OK if you go with it

Rating: 5/10 (5 April 2015)

Christopher Nolan's Interstellar wants to be epic and profound, and as long as you don't look too deeply, or concern yourself with character development, it hits those notes. For those who can't help but see the hokey sentimentality that parallels 1000 other films, or compare how you might have cared about these characters more if they were better and more fully written, it's a mediocre drama with some lovely visuals and music.
Midway through Interstellar, relativity/time travel supplies us with a scene where the main character has to watch 23 years of messages from his children, years that went by in mere hours for him. We watch as their hope of hearing from him slowly dies away, and he is powerless to tell them he hears them. McConaughey cries his eyes out, but the flaws of the movie mean the power the scene should have is lost on the viewer. Firstly, we haven't had time to settle in with these characters; see them as normal human beings we can connect to and care about. Second, the films momentum leads us elsewhere - character isn't Nolan's main concern, it's his epic vision that overrides all, and blurs past moments like these in favor of nice visuals with trance-inducing minimalist music. This is one of the core issues with the movie. The other is the unbelievable science.
I'm not talking about black holes and 5th dimensional reality, which are handled as reasonably this kind of movie really could without boring the audience, so much as a NASA mission to save humanity which apparently was planned more leisurely than your last family vacation. Movies like Apollo 13 show us in comparison how technically and carefully a NASA endeavor is engaged in, and that's when everything goes wrong. This movie expects us to believe they sent McConaughey and a couple other people up there to essentially wing it. Talks about how 'maybe we can fly up here and then go there, I'll put it on manual and fly us around if you feel like it' go far too deep into disbelief, as if every permutation wouldn't have a strict plan and protocol attached to it. Not like the 'save humanity' mission is important or anything. It's amazing to think how much time and energy was spent on the visuals of the movie, which are indeed impressive, only to be created at the service of such cheap science fiction.
In addition, the movie supplies us with a neat and interesting robot artificial intelligence to help our travelers, which demonstrates extremely high ability, but then leaves McConaughey and company to manually handle things that we would happily let even today's technology handle for us. As creative as the robot is, with it's all-purpose cubic body, it almost feels like a prop from another movie. One can almost imagine the makers of this movie extensively plundering real science and future-tech concepts for ideas, yet in the end they're just using it as window dressing.
Lastly, it wouldn't be a Hollywood movie if science weren't eventually trumped by a Hallmark greeting card: 'It's not the science that will get us there, but love, which overpowers all.' That's not exactly where the movie goes, but close. More than anything, that is what tells us this is, behind the veneer, just frivolous entertainment after all. Christopher Nolan may be one of the most skilled directors working today is wrapping his entertainments in beautiful packages, but in the end the box is still fairly empty.