Gone To Earth

Rating: 6/10 (8 November 2014)

I'm probably not the target audience for the freres Nolan as I tend to notice things instead of being seduced. Take the opening. We're in East Jesus in the heart of the dust bowl. An ordinary family, a wooden home one step up from a tarpaper shack. Inside an equally ordinary kitchen THEN, in the bedroom of the daughter of the house, Murph, we find FLOOR-TO-CEILING BOOKSHELVES? Fully stocked. You're putting me on, right, Chris. More? Seems the father of Murph is an ex pilot who has retired to become a farmer. No real problem there BUT, he and Murph stumble on some co-ordinates and follow them to a top-secret NASA base where the head honcho is Professor Michael Caine. They show the intruder the latest space-ship, explain that earth is running out of food and the only solution is to find a planet that will sustain human life AND THEN invite him to lead the mission. This is a guy who hasn't flown in x amount of years and may or may not be in shape. There is no training programme, no vetting, the whole thing resembles a car salesman offering someone who walks in off the street a chance to test drive the latest top-of-the-range Lamborghini. If you can get past this nonsense you may well enjoy what follows. Unlike, say, Gravity, which was virtually one hundred per cent in space, Intersteller does introduce a human element and is all the better for it. Clearly the Nolans are interested in exploiting technology at the expense of constructing an even halfway plausible screenplay and there are probably enough overgrown schoolboys out there who will respond to cgi the way Pavlov's dog responded to a bell.