Let me start by saying that I enjoyed
Intersetllar quite a bit. I'd give it 4 thumbs on my 5 thumb-scale
(don't ask where I got the other three thumbs). It was entertaining,
I didn't hate it. But there were some issues... And of course
SPOILERS:
- The premise doesn't really make sense. Thanks to Coop, they figure out gravity manipulation, launch enormous city-sized spaceships that can traverse worm holes. BUT they can't figure out how to grow Okra on Earth? This flaw is present in every “find a new home” save-humanity movie. If you have the ability to move thousands or millions of people off world, if you can traverse worm-holes, if you can figure out how to survive on some new alien world that's different from Earth, if you can terraform another planet...then you can make it work on Earth. If you can make plants grow on Alien World 7, with different soil chemistry, different lightning conditions, different seasons, a complete lack of insects and all the intricacies of agriculture that are present on Earth...why can't you figure out how to grow wheat back on Earth? Interstellar only explains it by saying that there's a “blight.” Which doesn't really make sense because when they move off Earth, how are they going to make sure they don't take the blight with them? If it's infecting all plants everywhere, why do we assume it can't get into their escape colony? They don't seem super strict about contamination when they let random farmer Coop show up at NASA's Ark headquarters and they just let him waltz in with Blight all over him. It seems like it would be easier to stop a viral plant fungus than to figure out wormhole manipulation. Then again, a movie about a man inventing a vaccine for plants might not be all that exciting.
- They have no MRI machines left on the planet. But they have wormhole-hopping super spaceships and joke-cracking AI robots. So why can't they make MRIs?
They send Coop and the gang through a wormhole near Saturn and then they go visit a black-hole and three alien planets...yet when they get to a planet, they have to walk long distances with no other method of travel. They couldn't bring along a rover like they did on mythical Apollo missions. That would be too hard, wasn't enough room in their ship for a tiny rover. Hell, send a segway. Coop and Matt Damon end up treking across ice for long distances. Anne Hathaway causes everyone to age 23 years because she slowly trawdles through ankle deep water. Seriously people, you've got interstellar spaceships and walking and nothing in between? A plastic kayak weighing four pounds could have prevented half the problems in the movie.
Let's fucking walk everywhere...IN SPACE!
- NASA needs a random farmer to be their savior for this mission that's just about to launch? Why? They mention that they don't have any astronauts left that have left a simulator. But remember, they just sent a bunch of people to a whole host of alien planets just 10 years ago. They forgot how to go to space in the meantime. Don't have the budget? In any case, wouldn't you rather send someone that's been training for this for a decade instead of a farmer that wandered in covered in blight talking about ghosts? They could explain this away, maybe explain that humanity is down to such a low population that they've actually tapped out the talented pilots or something. But as it is, it seems totally absurd that Coop is suddenly the savior. And what happened to the guy who was going to be the savior pilot? He just gets bumped from the flight and sits on his ass for 50 years?
See, big fucking rocket! Remember when they launch from Earth? There's a massive Saturn V-ish looking rocket, and it launches just this small shuttle like spacecraft into Earth orbit. From there, they dock to the bigger interstellar ship, they head off to Saturn, then wormhole. Then they take the small shuttle-like-ship down to a planet that has 130% of Earth's gravity. Then they do some surfing, then take off and fly away. Recall that getting from Earth to Earth Orbit required a Saturn V-ish massive rocket? Well now leaving a planet with 30% stronger gravity requires no such rocket, they just fly away. I'm sorry, what? This makes no fucking sense. If this spaceship is capable of just flying off a planet with stronger gravity than Earth, then it should be capable of just flying into space from Earth. And if you have the technology to build small ships that can just fly up to Earth orbit, then you don't need massive Saturn V rockets and you don't need gravity manipulation technology in order to put a lot of shit into space. You guys have the technology to easily get into space. Because remember, after they take-off from 130%-gravity world, which is a manuever that should be more difficult than launching to orbit from Earth, they then head off to another planet, then take off from that planet. They've got a ship that can launch into orbit from two planets one after another...but it can't get to Earth orbit without a Saturn V? This might sound like a nit-pick to you, but to someone that knows anything about rockets, this is like mind-numbingly stupid. They obviously tried to make the movie somewhat realistic when it comes to depicting black holes and relativity, but they wave a wand and hope you can't think about 1960s technology?
Let's walks some more. So you arrive through a wormhole, you have 3 planets to check out. It seems like they don't know shit about the planets other than knowing that the explorer has given them a thumbs up. Not sure why they can't just look at the planet now and do spectral analysis or even receive more detailed info from the explorers that could tell them that this planet is covered in a giant rolling tsunami. But whatever, assume they can't get more info and have to actually land on a planet and check it out (apparently just orbiting it and looking at it with their eyes isn't an option either?). Fine, so then which of the following planets do you pick? Two planets that are basically normal...or a third planet that's so close to a black hole that 1 hour on the surface is like 7 years on Earth? Let's go check out the crazy time-dilated world first! Remember that they sent explorers out a decade ago to check out the planets? Well the explorer that landed on Tsunami-World just landed there like 80 minutes ago. The explorers that landed at the other two planets are still broadcasting thumbs-ups after a decade. Which is more likely to be habitable, a planet that has supported a signal beacon for 10 years, or one that has supported such a beacon for 80 minutes? Why in the hell would you check out that crazy time-dilated planet first? Even if you get there and it's a great world and humans go settle there...they will always be dealing with crazy time dilation from being so near a black-hole. Does that sound like a nice stable place you want to make home? That'd be like deciding of all places to live on Earth, a trailer-park in Oklahoma is the best bet for survival.
