A rocket to nowhere

Rating: 4/10 (9 November 2014)

Let me preface this by stating that I am a big Christopher Nolan fan. Following the success of his "Dark Knight" trilogy, plus standalone movies "Inception" and "The Prestige", we have something of a one-man franchise. Warner Bros signed off on the biggest pre-approved budget in movie history to make "Interstellar" without even seeing a script.
Going into the movie, I knew that with this kind of creative freedom, there were always going to be a couple of self-indulgent bits and perhaps a few ideas and sequences that the producers would have viciously vetoed with a less powerful director at the helm. But I didn't mind. In today's remake and reboot happy Hollywood, I sat back to enjoy what might be the last movie in a quite a while with an A-list director, completely original story, and a money-no-object budget.
Which is why I'm sorry to report that this movie just didn't work for me at all. The problem is that it's not really a movie. It's about three different kinds of movie mixed together, into one very complex but rather indigestible dish. This same approach worked for "The Dark Knight", where Nolan threw everything but the kitchen sink into the screenplay and somehow made it all work. Unfortunately, lightning hasn't struck twice for Interstellar. Nolan's intergalactic juggernaut struggles to get off the ground, and when it's finally up there, doesn't really know what to do with itself. Sort of similar to the real space programme.
The film opens fairly slowly, mostly in a dusty Midwestern farming community. No problem, in theory - "Star Wars" and "Superman" both openedlike this, and both were great movies. Then lots of talking heads pop up, like in a documentary. Then, they vanish, and we find ourselves in the middle of what feels like a Depression-era movie with a single father struggling to raise two wayward children on his own.
We get a little background on this dystopian world. Big food shortages have created wars, crises, and the government can't afford frivolities such as a space program. Apparently, the Earth is dying, with the atmosphere rapidly becoming unbreathable. Also, there is a drone aircraft flying around - from India, of all places.
Then, a ghost, which is actually gravity, communicates with Cooper's daughter by speaking to her by arranging books into barcodes and tells them to go to a secret (fully funded and operational) NASA base which has been hidden from society for decades behind a wire fence in a cornfield. I guess that must be some wire. Space wire. NASA wire.
If none of this sounds like it makes any sense, it's because it doesn't. Without a clear direction, Interstellar falls apart. It continues to throw the most disjointed, jarring plot elements lifted from every epoch of space movie our way for the next two and a half hours in what could loosely be called a 'story'. There are bits that feel like "Gravity" with super-realistic spaceflight sequences. There are bits that feel like 1960s Star Trek where the famously doomed "redshirts" are sent down to random planets to die in slightly comical accidents. If you're detecting a bit of a clash of tone here, then congratulations: Nolan didn't. The unexpectedly mad, undisciplined screenplay continues to ricochet around until the very end, which plays like a cross between "Inception" and "2001: A Space Odyssey."
It's not just the plot which has developed mild schizophrenia either: the feeling extends to the characters. Brand (Anne Hathaway) is introduced as a scientific, hard-nosed foil to Coopers' wild, seat-of- the pants pilot. The movie has a nasty habit of forgetting about her, and she wanders in and out of proceedings to no avail. Then it's revealed that she's in love with an offscreen character who we have never met.
All throughout this, we are flicking back and forth between equally weird and random plot developments on Earth. Cooper has left a son and daughter behind. We spend quite a lot of time with the younger daughter (Mackenzie Foy) but then she grows up, becomes a quantum physicist - not bad for a farm hand - and is basically a completely different character, which means all the time the movie spent on the young version is ultimately wasted. Cooper seems to completely forget he has a son as well - we only see him pining for the daughter.
It's very important for a film to do is establish its tone and what kind of movie it is within its first ten minutes. Interstellar couldn't do this for two hours. It could have ended in a musical number and it wouldn't have made any more or less sense.
I also found myself wondering what they managed to spend the enormous budget on. Take away the A-list actors and there's no reason that this couldn't have been done for $30m. Some of the effects (example: when Mann tries to dock with the Endurance) are actually pretty flimsy. They didn't look or move like real spacecraft at all.
For me, the ultimate irony with Insterstellar is that it had two or three ideas which could have been developed into good movies on their own: for example, the idea of an former astronaut having to convince skeptical authorities on an impoverished future Earth that their only chance of survival is a wildly risky space expedition. For better or worse, there is no way Inception would ever have been made without Nolan's involvement. This is the great two-edged sword of creative freedom. I just hope Nolan doesn't become the last ever director to wield it.