A once promising director assaults his audience with a seemingly never-ending barrage of bafflement

Rating: 4/10 (6 September 2015)

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning
In the future, Earth has become a pretty sad, desolate place, where resources have run scarce and machines have taken over much. A space time continuum in outer space is discovered, around the planet of Saturn, that humanity can ascend to in order to begin a new life away from the rapidly diminishing Earth. Cooper (a continually, frustratingly mumbling Matthew McConaughey) a simple farmer, is chosen to man the space craft that will save Earth, along with co pilots Romilly (David Gyasi) and Brand (Anne Hathaway) and a talking robot thing that looks like a fridge, by the name of TARS (Bill Irwin.) But as the mission unfolds, they discover secrets and lies that threaten to plunge them into conflict amongst each other, I guess. They're possibly meant to do something else, and something else happens, but by the end (which, given the length, I'm surprised I stuck around till), the whole film had just so gone over my head I might have missed it.
At the start of the new century, a young, promising director called Christopher Nolan emerged, an eager and hungry young mind that delivered Memento, an intelligent and original thriller that took a far flung concept and played with your mind and demanded your full attention to the end. He followed this with Insomnia, not only one of my all time favourite thrillers, but also one of my favourite films, that I still love to this day. After these two relatively independent offerings, he established himself as one of the top new names, and possibly Hollywood was happy to throw a lot of cash at him, and let him run wild and indulge his darkest, most inner most relentless cerebral musings, and from here on in, he went and delivered increasingly lengthy productions that bombarded the minds of his audience with so much anomaly and detail, even turning Batman into a challenging and complex ride three times. Even his comparatively short 2006 effort The Prestige seemed lost in it's own mystery and aggrandisement. But with Interstellar, he's just completely surpassed himself.
Clocking up at nearly three hours, the film, in the time you spend with it (and you really do have to make quite a commitment) truly rakes up every last second of it's stated running time, and that would mean there's a lot to be taken in, and much you might have to describe and re-live about it afterwards. It could be quite difficult, but actually you can sum the film Interstellar up with one word: over. It's over ambitious, over indulgent, over bloody long!, over bearing, over cerebral over complicated and, just over whelming. And by the end, after grudging with it for so long, you'll be glad it's 'over.' Seriously, if you manage to get through it with out getting up to stretch your legs at least once while it's still on, you should get a telegram from the queen! I can't believe it took me so long to see it, but I'm certainly glad I missed it in the cinema.
An intelligent concept is fine, but it can't give the audience no room to breathe like this. It's a shame, because if Nolan had delivered something a little more condensed, the intricate plot the film had to explore and any intelligent message it had to deliver could have been better absorbed by the viewer, instead of being lost in a sea of bafflement. Sadly, the best praise I can end up giving it is some fabulous cinematography, in space and at sea that sticks in the mind.
Inception was too much, really, but I took it as the most intellectual film ever made and kind of have a soft spot for it, but this is just too much. Nolan can be thankful his films haven['t lost their spark and edge like fellow contemporary M Night Shyamalan, but he really needs to stop being so ruthlessly anti-mainstream and pelting his audience with such lengthy, cerebral exposition, or he might lose them forever. And stop least stop making them so dour and humourless to boot. In terms of a modern, space bound adventure, it goes without saying Alfonso Couran's much trimmer Gravity does a better job of being smart and in orbit. **