Tales of the Incredible Hoke Robertson
MOVIE REVIEW
Interstellar
Okay, once again we delve into the dark arts of movie review. People of course have differing tastes and preferences which means that one man’s porridge is another man’s poison. I don’t know if that is the correct adage but it suddenly came to me. Anyway, this is my take on Interstellar.
Interstellar is to sci-fi movies as raining frogs in Indiana is to weather forecasts. Now of course we can have sci-fi movies which don’t make sense or are not really based on good science, but normally a big-budget movie with a sci-fi aspect at least tries to be based on some sort of real science. To the contrary, Interstellar is based on some idiot’s poor knowledge of relativity and quantum physics gleaned from Bazooka Joe comics in bubble gum wrappers. The explanation for this is found in the fact that the movie was directed by Christopher Nolan, who “reinvigorated” the Batman franchise. Although visually neato and just plain cool because, well it was Batman for crying out loud, Nolan’s Batman movies were as lame as a one-legged man with bunions and leprosy. In case you do not know, that is VERY lame. For example, in the first Dark Knight movie, the evil yet super secret group faced by the Caped Crusader wanted to destroy an evil city as part of the practice of bettering humankind. Sorta of a “throw the baby out with the bath water approach.” I seem to have wandered a bit.
Interstellar stars Matthew McConaughey, a one-time female favorite. I say one-time because eventually we all get older and the older you get the fewer women “want” you. As Shakespeare put it so eloquently, “time seals all wombs” or something like that. Matt is now one emaciated dude, probably a result of his intentional weight loss for his last horrible movie for which he got an Oscar. Anything dealing with gays and AIDS is an automatic Oscar-consideration performance and once Matt realized this he made the leap from God-awful stupid, run-of-the-mill movies to God-awful stupid, socially sensitive movies. Anyway, Matt appears to have had a little face work done to remove those nasty sags and wrinkles developed by all humans, especially those who experience rapid weight loss.
The movie also brings the realization that Matt is a mouth breather. There isn’t one scene where his mouth is not open; reminiscent of a lung fish struggling to make it to the next mud puddle during a prolonged California drought. Which non-sequitorally brings us to his acting abilities. It’s not so much that Matt cannot act as it is he is always trying to act. There is no sense that a real person would react or do normal day-to-day things like he portrays them, rather its clear Matt has thought too long about HOW a normal person might act and then inevitably “chooses poorly” as the old knight so succinctly told Indiana Jones. Watching Matt chew up the scenery reminds me of some Second City sketch where Eugene Levy is pretending to be a famous actor while Harold Ramis makes fun of him off stage. Again, it’s not the worst kind of acting like, say Ryan Gosling in The Notebook (a truly revoltingly bad movie which escaped my review) but it just doesn’t come off very well. I’m sure everyone knows what I mean after seeing the Lincoln commercials with Matt trying his best to be cool and deep. More like luke-warm and self-absorbed.
Speaking of “not too well” let’s move on to the movie proper. Our space time epic starts off with the usual Hollywood technique of giving you no background and making sure you don’t know what is going on. Apparently something called “the blight” is knocking off our crops one by one as it first destroys all wheat and then morphs into something which destroys all granola bars. Anyway, this of course started starving man- and womankind which starving resulted in all nations turning away from violence and discarding their armies. You know, like throughout human history when stress and desperation cause peace and harmony to break out. Didn’t Ghengis Khan’s hordes turn into pacifist monks after the Great Steppe Drought of 1134? Wait, the OPPOSITE always happens … nevermind, we now have a society where we want famers and not engineers so they can grow more corn (not yet blighted). We don’t want geneticists or plant engineers, we want farmers.
We have these Saharan-like dust storms which periodically blanket the world, but everyone has adapted by having personal breathing masks and DustBusters attached to their utility belts. In our first scene Matt and kids chase down an old Indian Army drone (don’t even try to figure that one out) by driving their old pickup with a flat tire through miles and miles of corn fields putting to lie the notion that the world needs food. It is here we first learn that Matt is a super-scientist, ex-astronaut who can take the solar panels from a drone even though the drone clearly has no solar panels.
