While I'm a fan of shows about the future, for many years I have avoided watching Interstellar. My main reason is that I don't especially care for the director and one of the lead actors in it. Stories about a supposed race to save the human species from extinction have been done to death, frankly, and still never ring true to me for reasons I will not discuss online (like talking about sex, politics and taxes, just not a good idea.) So those were my biases, but when the movie became available on Netflix I thought, "Get it over with already" and so I watched it.
Positives: most of the visuals are quite well done, particularly on the worlds away from Earth. I grew a little misty-eyed seeing Michael Caine, who has retired from acting and has always been one of my favorite actors; I didn't realize he was in the film.
Negatives: I've got a laundry list.
The dialogue often came across as awkward and forced, the emotions stunted and forced, and the plot twists were too obvious. Has no one in this future ever heard of bioengineering? Hydroponics? Fungicides? Blight-resistant and tolerant strains like those hybrid tomatoes we developed back in 2012? Apparently whoever wrote this did not keep up with current science or its advances.
Tom's behavior made zero sense toward the end of the film, so I assume it was to set up his sister's discovery toward the end of the film.
The robots looked clunky, behaved completely unrobotic, and sounded like they had swallowed a real person who started talking for them. Why weren't they articulated? Probably wouldn't have looked as cool as they thought they did. When I tried to find out why the robots were designed so ridiculously I found out that Popular Science tore them apart much better than I ever could.
For accuracy, someone should have looked up how long it takes to suffocate in general, how long a human being can breathe in ammonia before they suffocate, and the resulting chemical burns to the mouth, eyes, lungs and other body parts from direct exposure. Let me asssure you as a medical professional that surviving prolonged exposure to an ammonia atmosphere with just a glove over a crack in a helmet visor is pretty much impossible.
The reveal of who was the child's ghost was just ridiculous and unconvincing, thanks mostly to that infinite construct and the dumb messages being sent to her from it (in Morse code, no less.) We can build something like that but only communicate in dots and dashes in a form that no one would ever notice in real life? Silly. Send a direct message, please, and broadcast on all wavelengths. Someone will get it.
The ending (based on the characters' previous behavior) wasn't logical or acceptable or even that interesting. Because I can rant for another three or four paragraphs I'll stop there.
In the end, I thought Interstellar was an overly-ambitious movie that didn't do its homework. I think Michael Caine was wonderful but on screen for too short a time, and the planet visuals were pretty cool, too. That's all I can say to recommend this one. Available on Netflix.
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