I love space shit. Fill the screen with cool-looking planets and spaceships and stuff, and I’m happy as an alien pig in extra-terrestrial crap. We don’t really need to mess up any of the plot with too much explanation of how all this quantum-physics impossible shit can happen — you know, faster than light travel and super-secret space stations that no one notices. We can ignore all that.
But the movie Interstellar seriously tested my patience.
Not because of the script or storyline — which does have its weird moments. Example? Okay, like the incredibly sophisticated robot/droid thing that looks like a Coke vending machine and can pretty much do anything, but NASA still needs a top-gun human pilot for its last remaining spaceship to “fly” it properly using a little joystick thingy.
No, Interstellar pissed me off because I spent 2 1/2 hours asking myself, “What the fuck did Matthew McConaughey just say?” Between the indecipherable southern drawl and the “I’m so cool I’m never going to raise my voice even when the whole world is turning to shit” delivery I spent most of the movie trying to hear what McConaughey was saying. The useless mumbling bastard needs subtitles — damn! Why didn’t I think of that last night? Sod it, no — sub-titles annoy me.
And then, to really get up my nose, it took headphones and about five rewinds to figure out what Michael Caine was whispering on his death bed scene (sorry, but that’s not really a spoiler) — only to discover it didn’t make sense anyway. Caine gasps and gurgles that apparently the whole thing didn’t have to happen (or something) and Smelly McConaughey (a few years back one of his co-stars complained he never uses deodorant) was on a wild goose chase. Which is utterly at odds with all the urgency and drama powering the story up to that point. But okay, maybe McConaughey muttered something earlier that explains this better and I missed it.
Matt Damon makes a fat appearance as a stranded astronaut on another planet. It’s only a small role in the overall movie and obviously allowed him to spend more time in the catering tent. Otherwise, existing alone on a remote planet at the other end of the universe is apparently a good way to pack in the calories.
And the ending? No surprise that there seems to be a blatant device for a sequel, but perhaps not. Maybe the director just said, “We’d better stop there, the audience will have had enough by now”. No argument from me.
Tonight it’ll be “Oblivion” with Tom Cruise running around some planet and carrying lots of big-arse guns. Or maybe they’re normal-sized guns and just look big, because Tom Cruise is such a short arse? I’ll let you know.
By the way, if you’d like to see my own efforts at a space shit story, check out Ghost Beyond Earth. Here’s a link to my web page and it’s available as an ebook. Lots of readers reckon it’s science fiction, others say it’s space opera, but I’ve always insisted it’s a ghost story — with a particularly nasty zombie-like dude included, too.
Really, it’s a ghost story.
The premise behind Interstellar was quite good. Still not up to 2001: A Space Odyssey standards, but not bad. Better than lots of other shit to explain “who we are”.
There are better sci-fi movies; Moon is definitely up there. And so is Gravity (especially in 3D). But Interstellar just took too long to get there, and yes the talking Coke machine and having to be a pilot was a bit silly.
However I applaud the attempt, even for the simple fact at least they tried and didn’t just rehash another crap “superhero” heap o’ bullshit.