After lots of stupid background, we learn that the young daughter thinks there is a poltergeist in her room, but of course the “clear-thinking” men do not believe there is anything amiss even though books fly off the shelves on their own. Of course there “must be some reasonable explanation” like crickets or Borrowers. [Note: always remember these weird movie occurrences as they inevitably become call-backs for something important later on.] Well, after the dust that blows into her room after a particularly nasty Sirocco arranges itself into lines, daughter finally gets dad to listen to her. She thinks it is Morse code. In an instant of epiphany, Matt deduces its “binary” not Morse code and deciphers longitude and latitude coordinates. Not to be too picky, but the lines were about four thousand short of enough to be the binary representation of long/lat coordinates. Oddly, when the daughter deciphers that the moved books do indeed spell out the word “stay” in Morse code, Matt scoffs at her nonsense. Dust making latitude and longitude coordinates is reasonable, books spelling “stay” is just plain dumb.
Off they go like a homeless person finding a ready-made “Vet needs Help” sign. They drive to an old NORAD facility, last used as the headquarters for Stargate SG-1. To their surprise and disbelief, the location that was given to them by magical dust lines has armed guards who take them into custody. If only we could have foreseen danger and practiced caution!
Well, it turns out this is the last remaining NASA refuge, headed by the country’s eminent physicist, Michael Caine. Why someone with a British accent is an American NASA physicist is unexplained. BUT, because magical dust directed them there, of course Matt must now be the pilot on the super secret space mission they are planning. You see, after the blight started, a worm hole appeared suddenly near Saturn, and NASA (after refusing to bomb starving people – figure that one out) decided they would send people through the worm hole to find inhabitable worlds. Those initial spacemen who were successful would come back and transport 10 billion people back to the new planet in the other galaxy or, if not successful the next set of spacemen would go through that wormhole, find a planet and raise millions of human embryos (already in neatly stacked icecube trays) to preserve the species. If neither of those worked, Plan C, naturally is that the eminent physicist would continue his work on gravity calculations and hopefully figure out how to raise the huge underground structure into orbit so that mankind could live in space above the planet and not on the planet. Yes, float the entire underground structure up into orbit where growing food without blight would be so much easier. All we need is the final quadratic equation for the anti-gravity levitation formula! Not find a cure for the plant disease, but solve the universal questions, over-come physics and float big chunks of stuff into outer space! The sheer genius of these plans brings to mind Al Gore’s “lock box” to protect Social Security. The sheer stupidity of each of these alternative plans is truly amazing. I seemed to have missed the Scientific American article that explained how we figured out how to travel through a worm hole. [Turns out you just fly into it and all our current knowledge of physics turns out to be wrong]
Well, since this made so much sense, Matt decides to sign up for the flight and has an emotional scene with his daughter where he explains to her he HAS to abandon her but he will certainly come home after flying to Saturn, zipping through a worm hole, finding the others who went before and then figure out which world can work for mankind and return through the worm hole and fly back to earth. What could go wrong? After all he promised to come home. Intent overcomes physics every time!
Of course the flight must go NOW, and so without any training, briefing or practicing, Matt gets into the space ship and is able to pilot it; it’s like riding a bike. Now we notice one more piece of the problem. Matt drives around in a 1993 pickup and everyone uses old broken down mechanical things, but NASA has state of the art advanced stuff. So, we can build space ships, cool rockets, have cryogenic sleep, etc and yet a fungus that kills all food crops cannot be handled. Hmmm.
Well, as we zip to Saturn to begin our inter-galactic journey we are given some necessary background bits like a worm hole bends space, relativity means time goes at different rates depending on the speed of the object, and Anne Hathaway is getting very ugly. Like a young flounder, one of her eyes is slowing migrating to the other side of her head. I don’t know if she also smells like fish, but she does appear to be a bit unwashed. Nevermind.
Of course driving your spaceship into a worm hole presents no problems except for the rattling and shaking. Space ships never incur damage that would be irreparable in some other galaxy. Oh yeah, some of those who earlier went through the worm hole seeking good planets have been able to send radio messages confirming their survival; thus validating the government’s decision to require fiber optic cable to even remote areas. Anyway, on the other side of the worm hole are: (i) a giant black hole and (ii) numerous planets NEAR it but within driving distance. It is these planets (are these planets?) to which the other guys went and some of which are still transmitting.
Our intrepid idiots argue about which likely planet to check out first and finally decide on the one sending out as constant signal with its beacon. Duh. Now it gets good. Because this planet is closer to the black hole than they are in orbit around it, each minute they stay on the planet is like a year in orbit around the planet. I flunked upper division space-time continuum lab, but this sounds a little suspect to me. Us idiot movie watchers can’t figure out how the closeness to the Black Hole affects time (or stupid movie actors). Isn’t the planet going the same speed towards the black hole as does the spaces ship orbiting it? When the space ship is on the other side of the planet while orbiting, is the one minute equals one year thing reversed? No matter, it is a movie and makes no sense.
