The only movies Christopher Nolan directed that I unequivocally adored was # 2, the breakthrough mind fuck “Memento”, in which a man with short term memory loss attempts to figure out who is wife’s murderer is, and the dreamworld “Inception”. But the three Batman movies left me a little cold.
And so we come to last years “Intersteller”, a huge, not very exciting movie about time, gravity which can move from one dimension to another, making time travel possible) and Matthew McConaughey, one of the more irritating actors in any galaxy, as an ex-NASA flyer brought in to fly a mission.Alright, alright, alright.
It is the near future, the earth is starving to death with Okra gone the way of the American Buffalo and corn next on the list. Science, unable to save us, has gotten a bad rap, and NASA, working in secret, sent astronauts on a trip through a wormhole directed by beings from another planet. Cooper) at the instigation of the head of NASA on a trip to find out what happened and find an inhabitable planet as Earth dies.
Meaning, Cooper has to leave his son and daughter (Mackenzie Foy is the daughter as a ten year old) to save mankind, a pretty good excuse in the shirking familial duties stakes) and join Anne Hathaway. That takes care of the first hour on this three hour epic. The next hour is 2001: A Space Odyssey, looks great, lots of movement, not much action, and then the third act is mumbo jumbo faux science. If there was any way for this movie to be less self-important it might have been a lot better.
As it is, it is a long slog to the far future (actually, something like 80 years), interesting but surely in the post-A.I. world, also the immediate future.
I enjoyed it to a limited degree, despite not being a big fan of anybody in it, except for the three actors playing his daughter Murph. The punchline works, it is a clever pay off, and the script, by Christopher and his brother Jonathan Nolan, has a satisfying tick tock (apt for a movie obsessed with gravity as a type of time machine), but it is too long and too self important. A dud at the box office, it claims 2001 as an influence, but messes it up. And McConaughey hogs so much of the movies time with his awestruck self-regard he weighs the movie down.
Grade: B-