Should be titled Star Trek: Interstellar!

Rating: 7/10 (22 February 2017)

Due to the legion (apparently!) of cinematic (and televisual) ignoramuses who insist that each successive Nolan movie is a greater masterpiece than the previous one, the more educated viewer is required to treat popular (and no small amount of critical) opinion on Nolan's films with scepticism. 'Interstellar' is a case in point. Cutting to the chase: (a) An artificial wormhole that leads from our part of the Galaxy to the other side is straight out of 'Deep Space Nine'. (b) Love as 'wormhole' connecting us with events in our past; again straight from the premiere of DS9. Arguably, the stunning DS9 episode 'The Visitor' examines this same idea to even greater effect. (c) A more advanced form of life intervening in the development of a less advanced one, possibly due to the former having evolved from the latter: DS9 again. (d) Using 'technobabble' to reduce the 'inertial mass' of a space station so that it can be moved closer to the wormhole: DS9 again. (e) Baseball is Benjamin Sisko's favorite sport; the game features in multiple episodes of the show. Although the baseball breaking the window of the house on the space station wall is a beautiful touch! To be sure, 'Interstellar' doesn't confine its 'borrowing' to 'Star Trek'; the explanation of how a wormhole works is lifted directly from 'Event Horizon'. The ending is reminiscent of the 60s movie 'The Time Machine'. Bottom line: like most sci-fi movies, it's neither startlingly original nor deeply philosophical. In fact, the TV show it 'borrows' so freely from did a far better job of presenting the idea that 'love...transcends time and space' than Nolan does here (Anne Hathaway giving what must surely rank as one of her worst performances ever, to boot). If that example of how the 'great' Christopher Nolan couldn't rise above the directorial standards of a TV show isn't bad enough, the execution of the movie's 'celestial temple' sequence, where Cooper communicates with Murph across time, must surely demonstrate to anyone but the most fanatical Nolanite how poorly Nolan ranks as an employer of visual storytelling; the presentation of multiple instances in the timeline of the room could have, and with a better director would have, allowed the audience to infer that the spiritual connection between Cooper and his loved ones was acting as the 'bridge' between him and Murph without Cooper having to baldly say so! This could have been achieved (and this is only one example!) by presenting more of the room's timeline through shots of the earlier stages in the daughter's life, with her mother as an infant, as a toddler with Cooper and her older brother, etc. Interestingly, for a film that asserts that 'love...transcends time and space', none of the characters have any photographs of their departed loved ones! Of course, maybe Nolan simply underestimates the intelligence of his audience and therefore feels it necessary to 'tell' them what's going on instead of 'showing' them, ironic considering how Nolanites consider themselves to be on a higher intellectual level than the average moviegoer. This movie goes absolutely nowhere that other sci-fi movies or TV shows haven't already gone before.