A decent cinematographic fable

Rating: 7/10 (20 February 2018)

I spent a good time watching Interstellar, although to be so I needed to constantly remind myself that I wasn't following a realistic story, but rather some sort of fable. The story is repetitively implausible.
There's an ex NASA pilot who hasn't trained in years who get himself ready in weeks to undertake an interstellar travel mission. The film makes it look like piloting spaceships is like driving cars. Current NASA missions requires around 5 years of training for one specific mission; enough time for an astronaut to see his children become teenagers. In the future, NASA operates undercover because the government is in denial of the spatial program. Somehow they already have astronauts in another solar system! The idea that an undercover version of NASA could undertake such missions in secret of both logistically and financially absurd. Those are grandiose missions, the kind of which require billions of dollars of funding, thousands of employees, years of research and development, and manufacturing deals with the private sector.
Once in space, astronauts explains to each other some aspects for space travel, which is a way for the screenplay to convey such information to the spectator, but which is unfortunately very clumsy because astronauts are supposed to know those things! There is a scene where some astronaut explains to the astronaut played by Anne Hathaway how a wormhole is supposed to work, by folding a piece of paper and making a hole with a pen in it. The character listens in awe because she apparently discovers how that works. This is the kind of explanation that anyone can find in any educative YouTube channel about science. It is unthinkable that an astronaut would not know that, for the simple reason that it would mean such astronaut is catastrophically under-skilled for the mission in the movie.
Many aspects of the mission are improvised in space. During one of such improvisation, Cooper, the main character, elaborates a plan by drawing rough lines and circles on a whiteboard, like he was playing some strategy game of something. Everybody agrees that the plan will work and that they're good to go. Such things require very precise calculations, adjustments, checking, double-checking, designing a protocol to ensure everything will go fine, etc. Maybe this development phase of the plan can be considered to be included in an ellipsis, but I find showing the spectator only the whiteboard drawing session to be so coarse.
On the science side of things, there are many bizarre things. So-called "gravitational anomalies" belong more to the domain of fantasy than of science-fiction. One of the pillar concept of science of that no matter what new discoveries are made, what worked one day continues to work under the same assumptions and limits in the future. This is why we're still using Newton's laws to make calculations on Earth even though Einstein proved them to be incorrect. They're only an extremely good approximation when you don't approach the speed of light, which wasn't even under consideration at the time Newton was alive. This is also why we'll never go faster than the speed of light under conditions in which it's currently known to be impossible (which is all conditions we know). So, whatever we discover about black holes I can assure you than the day gravity on the Earth's surface start having anomalies scientists are gonna shit more than bricks.
In the movie, there is a wormhole near Saturn. Wormhole are giant celestial bodies that are supposed to be taking thousands of years to form. I didn't feel like the film was set in thousands of years. It would mean they look back at the Apollo missions like we look back at the Great Pyramids, which wasn't really the way the movie conveyed the sort of nostalgia about those missions. When the astronauts embark in their spaceship to travel to the wormhole, the film chooses realistic travel speeds and accepts that it takes months (maybe years, I don't remember) to reach out to Saturn, but when they appear on the other side of the hole, in another solar system, then suddenly travel from one planet to another is only a matter of hours.
I could probably continue with more and more such paragraphs. While watching the movie I think I made myself such remarks at a rate of about one every 10 minutes. There's just no detail or even no medium-importance plot device that makes sense or is plausible in this movie. Yet somehow I mildly enjoying watching it, for the simple reason that it is a fable. Like in a fable, individual pieces of actions can be implausible, but the point isn't such details, the point is the overall story. Interstellar is the kind of material that should have been developed with care over an entire saga of science-fiction books a thousand pages each, but it's a 3 hours movie instead. At such, it's some sort of science-fiction high-density package of interesting concepts that aren't developed in much deep nor rendered very plausible. But it works on a high-level. You just need to imagine that instead of watching a movie you're listening to Christopher Nolan on a 3 hours road trip telling you about his last big science-fiction idea. You can feel how touching and grandiose it is, it only remains to be actually done.