Although the idea is simple and written 100 times in SF novels and short stories, it could make a quite good space opera. It could be deep and wise. It could make people think. But no. It had to be wasted. The weakest point is not poor acting (by the way: McConaughey really can't speak? I am not the best in the world in English, but I know many native speakers who couldn't understand him talking), awful music. Even the dumbest possible design of a robot is not the worst part of the movie. It is a forced, painful solemness and pretended adherence to science and logic combined with funny, childish errors and a mile wide gaps in logic.
It would take to much time and space to write down all stupid ideas, so just a few of them. Some of them are partially explained in the movie or e.g. in IMDb FAQ, but the explanations are even more naive than the goofs themselves. I start with a biggest problem: - In R. E. Raspe's "Baron Munchausen", the baron drowns in the mud and saves his life by pulling himself out, on his own hair. The Earthmen in the movie do the same: the humans from the future save their ancestors. But if the present people perish, there are no future people to save them... The most simple paradox, and yet they included it in the "serious" movie. And no naive explanations (branches, interpretations, non-linear timelines etc) can make it wiser, no matter how many times they use the word "fractal". And if the future people exist, they don't need to do anything, do they? - The best plan from the future humans is to put (in a past) a wormhole, 2 years flight from Earth, making it almost impossible to find and reach. Then the Earthmen would have to build spaceships for billions of people to travel to a new world. I would simply help the Earthmen get a decent crops...
To sum up: Interstellar is just another pseudoscience-fiction movie. It is intended to be deep and serious, but is just funny (including it's makers argumentation why it is not). It is not easy to think out a GOOD SF story. You can easily make a non-science fiction story which is very good and nice to read or watch (like Star Wars), but it cannot pretend it is serious and science-based. The most depressing thing about that movie is, however, it's huge overrating on IMDb. Are the young people so easy to control? If they see something that makes the first impression of having some value (slow, grave, pseudo-intellectual) they give 9 and 10 points just to show they are serious and deep-thinking? Is that why poor SF movies get such a high notes? Passengers, the last few Aliens and so on?
My "4" rating is a real one, not lowered to balance the general overrating.
It would take to much time and space to write down all stupid ideas, so just a few of them. Some of them are partially explained in the movie or e.g. in IMDb FAQ, but the explanations are even more naive than the goofs themselves. I start with a biggest problem: - In R. E. Raspe's "Baron Munchausen", the baron drowns in the mud and saves his life by pulling himself out, on his own hair. The Earthmen in the movie do the same: the humans from the future save their ancestors. But if the present people perish, there are no future people to save them... The most simple paradox, and yet they included it in the "serious" movie. And no naive explanations (branches, interpretations, non-linear timelines etc) can make it wiser, no matter how many times they use the word "fractal". And if the future people exist, they don't need to do anything, do they? - The best plan from the future humans is to put (in a past) a wormhole, 2 years flight from Earth, making it almost impossible to find and reach. Then the Earthmen would have to build spaceships for billions of people to travel to a new world. I would simply help the Earthmen get a decent crops...
- A catastrophic climate change destroys all the crops. How? During just several years? And all plants are dead? All animals? But humans survived? How? Isn't it possible e.g. to grow some algae in oceans? Why nobody even tries to do anything? - Why an anti-science education? A science never does any harm. Only the politics and businessmen do, using science. So it is not the science to be ostracized.
- A farmer drives his children to anti-science school fully equipped to bring a military drone down (has a specially programmed computer, antennas, means to establish a connection, etc.) - A "ghost" communication is very implausible. Does it really depend on gravity? Even some waves, oscillations would create observed effects on books/dust, the gravity hardly could.
- Barely legal NASA base, hidden in a barn, building a spaceship... Funny. Unsuccessfully looking for it's best pilot in the world, year after year... Funny. The pilot accidentally finds them, and is captured and interrogated like a war prisoner by scientists - funny. The scientists are pilot's old friends. And they just finished building a rocket. He has never seen this ship, he is a farmer for 20 years now, so will he fly it, the only hope for humanity, please? FUNNY! - Plan A and B. Science and technology so advanced that can keep human embryos alive during a space journey, and rise them to get humans, can not rise a radish on Earth (nor perform a MRI scan).
- Please, stop the stupid "expert's presentation how it works" (the imbecile with a pencil demonstrating wormholes, just like the similar imbecile in "The Martian" explaining the trivial maneuver around Earth). What makes it even more pathetic, the "expert" addresses his childish show to a engineer and best NASA pilot.
- ...and so on... I don't understand the physics that stands beside the unusual phenomena in the alien solar system, on its planets (the hundred miles high waves on an ocean two feet deep, the frozen, solid clouds in the air, the anti-logic movements of the ships, the anti-logic decisions of the crew... and so on...
- and at the end I (and all the nearby watchers) couldn't believe the stupidity of the falling to the black hole behind the main character daughter's bookshelves. It was... it was... unspoken. And the Future Men felt that the best way of communication with Present People is to shake the books in some girls' bedroom. If you can move the book, or a hand of the watch - that means, you can move objects - you can take a pen and write as well. It is the same action, using the same forces. Yes, I fully understand the meanings, metaphors, 11 dimensions of continuum, and so on. Doesn't help.
To sum up: Interstellar is just another pseudoscience-fiction movie. It is intended to be deep and serious, but is just funny (including it's makers argumentation why it is not). It is not easy to think out a GOOD SF story. You can easily make a non-science fiction story which is very good and nice to read or watch (like Star Wars), but it cannot pretend it is serious and science-based. The most depressing thing about that movie is, however, it's huge overrating on IMDb. Are the young people so easy to control? If they see something that makes the first impression of having some value (slow, grave, pseudo-intellectual) they give 9 and 10 points just to show they are serious and deep-thinking? Is that why poor SF movies get such a high notes? Passengers, the last few Aliens and so on?
My "4" rating is a real one, not lowered to balance the general overrating.