Scores on effects, fails on narrative!

Rating: 5/10 (22 July 2015)

Christopher Nolan is known to experiment, such as the the non-linear narrative of 'Memento' and well written characters in 'The Dark Knight'. A director of his caliber also made the disappointing pseudo- intellectual 'Inception'. Sadly, 'Interstellar' too comes across as a let-down of sorts, despite interesting science.
'Interstellar' has all the ingredients of a typical space sci-fi film: spacecraft, wormholes, stasis, strange planets, time travel, a black hole, robots running on artificial intelligence, father-daughter drama, etc., in the background of a dying Earth. While these concepts aren't new to Hollywood, the big budget allowed for the visual spectacle. Still, it is marred by choppy narrative, clichéd dialog and poorly developed characters that we hardly care about.
Set in unspecified future, Earth's capacity to sustain life has diminished; crops are dying and there are dust storms. Agriculture takes precedence over everything. Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is a former NASA test pilot turned farmer. A widowed Cooper lives with his father in law and children Tom and Murph. An inquisitive young Murph (Mackenzie Foy) is obsessed with the idea of a ghost in her bedroom and is always trying to decode signs.
As it turns out, the signs are coordinates to a hidden space station of NASA, headed by Professor Brand (Michael Caine), in search of life sustaining planets so as to evacuate Earth. Predictably, our hero, Cooper is the only man who can pilot the mission to outer space, beyond our galaxy accessed through a wormhole. Damn, a trespasser at a hidden space station is suddenly asked to commandeer a spaceflight without any serious briefing or training!
Joining Cooper on the mission are Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway) and two other scientists that are expendable. Their mission is finding three of the ten manned probes that went through the portal earlier and have reported seemingly positive findings. Again, don't ask why manned missions when they had advanced AI robots like TARS and CASE? That brings us to the existential question: why a manned follow-up mission, huh?
The overarching premise behind the mission is that certain benevolent 'beings' have opened up a wormhole and left clues through gravity- based anomalies. The aging professor has been working on a mathematical model to evacuate Earth. The model fails since it needs data from a gravitational singularity, where space and time can be bent. If Plan- A, to evacuate fails, Plan-B to populate extraterrestrial planets with genetic samples humans.
Unbeknownst to the fatality of Plan-A, the crew continues to explore planets. One Planet has time distorted to a level where an hour on it equals seven years on earth. The planet doesn't make the cut due to its shallow waters and gigantic waves. The second is an icy planet with ice-clouds (filmed in Iceland) and a crazed explorer (Matt Damon) who tries to kill Cooper so that he can execute plan B at the third planet, Miller; Result: needless drama.
As with every movie involving vehicles, terrestrial or extraterrestrial, fuel shortage and damage to the craft and the need for Singularity data are key plot elements towards the climax. Apropos, they need to slingshot past the black hole to the third planet which Amelia bets on, as her loved one went there during the original Lazarus project. Oh, a movie is so incomplete without a love angle! Glad there wasn't any romance between Cooper and Ameila.
And then, our hero, Cooper dives into the event horizon of the beautifully depicted super-massive black hole and reaches singularity. But what is this singularity? Just like the limbo being linked to Cobb's dreams in 'Inception', the singularity in 'Interstellar' is actually a four dimensional tesseract presenting a single location to Cooper at various points in time. And the location? You guessed it: Murph's bedroom. How convenient!
So, who's the ghost in Murph's life? Cooper! And the 'beings'? Cooper again! He opened up the wormhole near Saturn that took him through the same spot half a century later. Doesn't this create an inconsistent causal loop just like 'Grandfather Paradox' or a chicken going back in time and laying an egg that it is born out of? But then, an average moviegoer doesn't care as long as there are spectacular sights and happy endings!
'Interstellar' is lengthy and tiresome, narrative is patchy and has excessive inter-cuts during crucial scenes. Spoiling experience further is the jarring and ominously heavy background score by Hans Zimmer that muffles out dialog. Acting is just passable: McConaughey is hardly a fit, Jessica Chastain as the grown up Murph is decent as the scientist and Michel Caine seems to be having his fourth outing with the director.
Nolan's fiction works for audiences who believe they enjoy intelligent films, but actually watch them without thought or logic. As contradictory as it sounds, truth is stranger than fiction. Nolan's 'Inception' was full of plot holes, irrespective of whether it was deliberate or inept storytelling. Usually, a good narrative should have a logical end, except that it is Nolan and he likes keeping things ambiguous. I haven't come across anyone who understood 'Inception' or 'Interstellar' fully, despite claiming that they loved it.
About the science in 'Interstellar', Nolan found played it safe by bringing a scientist on board, Kip Thore, as a consultant and executive producer. This would've surely had an impact on the depiction of a spinning black hole and other stuff like the four- dimensional tesseract within the event horizon, boxy but versatile AI robots, etc. Nonetheless, I'm still amazed at how an astronaut can dive into a black hole and come out totally unhurt!!
If anything, Christopher Nolan must be admired for dreaming big. Sadly, this movie is a waste of a great concept turned into an average movie that sells only the basis of special effects bankrolled by a big budget. While die-hard Nolan fans would rave over this, discerning movie connoisseurs won't appreciate the poor storytelling.