Voto:
Nolan is someone who became famous to the general public with Batman... he has been Hollywoodized for a long time, maybe always (whether this is a bad thing is something I avoid dwelling on because I already have plenty to say about this film). You talk about a good blend, I found it terrible. Seriously terrible: a soggy mess made with top-quality ingredients. The best ingredient is the actors, especially McConaughey (and no kidding), but Hathaway, Chastain, and Caine are also in a state of grace. The scenes in space are magnificent, of rare beauty and (for the first time as far as I know) heightened and enhanced by the total absence of a soundtrack (Dear Nolan: 10 and praise, damn it!). Lighting, direction, and editing play their fundamental role in creating an audiovisual work; Nolan uses them as usual, and being someone who does his job exceptionally well not only according to the standards of those who truly understand cinema but also manages to present his cinema to the general public in a polished and gleaming way, what comes out visually will probably be one of the best films of the 2014/2015 season. What a pity, only gold and incense for this film... so where's the mess then?
In everything else.
First of all, the approach taken with the film: three hours for an intergalactic odyssey in search of salvation for humanity. If that’s not epic, tell me what is. And it kicks off grandly with Interstellar: about forty minutes of intro showing the Earth’s situation, the protagonist's existential voids, the love for family, for the Earth and its fruits, the defeat of the dreaming man, and the unstoppable advance of an inevitable, unsentimental death. The dust, the plague, the lungs of life suffocated by a huge mass without conscience or god. Nolan knows how to make an epic film; the third Batman is there to prove it, and in these first forty minutes, if you don't feel like shouting "miracle!" you have serious problems. After this endless and beautiful intro, the film takes off, the spaceship bids farewell to Earth, and Nolan seems to be bidding farewell to his viewers. From here on, it’s not clear what the film wants to be. A bit 2001, a bit thriller, a bit a reflection on human relationships, a onslaught of empty rhetoric (which, okay, does fit well in an epic film) and completely random secondary characters. Primarily Matt Damon. Matt Damon is a character that, in the economy of the story, is only useful for stretching the film by 20 minutes and to show you a bottomless planet. “It’s an epic film, it’s normal for it to be stretched with aesthetic drivel.” Okay, anyone who thought that is surely right, but those twenty minutes steal time from several other crucial elements of the film's plot that end up being treated poorly: the son and his emotional and moral fluctuations are one of the worst handled things I remember seeing. Oh dear, they aren’t even addressed; the son is the height of sympathy, then he gets depressed, then he punches people in the face more or less randomly and decides that his wife and kids can just die. Then he disappears: no one knows what happens to him. No, you say: it’s something that can happen... yes, I say, my dear, you can do that if you don't bore me with a 167-minute film. Because it seems obvious to me that you had more than enough time to say things decently.
And the argument wouldn’t hold: but in the end, the son is a secondary character: in this film, family is everything (we’re in America, so not much to be surprised about) it’s the spring that drives Cooper forward, the spring that keeps Murph “on point,” the spring that pushes Professor Brand to continue with a failing project because the important thing is that his daughter is saved (this is never stated in the film but come on, I hope no one is so stupid as to not get that and now intends to contest this). The characters here are few; managing them poorly is unforgivable. Managing them poorly in 167 minutes means that something in the
