The short version: it’s very pretty, so who cares about the flaws.

The longer version: remember that recent film that kills off a major character only for him to come back to the protagonist – except it’s all a hallucination due to oxygen starvation? Imagine waiting an hour, hoping it’s all a dream.

The even longer version:
We are haunted by 2001, A Space Odyssey. Like it or not, it has become the yardstick of the serious sf movie, the sf art film. It travels at the kind of pace that we rarely see in Hollywood film these days and when we do, I often find it self indulgent rather than joyous. Alternatively, given the action takes a couple of million years and travels to infinity and beyond – sorry, beyond infinity – that’s somewhat speedy as an average. The apes take a while and the stargate sequence really frustrates my students, but there is a joy in the miniatures and the classical music that has rarely been bettered. Hal 9000 created a new stereotype, the evil shipboard computer, to such an extent that I never trust a computer to run a ship.

And so comes along Interstellar, another pretender to the tradition, weighing in at 2hr 49 mins, nine minutes longer than its daddy, minus overture and intermission, or indeed Strauss, Ligetti and Wagner on the soundtrack. Nolan’s done interesting movies – I’ve a soft spot for Falling, a disappear up its own fundament psychological thriller, I enjoyed Memento, despite our not knowing much more at the end than the beginning and The Prestige is an interesting take of Priest’s novel, unfortunately shorn of its present day framing device. I eventually caught up with the Dicklite Inception on DVD and it has its moments, but too many of them seem to being situating women as less good than men. He did some comic book franchise, too, set in a dystopia where almost all women had died out.

So we have Interstellar, a film which I had singularly failed to find three hours to see prior to Saturday, and which I saw in one of the smallest cinemas in existence. We have nostalgic talking heads, telling us how things now have changed, We have Matthew McConaughy as Coop, an actor I last saw in Reign of Fire alongside Christian Bale, and the facial resemblance here suggests that so kind of synthespian shenanigans have been going on. We have a future in which the crops are failing one by one – Death of Grass anyone? – and the solution to this is to ruin the soil even more by growing the same crop in the same fields. Me, I’d be exploring hydroponics and such like. This is a world that needs more farmers and fewer engineers (although in guessing there’s a wriggle out of this) and where there’s a Sekrit Plan to evacuate Earth run by Michael Caine. But that is to get ahead of ourselves because there a Sekrit Messages being sent to Coop’s daughter, Murphy, including binary or Morse code coordinates for the Sekrit Rendezvous (because poltergeists, like the aliens from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, know where Greenwich Meridian Line is. Before you know it, Coop has met Dr Brand and her father, Michael Caine, who turns out to be an old friend and clearly marked for death in tragic circumstances at the three quarters point if the movie.

Look away now. Spoilers.

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