Anyway, we zip down to the planet using our detachable (from the mothership) space ship which lands in very shallow water on the planet which consists exclusively of very shallow water (two feet deep). Our heroes are homing in on the beacon of the dude who went there before them. Although they seemed to know the water was shallow enough to land on it, they did not know the beacon was hidden under the shallow water. Damn it! No previous guy, no land and no place to build maternity wards. Suddenly, even more laws of physics are ignored! A giant (as in 700 foot high) wave approaches. They rush to get back to the space ship and of course the WOMAN has to do something stupid which prevents one guy from getting back in time which something stupid results in that one guy getting killed. It turns out that landing in water clogs the space ship engines with water and we can’t start ‘er up. Now, here it comes. The wave is not a wave it is a wall of water zooming along. A wave is just that; a wave. As it zips by it LIFTS the existing water and so lowers the water level in front and behind it, thus it draws its water from that around it. The water only moves up and down it does not travel forward until the wave reaches land where the wave backs up on itself and THEN the water crashes forward. Here on kiddy-pool planet, the water depth before and after the giant wave remains unchanged meaning that the wave is not a wave but rather a wall of water rushing forward which means of course no law of physics would allow that to occur. Hey, does the top of the wave experience time differently than does the bottom of the wave? Regardless, our nifty space ship rides up the vertical 700 foot wave and then boogie boards down the other vertical side, without so much as one water-filled ear.
We still cannot start our flooded engines as a second magical wave is now approaching. Are we to be a hapless cork bobbing in this Bizarro-world ocean forever? Nay, Matt, being completely unfamiliar with this new space ship he has never seen before yesterday uses the “quick-start” protocol to cold start the engines and we narrowly miss the next giant wave. Our mighty space craft which needed two huge stages of fuel to lift off of earth can now zip back into orbit using nothing but perhaps the food our anorexic heroes have refused to eat.
Well the guy we left in the mothership orbiting the planet has aged 40 years or so even after using his cryotube a few times. Makes perfect sense. But now we have a bigger problem. The space ship we used to land and return from the planet has used too much fuel and our options are now very limited. This means we can only check on one more of the earlier guys. You remember, the guys previously sent to seek out new whorls and coldly blow while NORAD has gone below. [That is clever, damnit!.]
Welllllllllllllll, it turns out Anne was sweet on one of the other earlier space dudes and of course wants to check out his planet next. When asked if her decision was based on emotion and not facts, she quickly retorts with her second grade logic and snips “how do you know that isn’t just as good a reason?” Thank God we manned the space craft with highly trained personnel and not idiot actresses!
The WOMAN goes into a snit and off we head for the other option. This better choice is a world covered in ice. It even has clouds made of ice that defy gravity. When we clip those clouds going 25,000 mph during re-entry it has no effect on our cool space ship. We arrive at a seemingly run-down and abandoned camp site and go inside. There we find an old cryotube marked “Danger: Horrible Actor Inside. Use with Caution.” We rip open the vacuum seal and out pops Matt Damon; moist, older and pretty damn grateful.
But of course this is the movies, so everyone now has to act in a manner completely contrary to what would ever happen in real life. Matt tells our hearty crew that although the planet is frozen solid, way way down near the surface he found hydrocarbons (or some other word he doesn’t know the definition of). Thus, we can re-establish the human race on a cold, frozen planet by going down to where there is no light, where it is the coldest and where we can use coal for food. Hollywood always confuses carbohydrates with hydrocarbons. One you eat one you shouldn’t. This nonsensical nonsense makes sense to our stars and we start to set up a better camp where four people can raise a million human embryos to adulthood. We can only hope some are Inuits.
Matt Damon of course is LYING and only wants to kill everyone, steal the space ship and return to earth so he can starve there. He tries to push Matt Non-Damon over an ice cliff; which he does. Suddenly the 5,000 foot vertical drop ice cliff we were just shown has a gentle slope and a shelf onto which non-Matt lands and a fight ensures. Ignoring the basic rules of movie continuity, our space suits suddenly have little jets along the forearm (because we need them later in the film and we forgot to introduce them earlier) and Matt and Non-Matt fight until Matt uses his face plate to shatter non-Matt’s face plate without damaging his own.
