Mediocre

Rating: 4/10 (6 November 2014)

Interstellar is mediocre. The story is chock full of cheap clichés ("Love is the 5th dimension!"), over-layered with arcane science for believability and story points that are never explained.
The movie makes sense until Matt Damon. Up to that point, the quantum mechanics and astrophysics hold up, more or less. Although If you know you're going to age by 5 to 15 years on the water planet, why leave that one poor guy on his own? It's kind of heartless and that's when I started doubting the movie. But OK, fine. I can live with that.
Then they head for the ice planet. And, all of a sudden, "gravity is the force that transcends time" and "your mind fights death so you can see your children".
All downhill from there, way into deep space 9. The movie takes a turn for the worse: A nonsensical allegory about how humanity can be saved thanks to the power of love between a father and his daughter. It's endearing, but incomprehensible.
Granted, the movie's pretty. So I gave it two stars. The actors? Love all of them. That's another 2. But I simply cannot live with a script that's nonsensical and full of stuff we're supposed to take at face-value, because it's Christopher Nolan, and he's an otherwise brilliant director: What was Michael Caine trying to not solve? What is all the research about? And, sci-fi directors: Please, drop the blackboard and chalk cliché. We technology people use computers now. Blackboards were useful when Newton was running things. Now? Not so much.
It sounded like (but I'm not really sure) the five dimension bookcase, which lost me completely, was invented by humanity in a very distant future as a communications device. But then I also have to assume that that future humanity has really awesome technology if it can pull that kind of prowess. Then, why not simply invent a cellphone that can bridge time? Why not just send an email with the data component that's missing? Why would anyone have to take a chance taking a dive into a black hole to get it? And how is that future humanity saved anyway? And: How does the robot, whose location in space is never explained, come in possession of that data? And do 21st century communications really work in a black hole? Going back to the Michael Caine thing: What's the precious data component that he was missing? What does the ghost send in binary format to his daughter? (sounds to me like a lot of zeros and ones).
And how does humanity get saved? Do they invent some sort of galactic Noah's ark to get people off the smoking pile of carcinogenic garbage that Earth has become? Could they not do that before? I'm sure they could.
How does a human being in a space suit even survive flying into a black hole? Or maybe that's not what happened. I'm just not sure.
The list goes on and on. the movie is a confusing hodge-podge of pseudo-philosophical-pseudo-scientific mess full of circular logic and loose ends. It's intended for (1) sci-fi dorks who tend to not over-think things (2) Nolan worshipers and lovers of all things shiny (3) movie "buffs" who enjoyed Cloud Atlas, which was more boring and more bizarre than Interstellar, but only slightly.