A wasted opportunity

Rating: Null/10 (22 November 2014)

Honestly, I was expecting more from Christopher Nolan. The man is capable of unique vision, of scope that comes across only every once in a while. Such as seen in Inception and The Dark Knight. But this? This is still a good movie, but that's all. It's not great, mainly because of limitations in storytelling, dialogue and style.
The biggest problem is that Nolan's faults shine through more than usual. His over-reliance on exposition dialogue, his longwindedness and tendency to linger too long in certain scenes. In most of his movies you get the sense that he had one idea too many. Well, in this he had easily two or three ideas too many. This could have been a two hour movie, without a doubt, and it would have been better for it.
It also seems to have problems deciding what it's trying to be. Is it a hard scifi epic along the lines of 2001: A Space Odyssey, or something more leaning towards drama and so called space opera. Certain scenes lean more towards the former, some towards latter, and they don't mesh at all.
That being said, it's a fine movie. First of all, it's absolutely gorgeous. I have slight problems with the designs of the actual planets, but every single shot of space is jaw-dropping. I also like that they went and paid actual scientists to figure out what a black hole might look like, among other things. That shows dedication and certainly makes for a very memorable visual.
The cast is also superb. The problems with the characters stem from the script, not the actors, and all of them have great chemistry together. One of the underlying themes in this movie is the relationship between father and daughter. Both Matthew McConaughey and Mackenzie Foy, as well as Michael Caine and Anne Hathaway make for a great pair and I have no complaints about their performances.
Alas, I just cannot call Interstellar a great film. The ending alone would ruin it for me, but the whole journey is so needlessly long and slow that I never got into it. The movie has a lot of good ideas - the dying Earth, the robots, the black hole's affect on space-time - but those ideas are poorly realized and the whole just isn't as good as Nolan's previous work. It's worth watching, certainly, and it's not a bad film, not at all. Just a deeply flawed one.