It Has Been Far Too Long Since We Had a Great Space Epic

Rating: 9/10 (18 November 2014)

It has been 17 years since "Contact", the last great film about what might be "Out There." We've been teased with Interstellar for more than one year, and now the wait is over.
In Four Words: I Was BLOWN AWAY!
Although the film features many more space travel and other-worldly scenes than Contact did, it is the same type of story as Contact and that other great story, 2001: A Spaced Odyssey. Just as those two films were, the movie is not really about space travel -- It's about humans taking the next step in their physical, emotional, and spiritual evolution. There are quite a few technical inaccuracies in the spaceflight scenes, but this movie is not supposed to be a NASA Documentary. It's best just to let those details slide and concentrate instead on the story that is being told.
Some audiences have complained about the loud soundtrack drowning out some the dialog. I was fortunate enough to see the film on the IMAX screen in Costa Rica, with Spanish subtitles (I can read Spanish), so this was not an issue for me. However, the soundtrack really, really, really MAKES this movie. When you buy the DVD next year, turn the subtitles on and crank up the volume. The music alone can bring you to tears.
It is a bit of a tear-jerker, and the actors let the waterworks flow. The characters' reactions to being on a planet for little more than 3 hours, only to find out that 23 years have passed on their spaceship and on Earth, is heart-wrenching. Although the film gets dangerously close to it a couple of times, it always manages to fall just short of being overly-sappy or clichéd.
The movie is not perfect. I personally found the scenes with Matt Damon's character to be a bit artificial and unbelievable, although I do understand that so many years alone could make a person a nonsensical lunatic. The character is a psychotic that somehow seems to be totally emotionless and lethally rational. It just didn't compute for me. Fortunately, this is a relatively brief portion of the film.
I was ever so grateful to finally see a movie in which the robots weren't given stupid-sounding rhetoric and trite "machine" voices. The voice actors for the robots were given some awesome lines, too. "What will happen if he opens the inner airlock?" "Nothing Good!" The robots do have kind of a stupid-looking design, but their ability to adapt to many different physical tasks, as made quite evident on their first alien planet landfall, makes the purpose of their design very clear.
This is outstanding quality film-making, that will surely easily speed past the $500 Million Gross Income mark and become this generation's "2001."
If you do get a chance to see it in an IMAX cinema, I highly recommend it.