Interstellar (2014) - Movie Review

***CONTAINS MILD SPOILERS***
Interstellar is a film with a hell of a lot of good, but also with quite a bit of bad, making it incredibly difficult to review. Its a film with so much on its shoulders with Christopher Nolan's fantastic critical acclaim from The Dark Knight (2008) and Inception (2010), not to mention the huge success of The Dark Knight Rises (2012). What does become clear from this film though is that he has already reached and passed his peak with The Dark Knight (2008) and Inception (2010), and Rises (2012) was nowhere near as good as those two. And, sadly, neither was Interstellar.
This is a film that instantly sets its mood surrounding survival, and the dystopian future Nolan has created with a dust-covered Earth running out not of fuel but of food. This is such a brilliantly realized future that Nolan clearly enjoys exploring as a writer and director. In fact, this could be a film in itself - humanity trying to get away from this future Earth, allowing for more exploration of this future the film sets itself in.
The theme of survival is constantly pushed to the limits throughout the film, exploring relativity, time travel, ageing, and what this can do to a person. Nowhere in the film is this more present than on Dr Mann's planet in the second act, which includes a great twist, but ends up failing on the part of logic and contrivance. A space helmet that can crack another space helmet should have at least cracked a little itself, after all! Maybe I'm wrong on that, but the force of the helmet cracking and sound effect used didn't work for it to not crack for me, and felt like a contrived way to give one character tension, and another none. It also lost its tension from the fact that it was previously established a human could survive a few minutes on Dr Mann's planet without the need of a space helmet, so part of the tension was lost there as well. Also, they just so happen to have a spare helmet a couple of scenes later?

The space exploration explores some good ideas, but in grounding itself in real scientific theories never quite goes far enough to be nearly as interesting as it could have been. In fact, there is only one planet that we don't see in the trailer, and even then its barely seen and looks visually boring compared to the other two. Its fine having a dessert planet and a water planet, but the water planet's twist was in the trailer, and the only other planet left was seen in the trailers and seems so much less awe-inspiring than if it hadn't have been included in the trailers. The exploration seems so underwhelming, trying to engross itself in reality, but by doing so makes the film so much less interesting.
The black hole and wormhole segments are the most visually stunning segments of the film, with the wormhole being a fantastic piece of imagery from design to execution, and the wormhole scene itself is easily the best of the entire film by far.
Christopher Nolan is great at directing this space exploration, but seems to stumble with the character moments at points. The deep moments are so few and feel so artificial its almost unbelievable that they were made by human beings! I constantly felt the characters for the most part could have been robots, and it would have made little-to-no difference.
The characters' dialogue for 90% of the film feels like its relevant to building the plot and the science, showing off in the audiences' faces "look, we know this! We're teaching you stuff!", instead of building the characters as actual people. Not only this but the characters do incredibly stupid things and make unbelievable leaps in logic just to advance the plot. The plot should revolve around the characters, not the other way round. Matt Damon's Dr Mann has an entire scene where I could help but think of his as an idiot! He was meant to be a doctor, an actual scientist, and yet seemed to be ignorant of his sheer stupidity. I was close to shouting along with Cooper and Brand as the scene went on, and the fifth dimension scenes just left me going "what?!" incredibly loudly and in utter confusion. The film seemed to almost lose its logic at this point, relying on speculation and characters just by chance understanding this, to the point where it felt incredibly contrived just to make sure the story ended soon.
In fact, I left the cinema wondering what the hell the final scenes were all about!
The cast was terrific though, with the actresses playing Murph doing a fantastic job throughout, and she felt like the best realized character of the entire film. Matthew McConaughey was terrific as Cooper, even if he did seem to mumble in a lot of scenes, and Anne Hathaway for me sold the show as Dr Brand, despite her character getting no resolution to any of the character traits (yes, all two) that were set-up and almost being forgotten about at the end. The rest of the cast were great, but no one was particularly memorable both in performance and in character. The characters just did as the script told them to, instead of progressing and acting naturally as people, meaning that the actors have to contrast their own performance at points just because.
Hans Zimmer's score was certainly very good, if a little loud and repetitive, and I constantly felt he was trying to create a new version of 'The Dream is Collapsing' from the Inception (2010) soundtrack.
There was so much left unexplained in an almost three hour film and so much that was paced badly that I just wish the script had been re-drafted one more time to just polish it all off. It feels like its still at the draft stages, but went into production anyway. The pacing takes almost an hour to really pick up, and the plot is over-complicated so much to the point where I would have been so much easier to cut out entire segments of the film. In fact, Dr Mann's planet is visited in what feels like the most contrived way, instead of actually doing something intelligent, and if they had gone to Dr Edmund's planet instead the film would be shorter, less complicated and overall better. There was so much that could have been simplified that I'm amazed it got so complex and convoluted in the first place!
Despite my criticisms, Interstellar is hardly a bad film, but it certainly felt like a wasted opportunity and frustratingly over-complicated in its screenplay. I may or may not buy the screenplay book, just to see if I understand it better, but its so difficult for me to hate the film despite all this. There is a lot to love, but a fair amount to not love at the same time.