2001 for Dummies

Rating: 5/10 (29 December 2014)

If Spielberg had wanted to remake 2001 that is the kind of stuff we could have expected. Kubrick was derided as being to coldly cerebral (by the hilarious Pauline Kael) so his opus with Arthur C. Clarke was a powerful - philosophical - ellipse about mankind. Interstellar is a dumbed down version where humans do get to express their feelings and AI have a humour parameter.
I liked the futuristic vision of Earth, it was great to see something different, in between post-doomsday and pure phantasmagoria. Now the way to connect a brilliant pilot (simply the best) stuck in the dust to the plan to go interstellar was just a gigantic leap of faith for anyone invoking suspension of disbelief. Not that it stroke me violently as such during the show but you are waiting for the Man to fly to the stars and when you see how they managed to transition to this part you do feel this is cheap.
Then Interstellar moves forth with lots of boring exposition about why, when, what if... that is all supposed to give us a scientific and credible background. This is simply not very good. Then we get to watch the movie we came for as they reach for the Stars Gate near Saturn (2001), simply called a worm-hole. Most of what follows suffers from the same sin of too much rational exposition in between irrational action by top skilled characters.
In the end you are just a passive viewer not knowing if the whole movie added anything to the genre or just mixed pompous mankind stakes with routine Hollywood melodrama. With Solaris Tarkovski already had his own answer to the lack of human feeling in 2001, which Soderbergh remade. Anything less subtle about human feelings for an astronaut is trash. Nobody goes to watch a movie about The Future of Mankind and Serious Space Exploration while only expecting characters to be as emotionally unstable as in a soap opera.