It’s a remarkable feat that the movie Interstellar actually got made and exists – it’s a testament to Christopher Nolan’s big brain and power in Hollywood that he basically made the movie he wanted (though he may have bowed a little bit too the masses – will get to that later). The movie is also an accusing finger pointed at other 2 hr 45 minute movies that promote nothing but stupidity and noise by being about science, intelligence, the human spirit, courage, and love.

I was never once bored by this movie though what you get out of it may depend on what you take into it. It’s a movie that demands you pay attention – if you are busy chatting up friends or texting or whatever, you will get lose and find the ending utterly confusing. Hell, if you go in without a firm science understanding of some of the principles they try to explain (poorly, I think) then you might just be lost even earlier.

The movie tries for some hard science and making believable space travel and using fairly believable physics. However, it does have a lot of explanations and discussions of some of the more abstract things they do, they rarely stop to explain what it all means or how it works. There’s a heavy dose of relativity and time dilation which can stretch your brain that the movie might have wanted to explain. Or not… not stopping the movie to explain the time dilation that occurs around an event horizon is a perfectly valid way to approach a movie. However, they weirdly did take a few moments to diagram and provide an example of how a wormhole works which is super weird because I think the one heavy scientific concept that the majority of audience members can get is the idea a wormhole, or a stargate, or hyperspace or whatever you want to call it. We’ve been seeing it movies for years, guys. C’mon!

This really isn’t a complaint, it’s more of a concern that some people will leave the theater feeling like they got their brains beaten up by the smart guy in the room (the film makers). What it ultimately is is a huge complement to the movie that they decided to just throw it all the screen and let the audience sink or swim… go with it or not.

But, here’s the thing, there’s a ton of stuff that is clearly in the movie to appeal to a wider audience who couldn’t care less about the more abstract conceptual rules of physics. There are some genuinely really tense action scenes (involving docking maneuvers!) and a lot of emotional drama to get you through. Some people who might (and have, based on the reviews) argued that the movie didn’t need a human heart and all the emotional scenes rang untrue. I disagree but reasonable people can on this topic. But if they hadn’t put any humanity into the movie, it’d have been accused of being a cold, emotionless, analytic, and abstract.

This movie strides a weird balance between the abstraction of 2001 and a more mainstream science fiction flick. It clearly wants to be 2001 but Nolan probably knew that he had to give the audience a beating heart (and some super-tense action) to keep butts in seats. And the thing about that beating heart is that it’s not just the kind of schmaltzy emotions that Spielberg might have done (which I love – Spielberg is great) but also the heart of humanity as a striving, doing, accomplishing species. It uplifts the human spirit while championing both love and science.

Is this the most amazing movie I’ve ever seen? Nah. It really is a pretty great movie and I think everyone should check it out. It doesn’t really do anything wrong and it does a lot right. In the end, while I was never bored, it never reached that tipping point of the more amazing movies I’ve seen. It didn’t hit my emotional core and transport me as much as I’d have liked. But three cheers for something that made me think… something that wasn’t manufactured in a Hollywood lab and dumbed down with the assumption the audience is stupid.

Score: 89