Interstellar

If Time existed as a person, the movie Interstellar would exist as its obsessed stalker.

Quantum mechanical theories of time fuel Interstellar. It uses a set a watches as symbols. It eventually involves time travel (so to speak).

Even the spaceship turns as a clock. Heck, everything in this movie is round and moves in a circular motion. I’m surprised the writers didn’t name their main character Hour G. Lass.

First, the good news. The acting’s solid. The soundtrack’s good. If you watch this movie on IMAX, you’ll experience it as a three-hour-ish amusement park ride, the sort with the 3D screens and seats that jerks around and scramble your organs.

Interstellar offers a unique and exciting ride.

I hate to write something as cliché as “It makes you think,” but many of the movie’s discussions return to the forefront of your mind, turn your gears (see what I did there?).

Interstellar presents a mostly excellent series of scenes where Cooper (played by Matthew McConaughey) watches videos of his kids who age faster than him due to special relativity.

The chemistry between Cooper and his young daughter feels genuine. You love how much they love each other, and when events threaten that relationship, you care deeply.

Now, the bad news. Actually, allow me to precede the bad news with a few spoiler warnings. I’m afraid that I can’t avoid said spoilers if I want to discuss what didn’t work in this movie.

If you just want me to tell you whether or not you should see this movie, then go. See it. Come back here afterwards. We’ll compare notes.

I’ll wait.

Back? Great. Let’s discuss the ordeal you just experienced.

(Did you also want McConaughey to say, “I was driving a spaceship long before I got paid to drive one. I just like the way it feels.”?)

Interstellar’s first act provides a big frustration. A lot of it doesn’t work in the slightest, and there’s no reason why everything that didn’t work in Act One ever needed to raise its ugly head.

Our main character, Cooper, and his daughter (about ten years old) receive two binary codes, written in gravity (seriously), that tell Cooper to:

1) Go to a particular grid coordinate so that he can fly to another part of the universe (more on that later) and

2) Don’t fly to another part of the universe.

It turns out (you read that spoiler warning, right?) that Cooper, from the future, sent both messages at the same time while trapped in a black hole.

I swear to God, I didn’t make that up.

If that makes you scratch your head and ask, “Why did he send the first message if he didn’t want his past-self to get on the spaceship in the first place?” I’m right there with you.

But present day Cooper follows the first message and ignores the second because we wouldn’t have a movie otherwise.

The grid coordinates lead him to a secret NASA base that’s a secret for no good reason, and it turns out that Cooper used to work for NASA, and NASA’s about to search for a new planet because Earth will soon die, and they need Cooper to captain the mission because “he’s the only one who can save mankind.”

I wanted to play along, but this setup felt too convoluted, too indigestible.

None of this ridiculous setup seemed necessary. Why couldn’t Cooper just work for NASA and here’s his mission? Why navigate a maze into a building when you could stroll through the front door?

I might suggest that the writers pulled this stunt to stretch the movie’s running time (which would serve as a terrible excuse), but the movie ran close to 46 hours (perhaps a slight bit less than that—hard to say).

The characters constantly say things like, “Our mission is for the good of mankind,” “It serves mankind,” and “Your mission is to rescue mankind.” I won’t spoil the hidden meaning behind that, but the fact that there’s a character named “Mann” should sound alarms in even the thickest skull.

You recall those videos I mentioned, sent from Cooper’s children to his spaceship? One of them gets shown twice when only once would’ve worked better (the second time).

Cooper’s daughter quickly and easily realizes that her father’s inside a black hole and communicates to her through time via gravity. Her eyes just light up and she “gets it” somehow. It’s painful.

Cooper even makes the second hand of her watch tick in Morse code (only time will tell?) to tell his daughter how to save the human race.

I’ll accept far-fetched concepts and plot twists, but movies must first successfully pave the way for those concepts.

I accept that a wet Gizmo results in Gremlins (I’ve gotten an electronic device wet once or twice) because the movie Gremlins starts with those rules.

A Norse god, a rich guy in a flying suit of armor, a steroid abuser, and some friends will save New York from aliens? Avengers laid the groundwork for it. Heck, Marvel spent decades on that groundwork.

A story can get away with any list of rules so long as it establishes and plays by it. When a story invents its rules along the way, an audience can’t swallow them, and the story reeks of BS.

One more thing, and maybe these faults rest with the theater’s sound system and not the film. The soundtrack and sound effects annoyingly rose at several moments that didn’t call for it. Did the director fear that the audience had fallen asleep?

Worst of all, the movie ends about fifteen minutes before it actually ends. The wrap-up continues and continues. It’s a painful wait. You could honestly just walk away early and know you missed nothing important.

Interstellar provides frustration. It offers so many good points, so many good lines, so many fun concepts, good acting, great visuals, clever symbols, and yet . . . the final product seems a disorganized mess.

It’s a great class given by a terrible teacher.

The beginning’s too long, too needlessly complex. The ending’s worse for the same reasons.