A great movie until you think about it

Rating: 7/10 (29 March 2015)

You can read this review without spoilers if you stop when warned!
Overall It's a gripping film if you let yourself watch it without questioning anything. A deliberately slow start melts into a well paced movie that is never just about the effects.
The Good Interstellar seems determined to be different. It eschews many sci-fi clichés to offer a film that's as much about character as action. There is a lot of emphasis on the mess we've made of Earth making for a potentially moral film, and the frequent references to scientific concepts give you the chance to think without forcing you to. SFX were solid and never flashy. One of the positives was the lack of 'needless' CGI and showing off.
The Bad There are some glaring 'plot holes' which prevented me suspending my disbelief during the film. About five minutes after watching all I could do was pick apart where it didn't work. See the spoiler section for the other negative points.
However Interstellar deserves serious credit for trying to keep its science realistic and avoid paradoxes, it's just a shame they couldn't stick with this philosophy till the end. It's worth watching because the story is interesting, acting is good and the action does grip you when it happens. Just don't think about it afterwards.
** Warning ** Spoilers next **
** Spoilers Here**
There are so many forehead-slapping moments that it eventually undermines the film.
Characters die and I realise that despite time spent on character rather than plot, I don't care about any of them. Maybe this is due to being exasperated with the narrative glitches.
While it was refreshing not to have to sit through yet another 'training montage' - it was ridiculous that a long fallow pilot should be called up and in space within 24hours.
The farmers live with constant dust yet feel no need to adequately seal the windows?
They accidentally spend too long on the water planet. After 23years alone the crewman left behind appears entirely sane and little is ever made of an ordeal that would drove most people insane.
The black hole creates the 'one hour for pilot - ten years on Earth' relativity issue. So an hour on the water planet =23 years on the ship. Yet when Matthew falls into the singularity at the end - spends a long time there (morse code quantum formulae anyone!) and falls back across the collapsing singularity - he can still head to the colonised planet to be with the micro-biologist woman. Why didn't he 'gain time'?
The idea that you could transmit quantum data via morse code is itself ridiculous - it would take months. But worse, how on earth could he 'program' a second hand to waver in morse code - just by 'tapping it' in some mystically unexplained way?
Don't get me wrong - still a good spectacle, but escape all the traps and paradoxes of sci-fi it did not.