Suddenly again, we have a second, bulky but detachable space ship which is transporting the materials for our new camp and Anne and our bit-part other astronaut fly in THIS ship to rescue non-Matt while Matt steals the sleek space ship and heads into orbit for the mother ship. Our previously unmentioned (cargo) ship is as aerodynamic as a piano, but it somehow has the power and fuel to defy physics and chases Matt into orbit. Crazy lying Matt of course screws up in his well thought out plan of escape and his ship and a part of the mother ship explode. Goo of bad actor now covering many small bits of flotsam.
Again defying physics and especially angular momentum, the mother ship immediately starts dropping to earth. Remaining Matt (the original Matt in our epic) takes a “crazy chance” and putting the nifty joystick on “manual” steers his ship until it can dock with the doomed mother ship. Why a “pilot” unfamiliar with the ship could do this better than the computers and machines could is a function of Matt’s normal contract. Anyway, all is saved. Well, not really all. We now have too little food and fuel and mankind is certainly doomed. Hmmm, what to do?
Before we get to our solution, I must note we also have a robot on board. The robot looks like a big block of metal that can twist into a tripod, swim, walk, run and has any needed arm or tool hidden inside. The producers chose this type of robot because J. K. Rowling had already taken “magical house elves.”
I got it! Let’s shoot the robot through the event horizon and into the black hole because it can “record the data” which will allow Michael Caine to solve the gravity calculation now so desperately needed. What on earth could possibly be observed much less recorded inside a black hole is unexplained. The robot can send the data to our heroes who will take it back to Michael Caine who is now about 435 years old according to the physics of Interstellar. I will sound too preachy if I harp on the fact that physics today tells us that if you could be close to a black hole and witness something reaching the event horizon the gravity would stretch that object (destroying it) and it would appear to freeze in time, given the speed/time difference thingy. Thus you could wait forever and the robot would never be able to get inside, much less send you any data. I will not address the difficulties of sending a radio message out from within a black-hole.
Anyway, we now use the previously unmentioned cargo ship and another previously unmentioned shuttle ship to propel the mother ship toward the black hole. The plan? Get going real fast and then separate the ships from one another thus making the mother ship lighter and able to break away from the gravity of the black hole as the robot in the cargo ship gets going fast enough to enter the black hole. A plan completely at odds with the rules of mass and velocity.
Anyway, of course Matt is misleading Anne because he himself will also go into the black hole as does the robot. Yes his plan was to have a human body enter a black hole to learn the secrets of time-space and gravity; which secrets are on the various Post-it notes cluttering up the insides of your average black hole. Many movies have the hero doing a selfless act to save others. In Interstellar, the hero does something so unbelievably stupid and which would have no chance helping others. Go figure.
If you have any sort of dignity or self-worth you should stop reading this now and not expose yourself to the nasty private bits of this truly screwed up movie. For the rest of us troglodytes we continue.
Matt survives the event horizon as his ship is pelted with glowing pieces of hard candy which for some reason are not speeding along like he is. The space ship eventually disintegrates but Matt survives and ends up in some weird structure. For those of us familiar with awful movies we predicted where he was ….. Yep. He is now behind his daughter’s bookcase! He tries to get her attention but it only KNOCKS THE BOOKS OFF THE SHELVES. He is able to zip along to any point in time behind the book shelves because his nifty arm rockets still work. Well he stops at a time when his grown daughter is back in the room and tries to communicate with her to no avail. [STOP: Continuity check! When he was on earth and his young daughter saw the books fly off the shelf, he wasn’t spelling anything, but now when he does it to her grown up he is spelling something. So how did the younger edition of the daughter decipher “Stay?”] But wait! He calls the robot on his iPhone and has it convert the mysteries of space-time and gravity into Morse Code and then he taps on something which makes the second hand of the watch that he gave his daughter when she was small start ticking out the Morse Code. She is able to decipher this, solve now dead Michael Caine’s equation and mankind is saved. By that I mean they now have giant space communities orbiting around Saturn. Let me just pause for a second and speculate on the sheer number of “dits and dahs” that would be necessary to convey detailed mathematical calculations describing the underlying physics of time, space, gravity and utter dumbness.
Somehow Matt is shot back through the worm hole, is rescued and is able to see his now very old and near dead daughter. For some reason all her progeny have no interest and do not talk to their great granddad who saved all of humanity. Just to wrap up one last loose end, Matt steals a space ship (with no supplies or fuel) and heads off back into the worm hole to find Anne Hathaway, perhaps to surgically put her eyes back on the front of her face.
This movie ranks right up there with the greats like Plan 9 From Outer Space. Please watch this movie keeping in mind my summary.
