Entertaining nonsense, but no masterpiece

Rating: 7/10 (10 November 2014)

"Interstellar" pretends to be more intelligent than Alfonso Cuarón's audio-visual roller coaster, "Gravity", but ironically its best moments are those which, like Gravity, rely purely on thrill and spectacle.
For the rest of the film we are crammed into a tiny shuttle with McConaughey and his crew, or back on earth with the desperate remnants of human civilization as they attempt to solve the problem of starvation. Most of the dialogue consists of reams and reams of contrived quantum-physics babble, which, if you're like me, will whoosh straight over your head like those exposition sequences in CSI, with brief moments of levity provided by the two -weirdly cubic looking- robots TARS and CASE.
Their journey to find another habitable planet is marred by a sequence of seemingly insurmountable problems that become progressively so ludicrous, it ends up impossible to take them seriously, albeit exciting to watch.
We already have to stretch our disbelief past the opening premise that the world is dying because of crop blight, yet they've managed to build robots that have human intelligence and can adapt a variety of shapes to achieve a wide range of tasks. One wonders why humans at this level of technological advancement couldn't have found a solution to curbing this unexplained blight other than blasting off into a foreign galaxy to try and populate a mysterious planet neighboring a black hole.
Glaring plot issues aside (and there are many), the film is at its best when in full space simulator mode and the audience is being catapulted into the roaring white light of a black hole, accompanied by Hans Zimmer's electrifying score (props to Zimmer for once NOT composing something that sounded exactly like Pirates of The Caribbean), making full use of the IMAX experience.
Performances are fairly solid, in particular Jessica Chastain as the grown up Murph, and there is enough raw emotion on show to push some of the more logically questionable moments past your cynic meter and give a sense of weight and importance to what is happening, even if you can't quite understand it.
Definitely worth watching on the big screen, but would I give it a 9/10? No way. This is a film that you will enjoy on face value, but once you leave the cinema you will start picking it to shreds. There are just too many inconsistencies, contrivances and blatant stupidity in the plot to call this a masterpiece, but I'd give it a solid 7 for blockbuster entertainment value.