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Mon Nov 17 2014 11:13 Public Service Film Roundup:
- Interstellar (2014): I'm doing a special edition of Film Roundup before the end of the month to stop innocent people from seeing Interstellar under the impression that it's a film like Gravity where the cheesy plot is redeemed by great space visuals. That's what I thought going in, but it turns out that the plot isn't just cheesy, it's really awful, and the space visuals don't in fact redeem it.
Those who have been reading Crummy since 1998 (so, basically, Kris) will be shocked at me saying this, but... this movie is worse than Armageddon. Armageddon is a dumb movie that thinks it's fun. Interstellar is a dumb movie that thinks it's smart. In Armageddon the horrible science was plastered over with an attitude of "You eggheads don't know anything about the real world of asteroid mining, let some working stiffs show you how it's done!" I found this offensive, but I admit it works cinematically. Interstellar has a worshipful attitude towards scientists who constantly make rookie mistakes and have no way of solving problems beyond squinting at blackboards real hard. It's ridiculous.
I saw this movie with Sarah and afterwards we considered the possibility that we were seeing an Idiocracy-style scenario, in which society has so denigrated science that anyone with an undergraduate-level understanding of physics is considered a genius. (There's an astronaut who's always referred to as "Dr. Mann", even his nameplate says "Dr. Mann" instead of giving his first name, because it's unheard of for an astronaut to also have a Ph.D.) And that reading would work, except for one minor detail: these bumbling fools are somehow able to develop advanced space flight and cryosleep without any support from the outside society.
I bring up the Armageddon comparison because there are just so many problems with this movie, not problems with sci-fi cliches like someone going through a black hole's event horizon without getting smushed, but huge plot-wreckers that the movie tries to address and fails.
The space visuals definitely deliver, but they're used sparingly, and to my surprise I lost a lot of interest when the action moved to space. I thought the first act's portrayal of a dying Earth was really good. I also think that's because its emotional tone is copied from Children of Men. Which brings me to Interstellar's second meta-problem: it's an anthology of movies that are better than it, most notably Children of Men, 2001, and Tarkovsky's Solaris. (Sarah also mentioned Sunshine, which I haven't seen.) I admit that 2001 and Solaris are long, slow movies, and there's something to be said for adapting those ideas and visuals to a blockbuster, but Interstellar is about the same length as either of those movies (it has a longer running time but a 21st-century credit roll) and not exactly action-packed.
The one bright spot in this movie: the robots. Their design initially appears clunky, but they prove very versatile, and it's never made clear whether they're intelligent (which would be kind of disturbing given how they're treated) or just highly anthropomorphized.