Not stellar

Rating: 5/10 (12 November 2014)

The Earth is dying. Wormhole appears leading to potential new planets to colonise. Ex-pilot farmer finds secret facility and is immediately put in charge of the mission. Now, the obvious but not primary complaint revolves around the fact there are (already viable) options to escape a dying Earth that are much easier to accomplish. Terraforming Mars? Yes! It would even take less time to set up an initial colony than this. Actually fighting the (never ever explained) crops' blight? We have genetic engineering, you know. We don't get to go extinct because of drought. More importantly, the entire plot of the movie leads to the launching of a space station. Already built, but on the ground, so it couldn't be launched - now, call me crazy, but building a space station, even a colossal, much bigger than this one, is an infinitely better option than crossing galaxies to find out how to get this one off the ground. I think the film tries to explain this away with "we are working in secret, people wouldn't support the space programme". This is wrong in a million ways, from the fact that secretly building habitable space stations can't be harder than sending secret missions to travel through a wormhole around Saturn, to "people should have probably realised the world is ending so hey, THEY JUST MIGHT SEE THE LOGIC HERE", with a stop in "who cares what they think, we never intend to save them anyway". Not to mention I can't quite get how and why they sent the initial missions without the potential of returning - it would save a lot of time to just send them through, check the planets and return. And yes, that would be a better option even if you only consider "Plan B".
HOWEVER, this isn't the main problem. These are passable holes that can be accepted in favour of a compelling story. And that kind of happens, until the final part of the movie where our protagonist enters a black hole in another galaxy and voila, just like we feared from the beginning of the film, gets back home without reason, explanation, or a semblance of logic. We actually hear something like "love will help us transmit data from inside the event horizon to earth". There are limits to what you can get away with, and Nolan crosses the event horizon right about there. Add to that the fact that visiting the planet close to the black hole first instead of leaving it as a last option is by all accounts a ridiculous decision, although I do understand that it's dramatically very useful and actually helps plot and character development.
Visually, the film has its moments - but they are less than I had hoped. The journey through the wormhole and in the black hole are superb. So is the visual representation of the 5-D (?) library - if you can look past how Cooper gets there. But the planets visited are not particularly memorable. The dying Earth is just a sad rural landscape. The new human society is a suburban torus where you look outside the window to see the surviving human race (a couple of thousand Americans by the look of it)...playing baseball.
The main idea of the film isn't bad. The execution is severely lacking. The expectation-result equilibrium isn't great.
I do give a point for the use of Dylan Thomas, a fabulous poem that fits into the story wonderfully. Let's remember this, if anything, from Interstellar, for when our species faces great adversity: We must not go gentle into that good night.