Interstellar

Interstellar was one of the seemingly very few 100 Greatest Movies that wasn’t a Mafia movie or a dreadful Japanese cartoon. I’m not opposed to a good sci-fi yarn, so with a bag of popcorn, TheBloke (TM) and I settled down for a good two hours and 49 minutes of sci-fi fun.

Unfortunately, that’s not quite what we got. I didn’t mind the premise. Earth is dying. Let’s find a cure / spare planet. So far, so sci-fi.

And yes, of course, of course you have to suspend disbelief a little bit with sci-fi (apart from anything Margaret Atwood writes, which is just a bit too believable), but Interstellar took the concept of believability quite literally to a new dimension.

Let’s start with our hero. Played by Matthew McConaughey – who mumbles his lines so badly that I caught about one in every six words he said – and that was before he wore a sodding space helmet just to make things worse – our hero is a frustrated ex-engineer spacey person. This turns out to be lucky because when he accidentally turns up at NASA’s headquarters, they needed HIM AND ONLY HIM to lead a mission that’s starting literally tomorrow. God knows what they’d have done if he hadn’t turned up. Or why, indeed they didn’t bother calling him before now. It’s not as though he was busy doing anything else, just mumbling into some failing crops.

The hero’s daughter – Murphy – was a solid character. Feisty, clever and determined. But we didn’t see enough of her. We did get, however, Anne Hathaway playing an astronaut who clearly got her job through nepotism (her dad is the NASA boss), as she’s a bloody useless astronaut, who makes poor decisions based on heart rather than head, passes out whenever there’s any G-force and even tries to manipulate the data so she can go and visit her boyfriend. I mean, that’s female astronauts for you all over, isn’t it, making decisions because they like a boy, amirite? Give me fucking strength.

There was also a sarcastic robot. I did like the sarcastic robot. I would watch a film about the sarcastic robot.

The denouement is even more ridiculous with the hero ejecting into space to his death… and then magically finding himself trapped in a fourth (fifth? I lost count) dimension where he can sort of communicate with himself and with his daughter in the past via the medium of Behind Bookshelves. This bit is like Alice in Wonderland crossed with The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe if both of them were shit. It makes no fucking sense.

What makes even less sense is how our hero is then magically rescued from floating off into space something like 80 years later and earth has been saved – hurrah! Or they have a new planet! Hurrah! Or a space station! Hurrah! Or something! Something to do with gravity being solved. Hurrah!

Meanwhile Anne Hathaway has a whole new planet to herself that she’s repopulating with frozen embryos. I mean, say what you like about her earlier poor decision-making but nobody deserves to be on a planet all by themselves, as a single mother with 185 babies and no CBeebies.

3/5 Pap.