Monumental, but lazy, stumbling and ultimately confused about its own message

Rating: 7/10 (17 March 2015)

Now, months after Interstellar hit the screens and days after it got its home media release, one can already start summing up the impact this movie made. It may not have caught up with Nolan's other top products like The Dark Knight and Inception in terms of ratings and popularity yet, but it's already obvious that Interstellar was his attempt to make even a bigger bang. The longest of Nolan's movies so far, Interstellar sends us to a humankind-saving journey across the Universe, at the same time putting to test everything that we are used to calling humanity.
This movie was simply bound to be monumental. Taking into account Nolan's love for complex plots oversaturated with details and the premise of galactic scale, we could expect a spectacle which only Kubrick dared to stage before in his 2001: A Space Odyssey. Yet Nolan doesn't simply call his bet, he raises it, putting the fate of the human race itself on the table. And since it's not 1968 anymore and Christopher Nolan has no shortage of either money or technology, one thing is for sure - that Interstellar is as visually stunning as films can be today.
Now that was an obligatory piece of praise since one cannot deny Interstellar the merits mentioned above. And, of course, for some audience those merits will be enough, since it's not so difficult to imagine people who get all orgasmic from any high-budget sci-fi film or run in circles yelling "Spaceship! Spaceship! Spaceship!". But, truth to be told, not all is perfect in the glossy Nolan kingdom.
And i'm not even talking about the counter-scientific statements this movie makes. After all, any good science fiction at some point has to venture out into the unknown, with only the author's imagination to guide it per aspera ad astra. What i'm talking about is the quite earthly ground this movie is based on. And it is obvious that even the best spacecraft would have a hard time lifting off if the ground beneath it isn't solid.
Just a quick glimpse into this topic, since i don't wanna turn a review into a bashing. A piece of dialogue:

You're a well-educated man, Coop.

And a trained pilot. And an engineer.

Okay, well, right now we don't need more engineers. We didn't run out of television screens and planes. We ran out of food.

How do you like it? This is supposed to be a futuristic world, where the apex of human technology is in the past and the dwindled humankind is striving for food by engaging in manual labor. Yet we are told that engineers, the salt of the modern earth who can automate just about anything, including the food production, are not needed anymore. Because the bosses are happier with people driving tractors than with people knowing how to make machines do the job. After that, the logical consistence of the movie takes a nosedive and never straightens itself. Blight that breathes nitrogen, which somehow leads to the decrease of oxygen. Making the whole space station spin for two years simply to make the crew feel some gravity for a few minutes before they go to hiber-sleep. And so on, and so on.
But Interstellar's worst is not being handicapped about displaying the technical stuff. It is trying to add a deeper, more humane message to the film, yet being handicapped at that too. Here, people do not simply save mankind from its demise. They proclaim love, yes, love as a driving force of evolution, a not yet fully understood mechanism of survival of the species, the only thing besides gravity that can pierce through space and time, etc. And this hippie "love is the answer" nonsense is served with a dead serious face from people who only seconds ago were talking formulas and science.
Well, okay, if love is the answer then at least show us that love. Instead, we have a protagonist, a father of two children, whose only motivation is to come back home and save them. Yet for some reason he only really cares about his daughter, totally ignoring his son, as if he doesn't matter simply because he didn't throw a fit when his dad left them for a space mission. Moreover, his son is even displayed in the film as some sort of a bad guy, simply because he allowed himself to feel abandoned (as he actually was). Even when Coop returns back to people, he doesn't even ask a single question about his son. Now that's a true father's love that saved the world, no sh*t.
Still, Interstellar does have its powerful moments. Maybe the best one is the story of Dr. Mann (Matt Damon), which showed how people are actually unwilling to die, even if the fate of humankind depends on it, even if they knew beforehand that it might be a part of the plan, even if they devised that plan themselves. Once again, it proves that the most emotional yield is given by the stories in which a man's nemesis is a man himself. Too bad that Interstellar much often prefers to shows us battles with lifeless things like time and gravity.
Despite its flaws, Interstellar is a very enjoyable high-quality product. Unfortunately, the word "product" describes it better than "art". Like those fancy rectangular robots, it is shiny, useful and sometimes even funny. But still ultimately soulless.