My Review of Interstellar, Spoilers!!!

Rating: 3/10 (11 November 2014)

I recently had to see Interstellar for class. Going into the movie I was not happy. I really wanted to avoid this movie because so far, most of the movies I've seen from Nolan, I've loathed. I don't like his writing, and I feel that his writing and directing is pretentious and insulting towards people with brains. His characters rarely talk to each other, they just give exposition at each other, and they usually aren't characters. This movie, while not Nolan's worst in my opinion, still had all those ingredients that I don't like about Nolan.
This movie was predictable to me, the second I saw the Worm Hole I knew some sort of time travel was going to happen. Same when I saw the Black Hole, when Murphy mentions a ghost I already got that Cooper as going to be the ghost in some sort of stable time loop.
Also, a lot of the plot points in the movie have been done before, and done better. For example; *The planet is dying, they need to find/make a new earth for humanity with a gene bomb. --Ladies and gentlemen, here is the plot kick off for Titan A.E. by Don Bluth.
*We have a Worm Hole that leads to another section of the universe. --Hi Star Trek: Deep Space 9! How you doing over there with your seven seasons of storyline with a Worm Hole? *Black Hole and Time Travel. --Anyone who's grown up on Doctor Who, Star Trek, and a few hundred movies, shows and books on time travel, space travel, and the like would see this coming a mile away. Hell, Black Holes that make ships travel in time was part of the major plot points of J.J. Abram's Star Trek reboot.
*A man marooned on an isolated planet/island goes mad from the isolation. --Treasure Island, and several other movies and books deal with this better.
*A person travels through time and creates a stable time loop. --Terminator, Back to the Future, and other movies tackle this beautifully. Even the Bill and Ted movies deal with this better.
So, like I said, other movies have done a lot of these stories, and done them better in my opinion. We didn't need another movie that makes it look like it's something that has never happened before have the audience sit through two hours and 50 minutes with no three dimensional characters that don't go through character arcs at all. In the 2h50m movie the audience learns nothing about the characters that we didn't know hours ago.
Aside from Murphy and Cooper, the rest of the cast are pretty much Character Archetypes with no growth. Cooper wants to save humanity and get back to his kids after getting his last chance to go into space. Amelia wants to save humanity and get with her boyfriend, and I have no clue who Red Shirts one and two were and what they wanted. And at the end of the movie, Cooper and Amelia haven't changed. Cooper was just rejected by his daughter that hated him for most of her life for leaving her, and Amelia's boyfriend is dead.
*Cooper is obviously the Hero.
*Murphy is the Chosen one, or the Earth Mother, take your pick.
*Amelia Brand is the Star Crossed Lover.
*Doyle and Romilly, who I needed to look up on the IMDb to get their names are nothing more than Red Shirts. There was nothing for them to do except die. What was their purpose, what did they do in the movie aside from die? Who were they? *Dr. Mann is the Shadow to Cooper's hero.
*Professor Brand is the Mentor, who is also a Shapeshifter and turns out to be another Shadow, mainly to Amelia.
*Tom is a Shadow to Murphy and he totally disappears from the movie without a mention when Murph runs out of the house with the watch and the formula she needed.
*TARS and CASE are the Loyal Retainers. In other words, they are the Sidekicks to the hero.
Cooper going back in time with TARS through the black hole was something I saw coming the second I saw that there was a Worm Hole and Black Hole.
This movie is mind blowing for people who aren't familiar with science fiction and time travel tropes. But for someone who has been raised on Science Fiction and Time Travel, it is familiar and boring. Especially when one is already not a fan of the Nolan Brother's writing.
The visuals were well done, but I've seen better in animated films like Titan A.E. and Treasure Planet. The acting was also very well done, but the story lacked big time for me.
In my opinion, Nolan is a decent director, but he never wows me. He usually leaves me cold, or at worst, very angry. I think he needs a better writer that understands characters outside of their archetypal role.
The music was decent, a lot of it felt like noise and once again Nolan tended to have the music louder at times than he should have. It tended to drown out a lot of the talking that was important to the scene. I needed closed captioning for parts of the movie.
So yeah, Interstellar isn't this grand opus that is going to knock all other science fiction movies out of the park. The science is sound, I really don't care. I mean at the time of Jurassic Park being done, the dinosaurs were scientifically accurate according to the paleontologists working with the crew. And now a majority of that knowledge is seen as wrong. The difference between Interstellar and Jurassic Park? Jurassic Park has good pacing, tight story, and believable, three dimensional characters. Things Nolan needs to learn about.