Highly Overrated

Rating: 5/10 (1 April 2015)

Earth is over populated and is running out of food. All crops fail due to the worldwide blight except for corn and in time the corn will fail too. NASA decides to send a ship into space to look for a planet so mankind can survive. Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) a former NASA pilot and now a corn farmer is chosen to pilot the ship. It's been years since he last flew, but hey, it's like riding a bike. They must have seen McConaughey driving that Lincoln in a commercial and said, "you know, he could be our pilot."
You need a couple things before sitting down with popcorn to watch this movie: (1) A box of Kleenex, (2) the Remote knowing where the Volume Control is at all times if you watch the DVD as I did.
The best part of this movie is the first 45-minutes before blast-off to space. We see the premise which is all about love and family as witnessed between father (Cooper) and daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy). Yes, it is all about survival too, but love wins out. Here you need the Kleenex at times.
On a ride thru the cornfield Cooper and Murph come upon a secret NASA base where the Rocket is. Secret? Didn't the person who planted the corn see the security fences? What were they thinking?
Blast-Off: Here you need the Remote because the sound is deafening and not only here but all the way thru the movie. Why the deafening sounds? What were they thinking? And often the music (HA) is loud enough so we cannot really hear all the dialogues among the characters. We get bits and pieces, but there are times we need to know something and cannot. Rewinding the DVD doesn't help all that much. Since we know the movie is about 3-hours long, we cannot waste time doing the rewind bit and we give it a rest. However, most of the conversations are about love, family and survival and we got the jest of all that even though we hear a lot of mumbling. What were they thinking?
This is not Star Trek. We cared about the people in that show. Here we do not. There is a lot of Science-speak among the ship's crew, but this loses us most of the time; and how accurate this is cannot be known by us.
We are used to a metallic voice from a computer or a soothing voice like we heard by HAL in 2001. Here the computer voice is too human sounding (I looked around thinking this was another crew member) and looks like metallic air vents that can walk. What were they thinking?
The acting all around was okay, nothing Oscar Worthy. However, Mackenzie Foy as Murph did stand out. Notables: John Lithgow, Anne Hathaway, William DeVane, Michael Caine, Casey Affleck, Jessica Chastain as the older Murph, Ellen Burstyn as Murph on her death bed, and Matt Damon.
Visuals were disappointing for the most part. We see the wings of the ship most of the time. They couldn't help it that the CGI guy had to take a mental health day or was that "days?" The shots inside the ship were very good.
The mission is to fly to that Wormhole aliens put there so Earth people would find it and go through to a new planet and people of Earth will be saved. Yes, they go through (shades of the TV show SG-1) but later end up going through the Black Hole thinking they can survive and succeed and find a planet.
There are 2-twists that surprised us. When the first one hits the action actually starts and woke us up. The next twist is mind-blowing and you won't like it. Like I said, this is overrated. Does it save itself? Barely. What were they thinking? (5/10)
Violence: Yes. Sex: No. Nudity: No. Language: Only 2 F-bombs