I'm trippin' space balls!

A few thoughts on the movie Interstellar.

The title itself should indicate the target audience of this movie, seeing as it's a misnomer. Interstellar refers to traveling between stars and is of a smaller scale than intergalactic, which might be a more accurate title.

Nolan films typically feature low-key acting, but this seems to have reached a new low. There are a lot of non-characters that I can't really describe. Wes Bentley plays an astronaut who dies on a planet because giant waves are crashing in a knee-deep ocean and he waits too long at the door of the space shuttle before getting inside, which is reminiscent of the scene in Galaxy Quest when Tim Allen is captured by the miners. But before his death, his character never does anything that might indicate who he is or how he feels. Our avenue of comic relief is a wise-cracking rectangular robot with an uncannily perfect human voice, but every one of the movie's attempts at humor from the robot fell flat, and was received by silence in the audience. But I think the worst performance in the movie comes from a school official who explains to our hero that the moon landing was a hoax. Schools embracing dubious curriculum is of course a hot topic in this day and age, but I think the point could have been a little less heavy handed. I blame the writing at least as much as the acting.

It's set in a world where they say they don't need any more engineers because what they need is more farmers because the world needs more food because of the blight that's killing all their crops. But right now, the United States is covered with farmland, and our farms are mostly automated. We don't need any more farmers than our farms need to farm them, and we can't have any more farms than will fit in our land. I don't see how the people in this future world can think that more farmers will mean more food.

I think my biggest problem with this movie is the part about how the 12 explorers who sought out new home worlds were humanity's bravest, as though it's so rare to find someone willing to sacrifice themselves for science and the survival of the species. This was reinforced when the leader of those astronauts was described as the best because he managed to convince those 12 people to follow him in this suicide mission. And yet… over two hundred THOUSAND people have applied for the Mars One Project. Literally hundreds of thousands of people are, in this day and age, banging down the door for an opportunity to go into space, never return to Earth, and die on Mars. I am one of them. We all paid an application fee and had to make a video (which ain't exactly easy for most people) for said opportunity. And this is a time when there's plenty to live for on Earth. The people in the movie lived on a dying world with no food and dirt everywhere, so the motivation to go into space should be even greater.

And yet, when our hero is selected to go into space to save the human race, his whole family acted like that was some kind of bad decision. It was apparently more important to stay put and look after his dying farm and his dead-end family. Even his daughter, who was supposedly some kind of super genius, couldn't understand the need for his mission.

And of course this top secret space mission to save the human race just happened to depend on some salt-of-the-earth folksy everyman to fly their ship for them. But they didn't contact him or anything. They were just waiting around to have the very man they needed stumble upon their top secret base.

I started seeing parallels to Prometheus as soon as they declared that a supposedly binary code from a supposedly alien origin was "coordinates." How did they know that? And how did they know it was binary when the daughter kept saying it was morse code? It gets even more complicated because it turns out multiple codes were being sent in different ways from this mysterious source, and some were encoded in binary while others were encoded in morse code. You'd think the creator of these codes was trying to confuse the recipient deliberately.

It's also declared that dust bunching up on the floor in a pattern to form one such code was due to "gravity." Now, manipulation of gravity is common in pop sci-fi and Christopher Nolan himself used gravity shifts as a mechanic in some popular scenes in Inception, but when sci-fi writers use gravity to mean any invisible force that moves matter around it contributes to our population's scientific illiteracy.

I anticipate Nolan fans forming a cult around this movie every bit as big as the cult following of Inception. It's so abstract and confusing at the end that I know the fanboys are gonna eat that crap right up and have a ball picking apart every detail to find the minutest of hidden messages. But I'm sorry to say you've all been duped.

I know Christopher Nolan is a very well respected director, and Man of Steel may well have not been his fault, but I will say that Interstellar is the dumbest movie he's made.