Very mixed experience

Rating: 7/10 (6 November 2014)

I watched yesterdays theatrical preview in Vienna in anticipation of a great film, due to the high 9+ Rating on IMDb. (I know that IMDb has become increasingly unreliable recently but still...) The movie has its pluses and minuses, with the minuses too often disrupting the enjoyment of the experience. The animation and the space scenes are very believable, and the basic storyline had promise. Matt Damon gave a particularly good short performance, as an ever so a subtle weirdo, all fat and as a baddie, out of his normal type-cast.
Still it was extremely hard to hold one's suspension of disbelief due to the many in-your-face flaws of the movie.
The director equals "emotion" to overly drawn out scenes where actors jerk out tears at every faintly so small hard-to-believe opportunity. These were some of the "relativistically" longest scenes in the movie. You could almost feel everybody thinking: "Ahhh, get on with it for h...l's sake!" The frequently corny dialog - almost Disney-reminiscent - with sprinkled drooling of redundant "wisdom" not only resulted in me personally cringing but on several occasions also sarcastic muttering all around me. Good to see that one is not alone with one's evil thoughts.
The worst though were the many flaws in logic. The "explanation" of the creation of wormholes and (**Spoilers**) the room in the 5th Dimension create a blatantly contradictory logic-loop. The director does not respect the beauty of reduction, falling for the ugliness of its opposite: why three different ways to communicate from the 5th Dimension, via book drop, via sand line and via clock tick? Why can a simple four-letter word like "Stay" not be communicated properly from the 5th Dimension but a whole multi-dimensional scientific theory can?
Not to mention the gaping plot holes. (**Spoilers**) Why does someone falling into a black hole find himself suddenly and immediately precisely in a former scene? How does the fifth dimension switch itself off automatically once several messages have been transmitted to the past? Why do these messages in rapid succession have to be contradictory ... "Stay" vs. "Go somewhere" (coordinates)?
In the end, two or three viewers at the preview started to clap hard (very hard...) but nobody of three or four hundred others joined in. I did not either, too great was my displeasure with the bad execution and the irritation with a high expectation utterly disappointed.