Good Directors do not (necessarily) make good writers

Rating: 1/10 (31 December 2018)

Some directors can pull of the feat of writing and directing, Tarantino comes to mind. PT Anderson is another. Even though this was co-written between Christopher Nolan and his brother, the Coens they are not!
This movies is a perfect example of how making a movie (as my amateur film maker friend put it) is like building a cathedral. Being good at making stain glass does not make you a good brick layer, and that task is best left to ones who know what they are doing. To whit, we have this monstrous piece of pretentious drivel which attempts, as so many big hollywood movies do, to gloss over hastily written sequences with flash and bombast. This is another movie that feels like it was written by a committee of executives who were barely aware of the history of film and watched a couple of youtube videos on The Grand Unified Theory and tried to write something all smart-like. This movie is so scattered and convoluted it's hard to begin, and many other reviewers have pointed a lot of the plot elements that are glossed over with yet another "yeah, that happened, deal with it". Here are some of the things that I audibly groaned over:
Why not explain what happened to Earth when every other part of this movie is explained like the audience is 5 years old?
If the technology is available to build spacecraft with cryogen chambers, how about producing new forms of food? Lab grown meat for example? Hydroponic greenhouses etc?
Why are the robots basically mechanical jenga pieces? How does that design make sense? The robot REALLY bothered me, especially how there was absolutely no effort to actually make it sound like a robot, it basically sounded like exactly what it was, which most of the time was just a guy inside a cheap plastic box. His voice didn't even sound like it was coming out of a speaker. HAL sounded like a person, but still had a creepy quality to him that sounded vaguely artificial ("what a moment, wait a moment").
And then there is the idea that you could actually get anywhere near a black hole (let alone wormhole) with relatively recent technology and survive. I have a rudimentary understanding of physics, but even I know that the radiation would turn you into goo pretty fast, space suit or no space suit.
And a guy waits in a spaceship for 23 years by himself and doesn't go insane and looks basically the same except for a few grey hairs in his beard? I could go on and on....
This movie tries really, really hard, there is a lot of balling actors showing off their chops and trusting that they are making a masterpiece, which I imagine every actor must do, but alas there is no saving this movie. It tried too hard to be all things, part 2001: A Space Odyssey, part Armageddon, part Inception and fails on all counts. Everything about this movies hints at greatness, the effects, the Phillip Glass like score written by Hans Zimmer, the tears swelling up at climactic scenes, but it is all empty packing around a bad story. This movie is a shiny car with hamsters on a wheel as the engine.
One positive outcome of this movie is that it has reminded me to read about physics out of interest, but not to discuss them like I know anything, as I will come across as pretentious as this movie.
I suggest everyone watches 2001 to cleanse their pallet and to be reminded of what truly great film making is about.