What a disappointment this latest Christopher Nolan film is. The film creaks with movie clichés and unconcealed pandering to the audience. From a struggling farm family to several heroic rescues and an evil betrayal, Interstellar tugs at our heartstrings a little too firmly. The ending could have come out of a 40s melodrama.
Unfortunately, the dialog isn’t much better. It’s rare that the language of a film takes me out of the movie and brings home to me that that I'm watching actors reading lines, but in Interstellar, that’s exactly what happened. The stilted language that Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Mackenzie Foy, Ellen Burstyn, and Michael Caine have to speak feels more like that of a sophomore physics lab report than a conversation. And while the script mostly avoids the narrative gimmicks that Nolan can employ (though there’s an echo of Inception when we learn that an hour near the black hole is seven years in earth time), the sprawl of the The Dark Knight Rises is much in evidence here. But while it’s hard to stay engaged in this film for its nearly three-hour run time, at least the score by Hans Zimmer cues us in on how you should respond to a character or event when we're uncertain.
Interstellar has wonderful production values and a lot of good acting that remains firm in the face of some terrible writing. And it’s pleasant to watch the echoes of other sci fi touchstones like 2001 and its reflections on helmet faceplates. But there’s nothing much at the core of all this technique in Interstellar, which makes the movie's thee-hour length seem like 21 earth years.
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