Interstellar (2014) - A Ghost Story!

★★★☆☆

It’s okay if you don’t know anything about the wormhole, the black hole, the Singularity, the Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, the gravitational waves, and the extra-dimensional time and space, just consider ‘Interstellar’ a ghost story where a father’s asked to save his family and the entire human race from dying Earth by shooting himself to Saturn, entering a wormhole, then a black hole, landing onto the extra-dimensional and becoming a ‘ghost’ to be able to teach his daughter how to fix the problem and get out of Earth, and miraculously managing to find himself in one piece to get reunited with his aging daughter in the far future when humans already move to live in a space station orbiting Saturn! Some find a journey like that spectacular and moving. Well, I’m not sure about it.

While ‘Gravity’ complicates a single space task and makes it look extremely difficult and perilous, ‘Interstellar’ tends to simplify and make it look like a piece of cake, such as getting in and out of the wormhole and the black hole. All I receive are few great images with terrific score but nothing dangerous to feel uptight. Basically I feel rather safe sitting down there waiting to see how it’s going to sum up as it tries to convey so many thoughts like love, relationship, humanity, survival and sacrifice, so as to let us comprehend what makes us humans. What happens in the last 30 minutes may seem brainy to some but not at all impressive to me. If you want something twisty and mind-blowing, go for Christopher’s previous work, ‘Inception’. If you want real serious space thrills, ‘Gravity’ is sure a better choice. And it only takes 90 minutes to accomplish it while ‘Interstellar’ takes almost 3 hours but fails in a sense.

There’re emotional and educational moments in ‘Interstellar’, quite a lot indeed, but somehow I find them a bit awkward and corny. Frankly I was prepared to shed some tears and drop my jaw but turns out it’s more or less of a disappointment. Well, maybe it’s not the film. Maybe it’s just me expecting too much and reading too many reviews before going to see it. So next time, it’s best not to have any idea about the film you’re going to see lest spoiling the pleasure.

Time plays a big part in the film. It’s the cause of all the melancholy and tensions. Does time really exist then? Do we learn about time because we see things move, or things move because of time? Does time always necessarily go forward? Would it stop and go backward someday? What’s it like to go beyond time? I don’t know. I try not to think about it. All I know is, time is never our friend. Nor is it our enemy either!