What a massive disappointment

Rating: 6/10 (13 November 2014)

Though I am not a Bat-person, and do not wish to become one, I have admired Christopher Nolan for his early films and 'Inception', though, with the exception of 'Insomnia', I always regarded them as, in the immortal words of Andrew Sarris 'less than meets the eye'. I do not like to call films pretentious, but with 'Memento' and 'Inception' the word certainly came to mind. They seemed shallow pretending to be deep.
The same is, in my opinion, certainly true of 'Interstellar'. Yes, it carries you along for a ride, and yes the special effects are great, and yes, it might give us pause to think what will, in fact, be the destiny of our species. But, my dear Mr Nolan, surely you must realise that our species will not survive by planting American flags on distant planets. And, like 'Gravity' before it, the search for a happy ending has totally destroyed any shred of credibility of what might have gone before. The image of Cooper floating around Saturn without his spaceship, waiting to be picked up by a passing probe (just before his oxygen runs out, of course) is so ridiculous that if Stanley Kubrick were to be told that it is a respectful reference to the 'starchild' at the end of '2001', he'd punch you in the nose.
'Interstellar' - for all of its attempts to incorporate relativistic time dilation and very clever (I do not use that word in a derogatory sense) visual representation of multi-dimensional string theory towards the end, is void of any real cultural insight.
The film simply extends 'The Wizard of Oz' into the space age and decides at the end that there is really somewhere better than home. It is TOSH! Great films tell us something memorable about the human condition, or the nature of cinema itself. This film, for all its quotes from Dylan Thomas does neither. It is for people who think that the word 'awesome' has some profound meaning and not, as is the case, an excuse for not finding a more appropriate and restrained reaction.
Any suggestion that it deserves a Best Picture Oscar is a sad comment on the way that those awards have become debased in recent years.