If Kubrick's 2001 had a good ending.

Rating: Null/10 (24 June 2016)

Who can forget Kubrick's visual rendition of Arthur C. Clarke's "2001 s Space Odyssey", with it's incredibly impressive visual effects. Effects that predate CGI by several decades, and hold up to this very day.
But Kubrick's masterpiece (one of many) had an ambiguous if not downright ethereal, puzzling, and some might venture "supernatural" ending to a film whose final stages were nearly uninterpretable if you did not know the actual story Clarke had written.
Interstellar takes that same kind of story vibe, but goes the distance with an ending that's a little more palatable. Only Interstellar is not the masterpiece that Kurbrick's film was. Like a lot of corporate "art" meant for mass consumption, the casting, the story, the production value elements, to me, come across as being the product of market research.
It's a hollow film that tries to put heart into a story that really doesn't have a heart. Instead there's an emotional plot regarding the separation and reunion of family members after a crisis separates them.
One tries to be forgiving of liberties taken with stories, but there really weren't any liberties taken here. If the male lead wasn't cast because of market research, then I don't know what is. In short, that's exactly why he was cast, and why his voice was modulated. And why the dialogue for the "hero characters" is pithy and filled with zingers as they talk to one another about technical matters.
I really was groaning. Why is it that films like Secretariat, ostensibly a NON-Science-Fiction movie hold my attention, me, a big science fiction fan, and yet when a sci-fi movie comes around, I can barely stand the thing? Why is that?
It's because of the aforementioned reasons.
Years back I went and saw the remake of Solaris. It was far more tangible and palatable than the Russian film, but suffered very minor parallel mis steps of Interstellar. All the computers and technical stuff were nice and shiny. Well, okay, but the characters don't know everything, nor are they caught in the dark with predictable plot twists, like Interstellar, nor are they partially reliant on massive CGI vistas, as per Interstellar.
Interstellar has a lot going for it, but it's all the result of corporate research, and not the product of artistry. The director was told what script to shoot, the script itself was vetted, and you can see just looking at it that there was someone standing by making sure elements A, B and C were tossed into this film to make sure X, Y and Z marks were hit.
I remember from my boyhood watching "First Men in the Moon". It's an impossible tale about Victorian adventurers going to the moon to discover its wonders. Nothing there attempts to be scientifically accurate. Far from it. But it's a convincing and entertaining visual tale (for the time anyway ... the effects may be somewhat dated for younger viewers). But, as a film, it delivered.
Interstellar feels like a very empty experience regardless of the technical wizardry and everything else that got dumped into it. I'm glad I didn't see it in the theatre, and I'm glad I was able to stream it for free off of Amazon.
A better film would have done away with all the attempts to mimic past "realistic" sci-fi, and stuck with the story. A better film would not have had to make a point of educating the audience on black holes. A better film would not have used all the god-awful cinematography and audio junk to appease to various audiences.
To me Interstellar is the scifi equivalent of a politician who promises everything to everybody, and winds up delivering nothing in the end. Predictable and not worth the money.
Watch at your own risk.