to get through it. By the time Cooper is ready to go out into space, I had forgotten it was a space movie. It felt like the movie should be wrapping up what had been up until that point a father/daughter movie between Cooper and his rebel daughter Murph. Cooper also has a son, but he’s pretty much ignored throughout the movie so I’m not sure why he was part of it. All scenes with the son could have been cut and nothing would have been lost.  I was enjoying the father/daughter movie, but it was too long before it finally turned towards exploring space. I would have enjoyed the father/daughter relationship being established quicker before he left for space.

Once the team was heading out into space, I enjoyed it. I really enjoyed the robot TARS that was on board with all the astronauts, but then I always enjoy random bits of humor in any movie. It was out in space where we learned that they really only had a chance to check out one, or possibly two, of the five planets that scientists had visited years before. They had limited data sent back on all of them so they had no idea if the scientists were still alive or not. I would have really enjoyed if this part had been the entire movie. I found it fascinating that they had were making major decisions for all of mankind and if they made the wrong ones, they could all go extinct. Plus, they had different worlds to check out!

That was most of the second half of the movie, but at the very end, there is a twist and talk of different dimensions. It was entertaining and corny at the same time. It was fun to watch, but I was also rolling my eyes at the sentimentality. Or I could have been rolling my eyes at the music. Every time there was something that was supposed to make the audience feel an emotion, the music swelled up so loud that sometimes you couldn’t hear what anyone was saying. Background music should evoke an emotional response from an audience, but you shouldn’t notice that it is doing it. This was not subtle.

As for the acting, it was pretty much all Matthew McConaughey. People acted opposite him, but he was the main attraction, which was fine since he was excellent as usual. I actually believed he could be an astronaut. I felt bad for Anne Hathaway. I was excited for a female astronaut and then they turned her into a stereotypical blubbering girl making emotional decisions out of love. Then to be random, she became a love connection for Cooper at the end, even though they really hadn’t spent that much time together, and I’m not sure if she was over pining for another dude that she had just been making major emotional decisions over.

Overall, there was too much going on with this movie. I love long movies, but I don’t want to actually feel like they are long. When a movie is especially long, but good, I still don’t want it to end. I was ready for it to wrap up before Cooper even went into space. Even though I enjoyed the last half of the movie, there were too many things it was trying to accomplish so it felt all over the place. I didn’t really make a connection like I think it was hoping for from the audience. It did look very cool though.

Grade: C+

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