So, in the future, there are no more armies? Really? That's one of the most far-fetched sci-fi scenarios I can recall, and it's just kind of slid in there. There has been some form of a military/defense force since the beginning of time. And yet in 50 years or so, we're to imagine that they're all gone? Right. I don't know why that bothered me so much time this time around.
The kid who played McConaughey's (I'm going to call him MM for short) son is the actor who will be Paul Atreides in Dune. He's about the only question mark I have about that whole cast, other than that Zendaya girl playing Chani, but we'll save more Dune discussion for the Dune thread.
I'll get straight to it: Like the rest of this review, this film is way too long. Almost three hours of film time is agonizing. The good parts are very good, but the slow parts are just painful to sit through. It takes a half hour to establish a couple things - MM is handy and used to be a pilot, there's some strange phenomenon going on in the house, and NASA is still around. There wasn't enough world building for the time it took to get there. The pace it takes to get from here or there is tiring, but at the same time those scenes, including the silent ones, remind me of 2001 as they probably do for several of you as well.
After seeing films like these, I sometimes wish I got into hard science instead of social science and law. But then after reading about high level physicists and so on praising the film but still saying "we just don't know" so much it turned me off again. The spherical black hole is magnificent, though. Top tier visual effect.
Another frustrating thing I paid attention to this viewing was the deal with Plan A vs Plan B, and how Plan A was a waste of time, resources and everything. What was the point in pursuing another place to move everyone from Earth to if they all knew Earth was doomed to begin with? Of course there's that bit of hope, but think of all they went through following that false Plan A? Not just the crew, but the whole project with the gravity and all that, knowing that it was bad math and just hogwash? That's so irritating, it almost made Michael Caine into a villain because of his deception. I guess it can be argued that his work on gravity getting to that point let Murph answer it in the end, but to me I felt like he was the man who decided the world would end and that there was nothing anyone could do to save it. The ends didn't justify the means, because it required the intervention of fifth dimension beings to get the point across.
You know what? The entire crazy Matt Damon subplot could have been wiped from the film and it would not have been worse off. All it did was kill off one of the few remaining interesting characters and further throw a wrench in this stupid plan. Let's take a look. The first planet was a Costner-esque Waterworld, pass. The second was fake because Matt Damon, pass. The third planet was good but they couldn't get there, pass. I get that science is uncertain and you have to fail before you succeed most of the time, it was just exercise after exercise in futility. Finding the suitable place was like looking for your keys. And then things got weird.
There was a game for the NES called Captain Skyhawk, and it was an aerial shooter where after every stage,
you had to return to the space station and dock with it. The docking was a lot like the docking maneuver he had to do, spinning up to speed to catch up with it and time it just right. Most of my deaths in the game early on came from that stupid docking sequence.
While a total visual experience, the infinity/ghost sequence didn't have as much weight for me as it should have. It felt like the writers' equivalent of shrugging their shoulders. I got very bored with it quickly, and then it dragged on for another 25 minutes.
7/10. The ending felt like a forced happy ending, I kept waiting for the bad thing to happen to realize it was all in his head and he's floating through space with no oxygen left. But nope, he, Anne Hathaway and Bill Irwin the robot lived happily ever after.
