Bruce722 Review of Interstellar

Interstellar (2014)

Great potential but Nolan got in his own way... as usual.

[7/10 · 18 April 2015]

Interstellar is your typical Christopher Nolan film. It has an incredible score that plays throughout essentially the entire movie, beautiful visuals, an interesting and captivating plot, great acting, great character and setting development, a heavy reliance on suspended disbelief, and enormously huge plot holes. Some people don't mind them but I have trouble with plot holes so big that they actively go against what has already been established in the story arc. Forewarning, the following sentences will contain SPOILERS that are as big as the plot holes they discuss. Now I won't get into the details on every single little plot hole and inconsistency because this review would become way too long. I will, however, touch on the two biggest ones, in my opinion, and both have to do with the conclusion of the movie so again, you've been warned. The first is the complete and total fail that is the time paradox proposed in this film, more specifically the 'bootstrap' paradox. This is based on the concept that critical content that the futures hinges on is actually acquired from the future itself. Of course, this theory is a farce but unfortunately many science fiction stories rely on it as its foundation. Theoretical physicists will disagree but they're just manufacturing job security (i.e. they're liars). I won't go into too much detail on the various examples of this paradox in the film but if you see it, it'll be painfully obvious which instances I'm referring to, as they point them out for you. The second fail is the inconsistency of time relativity, as they introduce it in the movie itself. It makes sense throughout most of the film... until the end, when Anne Hathaway somehow doesn't age. Nolan apologists will fabricate arguments to defend this or make excuses, just like they did in Inception, but the reality is that Nolan blew it here. She should've aged 51 years or more just like the rest of the people (outside of Matthew McConaughey, who was sucked into a black hole and of course survived). I mainly focused on the negatives with this review because those few negatives are what held the movie back from a perfect rating. If Nolan would've gotten out of his own way, this could've been one of my favorite science fiction films ever. Unfortunately, it was pushed back to the "really good but not great" category where so many other films reside.