Interstellar (2014)

  I was planning on doing a Dracula marathon on Saturday, seeing as Bethany has never seen any movies starring my favorite vampire.  I was even going to be good and limit it strictly to Dracula and not just inundate her with every vampire movie I own (plus I'm pretty sure it would have violated something in the Geneva Conventions about holding people against their will).  But after only seeing the 1931 progenitor and cherry-picking differences from the concurrently-made Spanish version, Tyler made his objections clear.  No more Dracula or he would quit the field.

Democracy sucks.

Instead, he proposed one of his favorite movies, Interstellar, and should he ever read this blog I will state that my opinion of the movie does not extend to my opinion of him as a person, or his taste in movies.

This is my new least favorite Nolan film.

In the near future, humanity is eking out a miserable existence on farms as crop after crop is lost to blight.  Some sort of apocalypse has decimated the population and the survivors struggle to cope.  Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is a former NASA engineer and widower trying to do right by his two children.  A gravitational anomaly in his daughter's (Mackenzie Foy) room leads him to the discovery that NASA has not been disbanded but has moved underground to a secret facility headed by Professor Brand (Michael Caine) and his daughter (Anne Hathaway) dedicated to preserving humanity.  They have previously sent probes into a wormhole near Saturn, believed to be an overture from some benevolent extraterrestrials, to a new solar system, followed by manned expeditions to potentially viable new planets.  Now they need Cooper to pilot a new craft to assess which of the three best options should be humanity's new home. 

This is possibly one of the best representations of the science behind space travel but Jesus Leapfrogging Christ, is it a depressing slog.  Tyler was thrilled to bits because of the film's reliance on real science, lack of romantic subplots, and sheer antipathy towards human relationships.  Bethany and I were less misanthropic.

Personally, I was also annoyed by the tropes of Genius = Asshole, Bad Dad = Loveable Scamp, Straight White Male Savior Complex, Dead Minority Castmember, and AI as Slave Labor.  (#JusticeforTARS).  I was not thrilled by the downgrade from Timothee Chalumet to Casey Affleck as young and old Tom or the sidelining of David Oyelowo as a principal with three lines, but it was nice to see Topher Grace in more stuff.

Look, visually, this movie is as stunning as you expect a Christopher Nolan film to be.  It just veers into a misery watch on par with The Dark Knight Rises and no amount of scientific accuracy makes that worth it for me.