BA Review: Interstellar

I love a good sci-fi blockbuster. I love them even more if they have big sweeping themes, thoughtful dialogue and concepts, and a story told elegantly.

Unfortunately, Interstellar doesn’t deliver on any of those levels for me.

Oh, it does have big ideas and big themes, but in my opinion it really failed to deliver on them. The story telling was confused, the concepts yelled instead of being allowed to unfold, and the dialogue was clunky (even laughable at times).

And the science. Yeah, the science.

I wrote a (spoiler-laden) review of the flick, and it’s posted over at the Space: The Next Generation section of Slate.

Update, Nov. 9, 2014: In that review, the basic assumptions I made about the black hole in the movie were incorrect, and so one of the conclusions I drew was incorrect. This needs some explaining, so please go to my follow-up post. 

I’ve been getting a fair amount of tweets about it, some of which accuse me of disliking the movie because I didn’t like the science. Actually, in the review I specifically talk about how I can ignore science if the story demands it, and that the bad science in Interstellar is very much not the reason I didn’t like it. I do spend a lot of the review on the science—and barely scratch the surface of the weird-for-no-reason science in the movie—but in the end, the movie failed me because of the weight of its own ponderousness. It set the bar high, and then walked under it.

I have no desire to stop anyone from seeing it, as I tend to ignore critics’ opinions myself. But if you do see it, then drop on by the review and see if you agree or not. All right all right all right.