Mind blown?
More like time blown -- three hours and about 2 percent of my hearing (the theater must've assumed that by turning the volume up to "11," it'd seem better...) that I'll never get back, lost forever to the high budget engine that couldn't (though boy oh boy did it try), which additionally set women back a solid century thanks to the selfish and impulsive, cry baby of an inter-galactic boy-chasing scientesse (1) as played by Anne Hathaway. Interstellar is the much-hyped recently released Christopher Nolan sci-fi extravaganza, written by Nolan and brother, with a slew of IMDB top-ranking elites contracted to give us their teary all in hopes of finding rank with cinematic space and time travel predecessors that will remain, for all its efforts, comfortably stationed on far higher plains/dimensions.
Interstellar's previews shine. My suggestion is to stay with the thrill they provide, for the trailers are expertly dissected slices of a pedantic film project that tries to be everything to everyone, which in the full frontal spirit of TMI leaves nothing to mystery, imagination or intellect. There are poorly crafted, implausible details -- from that lonely colony of fertilized eggstronauts (2) (whatever to do with them?) to the gag-inducing submersible zip lock sleep pods. There are also needless subplots (the subversive Matt Damon schtuff), silly melodramas (brother vs. sister, daughter vs. daddy, aged mentor [Michael Caine] vs. basically everyone in the end). All are neatly rounded up with an equally unsatisfying happy joy-joy resolution, a handful of penciled coded notebook sheets tossed a la classic cliché to the wind as the penultimate heroine plants a big, wet smooch on her physician-type, boyfriend-type, tire iron-wielding (really?) sidekick in a moment of professional joy (mega ultra classic cliché).
Interstellar lost me early on, when Anne Hathaway's smug scientesse stumbled and sloshed about in the watery path of an oncoming Red Sea-esque whopper of a tsunami that surged (and surged and surged on, granting oodles of spare seconds so she could prolong her clumsy junk-heaving folly only to be rescued in classic, damsel in distress fashion) on stop number one of the astronauts' doomed mission, which consisted of planet hopping for purposes of finding a new Earth on the far side of some spherical wonderball wormhole entrance. And naturally (spoiler alert, I suppose), that flower-picking feminine obsessiveness totally screwed up the rest of the mission.
The plot thickened soon enough to accommodate the fact that nothing was meant to work in the first place but for the utter magic conjured up via a fully resolving, conveniently collapsed, storybook-like space-time continuum -- but I won't give more away than that. Honestly, I was still so imprinted with Hathaway's earlier Fantine that I kept expecting her to break into empassioned songs of self-loathing and sorrow, considering the ceaseless teary-eyed lip trembling she re-employed as the scientesse. She did not, however, sing, just as Matthew McConaughey did not speak -- he either mumbled or sobbed. Hathaway simply spoke (a lot) of love love love whilst being a snide bitch about McConaughey's fatherly love towards his children.
It's notable that I like every last actor involved in Interstellar -- just not here. I also get Intersteller's attempt to make this about our humanity. But I spent more than enough time watching this film, so I will keep my review proportionately brief. Save a buck, wait for Interstellar to show up on one of your pre-paid movie channels. And if you haven't yet, watch Contact.
(1) Scientesse - In entertainment, any female scientist character burdened with sexist, cliché-ridden faults and shortcomings, applied so as to move the plot forward via their backwards deeds and behaviors
(2) Eggstronaut - Stored, fertilized human eggs/zygotes/embryos as featured science fiction stories, existing for purposes of re-populating new worlds