A narrative ouroboros, with limited nutritional value

Rating: 5/10 (30 April 2015)

Interstellar is, ultimately, the story of a man who flies into a black hole and finds that it's full of books much better than the movie's own plot.
Yes, most of the science in it is correct, at least during the first two thirds of the movie, and that by itself puts it ahead of all the nonsensical "sci-fi" that fails at both plot AND science. But it's still only half the ticket.
The cinematography is excellent, the special effects are almost flawless (without ever calling too much attention to themselves), most of the actors are convincing in their roles (with the spectacular and probably quite expensive exception of Dr. Mann), and both the direction and editing are very good.
But when a plot about interstellar travel ends up as a sentimentalist (albeit four-dimensional) metaphor for father-daughter communication issues, complete with emotionally manipulative music and tears trickling down cheeks, you can't help but feel that the writer couldn't really grasp the scope of what he was dealing with. It's like watching the best roadies in the world put together the greatest stage in the world, so the finest musicians in the world can play "Three Blind Mice". You keep thinking "there has to be more than this", but there isn't. In fact, it turns out there's even less.
To quote Stephen King, "coming back to where you grew up is like doing some crazy yoga trick, putting your feet in your own mouth and somehow swallowing yourself so there's nothing left". And (in clear defiance of King's follow-up line, which IMDb won't allow me to quote) that's exactly what Interstellar's plot manages to do.
I guess there were some hints along the way; a few pretentious-sounding but ultimately meaningless lines, such as "love is the one thing we're capable of perceiving that transcends time and space" (huh?), or "the only thing that can move across dimensions, like time, is gravity" (I imagine the film's scientific advisors lost some hair over that one). But I still wasn't expecting the story to suddenly eat itself like it did, both in terms of time (because it goes into an impossible loop) and in terms of gravity (the other kind of gravity - because it loses all sense of the relative importance of the events taking place).
Even the tributes to other sci-fi classics are done in a way that suggests the writer's imagination never rose very far from the ground. Arthur C. Clarke's monolith, a symbol of transcendent intelligence, is reduced to a kind of robotic sidekick, used as a mix of comic relief and deus ex machina solution to human incompetence.
And then there are the obvious plot holes, like how they need a huge rocket to launch a small "lander" from Earth into orbit, but that same lander can take off from all the other planets they visit on its own, without any need for booster rockets or extra fuel.
Finally, the "feel-good" ending (a man and his robotic dog riding into the sunset to save a damsel, after having thoroughly saved everyone else) seems like something pulled out of Starship Troopers (but without its tongue-in-cheekness), and I get the feeling it was added because some focus group wasn't happy leaving Matthew McConaughey trapped in library limbo (I wonder if the "tesseract" was a deliberate nod to Pratchett's L-Space; that would almost make me give it another star).
Overall, it's probably still worth watching. It's not insultingly bad, like (for example) Prometheus. But don't expect Stanislaw Lem levels of insight into scientific philosophy or mankind's relationship with the cosmos. Think of it as a two-hour dramatised documentary about a space trip that somehow got mixed with one hour of a soap-opera writer trying to justify his pay.