Not quite the Worst Movie of All Time

Rating: 1/10 (10 November 2014)

Interstellar is Christopher Nolan's big, BigBudget homage to Kubrick's 2001. Except it is not. Where 2001, Robert Zemeckis' Contact (which also cast Matthew McConaughey), and Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity used solid science as a launch for deeper philosophical musings, Interstellar begins with ersatz science and degenerates from there. The premise that a planet orbiting a black hole would be a suitable place to relocate Earth's population (after Earth's environmental collapse) is a fatal flaw. Black holes radiate powerful, deadly radiation, and everything circling around them are inevitably sucked closer and closer into the black hole's crushing gravity. Somehow, the hero ("Cooper") gets himself inside the black hole unharmed, where he sees myriad display screens of himself at various times in his life. And somehow he sends his past self a message. The illogic of that circular logic (ignores first cause) breaks the entire arc of the storyline, such as it is.
Then there are illogical subplots like the crew rescues an abandoned astronaut, "Dr. Mann," from death and he repays them by trying to kill all of them for no expressed reason. The fight scene between Dr. Mann (Matt Damon) and Cooper (McConaughey) is intercut with something happening back on Earth (setting fire to a cornfield) that doesn't have any apparent connection. The sound balance raises sappy music, designed to portray emotions like heroism, way above the volume of the actors' voices. The audience can't hear much of what they are saying. I thought at first this was a flaw because I assumed that what they were saying would clarify some of the meaningless actions. But now I believe that it was just as it was supposed to be: gibberish.
Although Nolan spent many, many millions, and some reviewers think this movie rates their highest number of stars, I say it is close, but not quite the Worst Movie of All Time. Giving it the title of Worst would confer too much attention to this sorry waste.