Hurr durr, I'm an astronaut. I hate Anne Hathaway. Oh my god, shut up. You are so annoying. All you do is cry and screw things up, then blabber on about love.- You made a sort of believable story about worm-holes and warping space-time...and then you crammed in the idea that love is an actual super-natural force that transcends space-time, but not just any love, father-daughter love? A. It's corny as fuck. B. You don't need to tack on something super-natural like love being an undiscovered aspect of physics like it's the god damn Higgs Boson. It just makes people roll their eyes and try to ignore that Anne Hathaway was in the movie. Let their love speak for itself.
- If you want to make a movie that's like 2001 A Space Odyssey, why do you edit it like it's a music video? 2001 is full of incredibly long shots of beautiful space things with no dialogue and sometimes no music. It gives the audience space and time to think about what's happening, to live inside their own heads for a moment and wrap their heads around what's going on. While I think 2001 does this too much and could have done with a good trim, it still stands that one of the reasons 2001 is good is that it is not in your face and it gives you time to think. This movie throws three times as much information at you, but before you can think about it, it then slams you with a plot twist followed by a bunch of crappy dialogue. For example, any space-travel sequence is filled with non-sense pilot chatter. “Full reverse thrusters” “On my mark, 3, 2, 1” “Match the spin now.” A. Pilots don't narrate what they are doing. B. It's not even necessary, it's not like the audience would be totally lost if Coop doesn't explain what he's doing. C. Imagine instead that these sequences don't involve rapid cuts and shitty fake-pilot dialogue, and instead consist of long shots and no dialogue that let you just appreciate the visuals and have some space to think. I think you get more tension from silence than you do from random fake pilot speak. Also, for all the pretty visuals, they sure like to cram in as many cuts as possible. No, stop looking at the wormhole, instead, look at Anne Hathaway passing out and then a close up of the ship exterior, now back to Coop, now back to Hathaway, now back to the exterior. How about an iconic long shot as they traverse a worm hole that doesn't cut away from the pretty visuals? And it's not just a problem with space travel. They also cram in random shit throughout the whole movie. Clips from the future of people talking about dust storms, let's just cram that in to the beginning. This movie is nearly 3 hours long, yet it can't ever find more than 15 seconds to let you think without hitting you over the head with corny dialogue about love or stupid fake pilot speak or a random plot twist. It's almost like Nolan is afraid that if a scene takes more than 40 seconds we'll get bored. You make so-called philosophical movies that make you think, but apparently the thinking is homework for when the movie is over.
Astronauts cry a lot right? The ending sucks. So Coop makes it out of the black hole alive, is recovered floating in space, then meets Murph as a grandma, but just for about 30 seconds before she tells him to leave (cause the audience is bored already, it's been 30 whole seconds). Then he steals a spaceship and heads to Anne Hathaway because she was the only woman in the movie he's allowed to have sex with so he has to go to her now or something. So, they choose to have Cooper live through a black-hole only to have this not really pay off. Sure he meets Murph again, but she tells him to leave almost immediately and she dies. Was that worth it? Then he goes to Anne Hathaway...who is still alone on that planet for some reason? They've launched massive city-sized ships, but they couldn't send a single shuttle with like 4 people to go help Anne Hathaway? They even send for grandma Murph to come out to Saturn and meet Cooper, and they have a hangar full of ships...so they're heading to the new home for humanity, but haven't bothered to send anyone to help the single individual woman who is on the planet by herself getting it ready? Why? It's not even a plot hole because the fact that she's alone doesn't really matter for anything anyway. Why do we make such a leap, that Cooper lives through the black hole and is recovered, only to have such an unsatisfying ending?
Here's how I would end the movie instead:
Remember how Cooper could move her books on the bookshelf? Then at the climax, as she's figuring out that he's the ghost...she starts moving books. I thought she was going to communicate with him inside the black hole by writing something in morse code by moving her books. And he could respond, since he can see into that room. Right? They could have communicated back and forth. How's that for an ending? She can't see him, but he can see here, and they communicate with morse code by moving books around, they both cry tears of joy, he then gives her the data. Since he's inside the black-hole, time moves really slowly, almost a stand-still, so he doesn't' die, he's just left in the black hole forever living in that moment. Meanwhile outside the blackhole it just looks like the black hole disappears along with Cooper. He's gone. But to him, time was passing so slowly that he's in there basically for an infinite amount of time living in the moment where he talks to Murph. Then we glimpse her figuring out gravity manipulation and then we see the giant ships leaving earth. The end.
