A Over-hyped Imperfect Movie...

Rating: 3/10 (9 November 2014)

Interstellar is not a bad film. Lets get that out of the way... Nor is it a great film either.
It straddles the fence of imperfection ever so well. There are some great moments and then there are some very long drawn out moments that make you shout at the screen and say, "Shut up already and get on with it!" Once such scene came when Anne Hathaway was talking about love... a lot. Yes, there was a lot of talk about love and analyzing what love means. That moment sucked me out of the film, because I found it hard to be dragged into the immersive experience that Interstellar should be, when it is coupled up with such bad writing that doesn't blend in a scene well.
Such out of context reality smashing moments happen a lot in Interstellar that makes you wonder if the writers were tripping out on their own interstellar experience. Another scene comes at the revealing of a betrayal, of sorts, from a certain character. Without going into too much, all I'll say is that the scene felt hammy, rushed and again, didn't blend in what was going on. While I 'get it', as in the reasons for the betrayal, I didn't 'get it' in terms of why it had to happen, and it just felt... strange.
By the time the film matures in the middle, it goes downhill and your left on a spiraling out of control adventure that is the result of some new age writing gone bad.
If that wasn't bad enough, I had to put up with the endless scenes of key dialogue that I could hardly hear, because Nolan likes to blare his music up over important dialogue. Maybe it was just the Cinema sound system being extra enthusiastic, or maybe once again, a criticism that I've aimed at Nolan before, is that he really needs to edit his movies better and get an editor that doesn't make it hard for the viewer to hear what's being said. It is blatantly criminal in the sheer bad editing that this film suffers from.
The film does have its good moments, although I would have to call them rare, but again the visual effects are splendid and is possibly the only reason why this film is a 6 for me, and not a 5 or lower. There literally some scenes in the film that made me go 'wow...' and look on with delight. It's for these scenes that you need to go and watch Interstellar, but be warned, that the rest of the film performs below its expectation.
Major Gripe: Time for a major gripe, and I thought it would be the editing of the film, but no. It comes down to design. Now, I've read that there are those that liked the robots, TARS, and CASE. That's fine, and I'll admit the design is unusual and somewhat funky. Yet the positive reviewers probably don't or won't, look at the faults in design. Well I saw the fault in the design all too clear; In one particular scene, just after getting out of the shuttle after landing on a new planet, TARS is scene 'walking' for want of a better word, onto the planet. Yet I caught that moment when it awkwardly tried to maintain its balance. What was it doing with its left leg? I wondered to myself... And ever since I saw that strange fault, I couldn't let it go. The more I looked at its wobbly movements and its rather awkward looking design and its very human personality with its very human non-robotic voice, I just couldn't get into it that this was a robot. I kept on imagining a guy in a suit... and that's the problem.
When you design a robot for a film, you need to get it across to the audiences that this is a robot. Not some strange puppet on a string or anything else, but a robot. Sadly Nolan failed in getting this across because of the voice being used, because of the very human personality and because of the rather awkward looking way it just went about. There was nothing about the robot that I honestly liked, it just didn't feel like one, and at no time in the film is it explained where the tech came from, impressive tech at that, yet it just didn't translate well onto the screen.
Interstellar is a decent film. Is it worth the prestigious rating of 9.0 that most reviewers give it? I personally don't think so, and I think in a lot of cases such positive reviews come from the reviewer being dazzled with special effects and in a lot of cases that is the case. It happened with Gravity; people were so amazed at the effects they just threw 9's at it all day. Interstellar is not about any of that, it's about the story, and sadly, it lacks a decent one.