Overly Long With Little Real Purpose Or Meaning

Rating: 4/10 (1 November 2015)

It's almost as if those who made this movie wanted to use two and a half hours of less than stellar movie making (if you'll pardon the pun) just so that the viewer could tough it out to the end and see a ridiculously sentimental ending. Really, by the time the end finally came, I found myself wondering what the point of the whole thing was.
Cooper (played by Matthew McConaughey) is a farmer in the midwest United States struggling along with his family to survive in some future world in which humanity is facing extinction. The atmosphere is changing so that there's less and less oxygen, and it's becoming harder and harder to grow crops. In this part of the world at least everyone seems to survive on a diet of corn, corn and more corn while being constantly threatened by horrible dust storms. I'm assuming this is meant to portray an environmental catastrophe. Eventually, Cooper and his daughter Murph (played as a young girl by Mackenzie Foy, who did well in the part) become aware that they're receiving some strange signal and they head out to investigate - an investigation that eventually leads to Cooper leaving Murph and the rest of his family behind to explore space in the hopes of finding a new home for humanity.
I get it. I just didn't get excited by it. And I struggled from the start (well, once Cooper was picked for the mission anyway) with the question of why Cooper wasn't simply recruited for the mission from the beginning. He's clearly the best pilot around - which Professor Brand (Michael Caine) states openly - and he was immediately put in command of the mission, which made me wonder why they were just going to leave him playing farmer if he was really that good! That bugged me all the way through. But what bugged me more was that there was no consistency to this. There didn't seem to be any real direction to it; it didn't seem to be leading anywhere. I thought the storyline involving Mann (Matt Damon) was extraneous and just added time to the movie without adding much in the way of substance. There are a few places where it seemed as if the movie was trying to pay tribute in some way to "2001": particularly around the character of the robot TARS, and even some of the special effects/cinematography, but as I said it just didn't seem to be leading anywhere, and I wasn't entirely certain if this mission had accomplished much of anything.
The entire movie seemed to be little more than a vehicle getting us to the sentimental ending. Murph had been angry that her father had left her behind, but she remembered that he promised he'd see her again, but because of differences in the way time would pass for the two of them (see: the theory of general relativity) she might be the same age as him by the time that happened. As it turned out, Murph was an old lady by the time Cooper returned to earth, and we get the sight of Cooper visiting his daughter in the hospital on her deathbed. Sentimental, yes, but I'm not sure it made the long wait to get there worthwhile. (4/10)