Stanley Kubrick can rest easy . . .

Rating: 3/10 (20 November 2014)

After a long drawn-out establishing sequence on our trashed home planet Cooper and young Murph (Matthew McConaughey and Mackenzie Foy) follow a mysterious trail to a secret NASA lab where a last ditch mission to a wormhole to save humankind is revealed by Professor Brand (Michael Caine) for which Cooper is implausibly selected to pilot.
This section is reasonably authentic: conventional rocket stages and a shuttle-like capsule which then docks with a larger vessel capable of achieving artificial gravity through centrifugal force to take them on the two year mission to Saturn. But from then on the science and the script become increasingly fantastical; whether in the high energy environment near Saturn, or (later) falling into a black hole our plucky astronauts absolutely need not fear radiation. The formula for the rocket fuel must be worth a fortune: after the initial conventional launch the landing and taking off from large Earth sized planets is achieved miraculously with small shuttles, so why the staged launch vehicle was needed is a mystery. The initial two year trajectory from Earth to Saturn and the wormhole does not then restrict the spaceship suddenly changing course and having a quick fly round the wormhole: the laws of celestial mechanics initially adopted are suddenly thrown out the window! Communication (which is essential in the script to move the plot forward) is also maintained somehow through the wormhole and back to Earth. The three planets themselves fall into formulaic categories of water world, ice planet, and (at the end) desert planet, and whilst some have oxygen whether there are plants or living organisms producing the oxygen is not made clear. The sexy black hole Gargantua gets lots of attention, but the star(s) at the heart of the system are forgotten about.
Despite data from earlier probes dispatched through the wormhole the astronauts seem to know next to nothing about the planetary conditions (again essential for the script) but somehow arrive exactly where the early expeditions landed (or crashed). It seems the script is as twisty as the wormhole! Throughout this movie there is absolutely no sense of any rudimentary astronomical comprehension and so despite the painfully thin gloss of authenticity we are basically in Star Trek space fantasy land: anyone seeing this movie expecting verisimilitude will feel they have been very cleverly conned.
The derivative concept boils down to one part 2001 A Space Odyssey to one part Contact with a liberal dollop of Gravity (space docking / disasters etc). The art design is in itself curious: the clunky robots seem to be wilfully jointed variants of the monoliths from 2001, the cheap and nasty space suits (intentionally?) retro NASA, the hibernation pods that sink dramatically into the floor (why?) part 2001 part Alien. Overlaying the woefully dodgy science is a powered-up emotion plot line that at times is intensely annoying and hugely implausible: for example when one of the astronauts drowns on the water world all the attention is on Cooper missing his family; their dead colleague with whom they have been cooped up in the spaceship for years is immediately forgotten, and when they return to the mother ship the fact the remaining astronaut has been waiting for 20 years gets little plot attention: more wormholes in the aim-to-crowd-please script? This mid-film emphasis on Cooper and his family is massively self indulgent and McConaughey's character becomes very irritating. .
Throughout Hans Zimmer's score provides a high decibel level of aural dampening to divert the brain from these trivial inconsistencies or when the plot or painful dialogue starts to sag; whilst Brand (Anne Hathaway) provides cute. Those parts of the script that are discernible through the thundering score are lightweight, tedious, and overworked.
So what do we learn if we retrospectively compare the three movies: 2001, Contact, and Interstellar: in hindsight 2001 can now be seen to represent a triumph of direction and cinematography, thoughtful intelligent script, a sound science base bound together in beauty and imagination; in contrast Contact it seems is already exhibiting the growth of emo in science fiction movies (epitomised by the self indulgence offered its star Jodie Foster), though this is contained within a reasonably plausible and scientifically based script, but oh dear when we look at Interstellar doesn't this movie says something rather awful about the sloppy crowd pleasing filmic times we live in, with the massed forces of technical wizardry and editing coupled with that all pervasive score to dull our dissent. Stanley Kubrick can rest easy; despite the hype Interstellar is not going to knock 2001 of its stellar perch. Overblown, over-hyped, corny, unscientific, implausible, Interstellar fails majestically as great cinema. Meanwhile 2001 like the very best sci-fi is subversive, it has edge - even satire, it transcends genres, it asks us the audience to think, and it exposes the brutality of the human condition. Where it is optimistic this optimism is undercut ambiguously, and it has profound things to say about humankind's place in the universe. Interstellar meanwhile, whilst for sure its sugary effect lingers cloyingly in the brain after leaving the cinema, is a mere annoying dust mote in the eye of space cinema.