SPOILER ALERT – I MEAN IT. DON’T CONTINUE READING IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS.
Christopher Nolan – famously known for his breakout film Memento – and more recently for his contributions to the Bat Man universe – has come out with another special effects heavy film Interstellar. Unfortunately it is so reminiscent of his previous work, Inception. This time the Ellen Page character is pretty much the ENTIRE cast of Interstellar. There is so much exposition in this movie that you begin to doubt your ability to comprehend anything – nothing is truly explained. All it manages to do is demonstrate how little trust the writers have in their audience to catch on to what is going on. And that just makes for the fodder of more jokes to be mined by the writers of The Big Bang Theory.
The script, which Nolan co-wrote with his brother Jonathan, is full of so many holes that by the time Anne Hathaway (Les Miserables) appears you literally want to get up and leave the theater to go watch the animated Big Hero 6 – which apparently a lot of people did. I won’t mention the numerous attempts at suspending belief when it comes to simple logical questions – why can’t they send an unmanned ship through the wormhole? There is a severe problem with the way the women are written in this film – in almost all of Nolan’s films actually. Jessica Chastain is so busy channeling her Zero Dark Thirty performance in depicting her daddy issues (Really? This is all they can give her? Her dad went off to save the world and she’s going to carry a grudge?) that the interesting twist in time (which seems to be a steady tool in Nolan’s bag of tricks clearly demonstrated in his other works) completely misses the mark.
Storytelling is hard. But overloading a the script to make up for a lack of trust in your audience doesn’t help the process.