You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
The knowledge needed to appreciate the film, Interstellar.
You need a catheter and a physics degree to see this one.
The film is almost 3 hours long. I’ve often said no film needs to be 3 hours long. Superfluous scenes lurk everywhere like termites in a haunted house. If we want a director’s cut we’ll buy the DVD.
And you better empty your bladder before sitting. It’s like a marathon you run sitting on your ass.
It’s Tick Tock Tinkle Tinkle Shake.
The only good news? There are many pee break opportunities due to many scenes that unfold slowly, methodically almost clinically.
“But it takes a while to discuss the end of the world,” a friend will argue.
Not in Cinema, there’s not I counter.
The movie makes me want to take notes, to remember facts that are easy to overlook.
Interstellar is a story about a failing Earth. Dust clouds and blight and food disappearing. Mankind needs to find a new Earth to continue the species.
Really, there’s nothing new about this movie premise. But it’s a fascinating topic which is why we pay our 10 dollars to sit through it over and over and over.
The story starts when a select group of NASA Explorers delve into the far reaches of space, traveling through a worm hole to find sustainable planets to live on.
These astronauts travel secretly without any fair fare while the planet is on the brink of collapse. It seems far-fetched, that this kind of cash could be diverted for this kind of secret program while food riots are breaking out.
But it’s a movie and I can make this plot line leap of faith.
Again, let me say I liked the movie. It was entertaining and I did like the characters, though I know some movie critiques felt they were cold.
The movie was thought-provoking. ALMOST TOO THOUGHT PROVOKING.
Nobody told me that I needed to bring a protractor and a pocket protector to the theater.
Nobody told me I’d need an astrophysicist as a date to whisper scientific formulas into my ear for 3 hours.
Interstellar’s story is driven by the principles of time and relativity.
Carmike Theater failed to hand me the Albert Einstein cheat sheet as I took my seat.
A prior understanding of black hole singularity, the curvature of space, event horizons, and Einsteinian Principals would have been helpful.
If you enter the theater and buy popcorn and soda and sit down and think you will be entertained like this Footloose 2, then you will be 3 hours older and not 3 hours wiser when the final credits start rolling.
This movie is like cramming for the SAT.
You need a computational hand-held calculator and adult diaper to sit through this laboratory experiment.
The movie goes out of its way to slow down, to stop cinematic action so that academy award-winning actors can act professorial and explain worm hole phenomenon.
The characters tell me how gravity and light and time all interact.
This takes precious film minutes.
It’s crucial, but at times, it feels more like a classroom and less like a movie.
Nothing screams boring when you cram three actors and a robot into a small space and debate minute details of physical properties and how these will affect the next course of action.
I gotta pay attention, I think to myself. I wish I could take notes. I want to understand the principles behind their dilemma so their decisions make sense.
I am on the edge of my seat, quietly mouthing the words they say, committing them to memory.
Will there be a pop quiz at the end of the film?
If there is, will they let us pee 1st?
My 16-year-old son, with the life of experience of used Kleenex, will tell me that the every scene was necessary and the film tremendous.
I am pleased he enjoyed it on levels beyond Dumb and Dumber.
There are just so many chinks in the armor of this film, it is hard to make that constant leap of faith.
Food riots and no army and accidentally stumbling upon NASA only to be their top choice to pilot a space craft to save the world?
Huh?
There are web sites devoted to the multitude of questions of story integrity, so I won’t bother with that.
I’m OK with story deficiencies and the myriad of why’d that happen and if that happened then why’d this happen?
I have my own time and relativity issues; like how much of my time did this movie take and how relative is it to my entertainment dollar?
I give the movie a thumbs up.
I thought the acting was solid, and some of the characters worth rooting for. The visuals of another dimension were believable in a CGI Well-done kind of way.
The story was engaging, when it was moving forward.
Interstellar’s problem is relative to time it takes to tell story.
If you have $10, 3 hours, and an empty bladder. This is the film for you.
Life’s Crazy™