Worm-Holes ? What About Plot Holes ?

Rating: 4/10 (29 March 2015)

One of my all time favourite novels is The Death Of Grass by the late John Christopher . Written in 1956 it tells off a virus that destroys the cereal crops of Asia , Africa and Europe plunging most of humanity in to famine . It was adapted by Cornel Wilde in a 1970 film called NO BLADE OF GRASS , a very bleak and hard hitting film but one that was also painfully disjointed and ultimately unsatisfying . That said the power of the premise is clear to see and one has high hopes it will be remade one day . Along comes Christopher Nolan a director so highly regarded that if he did a selfie on his I-phone then that clip would automatically find itself on the IMDb Top 250 film list and he takes the premise of The Death Of Grass as a plot device and manages to make a film far more unconvincing than Cornel Wilde's movie not t mention far more expensive
As I said humanity is being starved in to extinction and live on a diet of corn . Being set in the American mid-West corn is obviously easy to come by but would this be true of other people living on other continents ? I'm not a farmer or a geologist but surely there's a good reason why some countries have a staple diet of wheat while other countries have a staple diet of rice ? Perhaps the countries that no longer can grow wheat now grow root vegetables as their staple diet ?
I suppose you've got to join up the dots for yourself but it's rather annoying the way the rest of the world goes unmentioned almost as though the film makers have failed to think the scenario through properly . Especially later where mankind seems to be facing greater dangers from sand storms than famine
Some other things the makers haven't thought through with the film In this near future world armies no longer exist ? A noble ideal perhaps but surely if a nation state exists so would an army if only to protect itself from other nation states ?
It's official - everyone thinks the Moon landings were faked . I can see Nolan having a dig at creationism being taught in American schools but this ties in with another plot turn NASA still exists as a secretive organization ! Right so the government agency that sent men to the Moon and back exists as a real though somewhat underground organization and yet everyone thinks the Moon landings are faked ? Can't see the logic behind this . It also adds more confusion when ...
NASA send the protagonists to a wormhole just off Jupiter . It's never revealed if these space journeys have US government approval but if not why would a government scrap standing armies and not totally shut down an agency that can send people to the ends of the solar system if you're going to teach conspiracy theories in school ? In reality it also be technically and monetary prohibitive for an agency to do this without government approval , Certainly internal logic and continuity is not the films strong point . It's also a film that's over long and contains an ending straight out of the more prentious episodes of SPACE 1999
This is a pity because it's more than competent on a technical level and I can see Nolan is trying to make an intelligent space epic that will try and grab the audiences attention and fire up their passion for real life science . Unfortunately he's left out the intelligence in crafting a drama and when this fails so does everything else