Stellar only in theme, not in quality

Rating: 3/10 (1 September 2018)

This is not going to be a scientific analysis/nitpick-fest of the film. Many things didn't make any astronomical sense, but I can usually forgive these errors (so long as they're not terrifically dense) if a film has good content, emotional impact, or any of the various qualities that make great films great films. This film, unfortunately, did not deliver very many qualities of good film making.
As a veteran viewer of Christopher Nolan's films, I wish to open up with his weakest writing ability: characters. The only character that stands out among all of his films is the Joker in The Dark Knight, and that was mostly due to the brilliance of Heath Ledger's acting. Every single one of his characters (besides the Joker) is bland, stale, unexciting, unlikable, unrelatable, and simply banal. There is no lack of character change in his films, as there are certainly events/epiphanies/catharses that cause change in the characters, but the characters themselves, both before and after change, are just not interesting and lack depth. Change alone does not make a character more interesting or notable; there's also what they were before and what they become after to take into consideration. Interstellar is no exception; the characters are fairly one-dimensional. To be specific, Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is the typical headstrong, confident, amiable guy, a protagonist type. His daughter Murphy is the average "lovable cute" daughter with that special "connection" with her father that ends up more or less being what saves the world by the end of the film. Anne Hathaway's character Dr. Brand had a lost love on another planet but other than that didn't offer much to the film.
Perhaps a big part of why the characters are not so great is that there is almost always an oversaturation of characters in Nolan's films, so each one doesn't have a lot of time to be developed. Nolan loves to sprinkle in tons of big/medium name actors for near-useless roles, or very small ones. This film is once again no exception; what was the justification or purpose of Casey Affleck's character as Murphy's brother? That was a completely useless throwaway character. Even John Lithgow's character as the grandfather was pretty much unnecessary. And how about Topher Grace's character? Wes Bentley's? Even David Oyelowo's character, beyond helping out with gravitational research, offered very little to the film. There are simply too many small characters, it's hard to even remember them at all, let alone justify their presence in the film whatsoever. Inception suffered from this as well; I personally haven't seen that film since it first came out, and by now I can't even tell you any characters, or what their purpose might have been, beyond Leonardo DiCaprio's and Ellen Page's. I know many of the actors in the film but forgot their characters.
It is not necessarily impossible to make a great film without a presence of good characters, but other areas must shine to make up for this lacking. There was plenty of dialog between the characters in this film, but most of it was a vehicle for explaining what was happening in terms of the scientific/relative time aspects. I feel that Inception was the same exact way in this regard; most of the film was spent tiresomely explaining itself, instead of just letting it play out and allowing the viewer to piece it together. Most films that explore sci-fi concepts that are a bit more difficult to follow than the average film, such as The Matrix, Vanilla Sky, and Minority Report, do so without sacrificing over half the film explaining what's happening. These films leave that explanation to a few key scenes, and let the viewer figure out the rest, even if it requires multiple viewings to fully absorb. This time spent explaining the scientific phenomena is precious film time wasted that would have been better spent on advancing the story, developing characters, build-up, or anything valuable as far as film substance. I can appreciate and understand that the film's concepts may be a bit much to swallow for the average viewer, but when a film's runtime ends up being 2 hours and 49 minutes because it needed to explain itself so vastly, this often indicates that there is something severely wrong with either the underlying story or the script, or perhaps both. Is it really worth all that extra time and sacrifice of film substance just to get across what is happening onscreen? Even if it makes the film slightly less accessible, I argue no. Not only that but it's a pretty darn boring way of going about it; the characters are just back-and-forth discussing their plans for most of the entire film. Surely there could have been more interesting ways using the language of cinema to communicate even these complex ideas. To the film's credit, Cooper did once use a whiteboard to diagram part of their plans; little touches like this were much needed in the other areas of the film.
Even the dialog that was not self-explaining was rather dull. One of the lines was something like: "I thought I could watch you suffer and die but I just can't do it". Why was that even in the film? Why not use cinematography to show his head look away, silently portraying that he can't watch it? The writing in general was just not good, there are plenty more exemplifications than just this.
Were the story and overall ideas conveyed enough to outshine the rest of the film's lacking? Unfortunately not. The film begins in a typical modernist viewpoint of a near-future apocalyptic scenario; humans destroyed the planet and need to be offloaded onto another. Most of the film is about exploration and the journeying to find a suitable planet, while possible chaos and total destruction of all humans on earth was at hand. Time travel, fifth-dimensional, and black hole theory were sprinkled in a bit too. The premise and concepts are certainly interesting enough in themselves, but they just weren't used well at all and meshed together rather awkwardly. The scene inside the black hole was trying to be super thought-provoking and "out there" and 2001: A Space Odyssey-like but it fell pretty flat. The visuals were fairly interesting but it felt more like a thrown-in aside than an attempt to say anything useful. The only thing I personally gathered from it was that human technology could perhaps one day advance to the fifth dimension. This, sadly, offered nothing for the film itself, and only provided a brief marveling about future technology. To contrast, 2001 was all about these ideas, and the genius of Arthur C. Clarke spoke volumes about galactic travel and technology.
The overall message of the film was fairly cheesy; the human idea of "love" somehow transcends all physical laws and stands as the One True Concept of our universe, or at least the one that outshines the rest. I could see this idea working but it wasn't portrayed well at all. In fact this message was even outright told to the viewer by the protagonist; once again where is the subtlety here? Certainly the average viewer can gather at least that much.
Interstellar was, however, not completely terrible in every way. Hans Zimmer's work on the score was fairly fitting, epic and had a slow, drawn out feel as the film did. The acting was pretty good all around. Of course, I wish the characters were better to make room for better acting, but good performances were delivered for what the characters were. Many of the effects, especially the incessant spinning of the various spacecraft, were fairly well-done and immersive.
Finally, to end on the film's best element, the human impact of time relativity on a real person is something that is not explored much even in most sci-fi films. When Cooper sees his children all grown up and learns that his father has died after spending only a few hours on an extragalactic planet, he weeps uncontrollably. This is something that audiences can relate to; this is good film content. This aspect I'd like to see explored more in future films, and perhaps Interstellar shall be popular enough to make an impact within film studios toward this direction, hopefully with better writing and direction in future endeavors.