Falls short of greatness because of gimmicks

Rating: 8/10 (7 December 2014)

Interstellar is a great film. That's first and foremost. It's Olympic. But, once you're in the Olympics, you have to compete against the other Olympiads. You ought to be held in the highest esteem for the rest of your life for achieving that level in the first place, and then you compete for the gold medal. That's the way we are. We always look for more.
Interstellar is (insert details about director and actors here). The film feels like an independent feature at the same time it sweeps with epic grandeur. It's beautiful. It's exciting. But I would stop short calling it a work of art.
Kubrick's 2001 is a work of art. The reason I say that is simple. 2001 doesn't try to wrap things up in a neat little bow. 2001 ends as art. Art, in my humble opinion, approaches the inexplicable without the conceit of explaining it. Where Interstellar falls short of the gold is that it goes for the gimmick ending. I don't want to spoil it... Let's just say I liken it to Gravity, another amazing sci-fi movie that fell apart for me at the ending with the red baby shoes. (That film is old enough now that I feel comfortable with the spoiler.) She sees a dead guy, she thinks about the dead shoes, suddenly she knows how to get home and then she does and it's a happy ending. It does have its poetry and it's allegoric ministrations – how she floats like a fetus, how she takes her first woozy steps on land after her "birth" in the ocean back home – but it errs on the side of happy ending goo.
Interstellar had a theoretical physicist consultant. The film charts the full-circle course. Of course, the theoretical physics needs to be dumbed-down for a big audience. So there's that. The plot mechanics surrounding the fourth dimension et al start to fall apart once you think of them. They wouldn't though, if the film took a different tack for the denouement.
In 2001, Kier Dulla flies off into the great beyond. There is symbolism. There is magic. There is little that is explained. In Interstellar, the ending is peppered with sudden bursts of explication. Oh, this happened because(In case you didn't put it together yourself.) All of that magic, all of that build up is explained away by this ending exegesis and one pretty lousy "twist" gimmick.
It's unfortunate. Perhaps William Blake is appropriate. "When nations grow old, the arts grow cold, and commerce settles on every tree." Kubrick wanted to retool filmmaking. He was an artist. Nolan may or may not be an artist, but Interstellar is a commercial film. There is nothing inherently wrong with this (Blake quote notwithstanding). It's just, for my taste, I want to be jettisoned off into that great beyond, left to wonder, left to feel the void, the abyss, the art. Not to be yanked back home by some watered-down theoretical physics that doesn't hold up too well under scrutiny.
In fairness, it provokes some fun thinking and good debate possibilities. And it is, as a work of entertainment, a ton of fun. There are beautiful vistas and some really clever moments. It's a fun ride. It's an Olympic film, but I think it will be caught doping.