Can 10 million viewers be wrong?: Interstellar

God knows why but I did watch the rest of Interstellar last night and I feel as if I went through one of the gravity holes or whatever they are, as if I was about 40 years older by the time the movie ended. I wasn't 100-percent right in predicting the ending, I admit, but the ending certainly held no important surprises - not that anyone cares. Can anybody follow the plot line here, with all these ridiculous time warps, McConaughey talking to his daughter across all sorts of time dimensions? And does it matters? I watched the whole damn thing to see Iceland location setting and got to see about 20 minutes on a glacier that might as well have been a studio set of a digital manipulation. There is nothing in the least original about this movie - neither its apocolyptic premise (plant must be saved from peril), its team of experts (direct knockoff of that scifi thriller - Asteroid? - of a decade or so back), even the friendly robot companions are a weak-tea version of the bos from Star Wars and a million sequels. Christopher Nolan and brother Jack Nolan used to make smart, small, literary films (Memento) that nobody watched and now they make huge, bloated, preposterous, boring films with major stars, major budgets, and everybody watches them - so can you blame them? I can only recall an NYT book review in which the reviewer, writing about some international bestseller, quoted the promotional copy that said: Can 10 million readers be wrong? And the answer is: Usually, yes.

Interminable: Three hours you'll want back after you see Interstellar

Maybe, just maybe, I'll watch the rest of Interstellar tonight, and if I do it will be only to see the sequences filmed in Iceland, which I guess look more like scenes from another galaxy than any other place on earth - but my god how long is this movie? (Last night Red Sox played longest game in franchise history, and Interstellar might seem longer.) Though I'm told the producers and writers made some attempt to base this story on the principles of physics - essentially a team of astronauts is sent to explore possible resettlement options in other galaxies, as earth seems to be a doomed planet, but because of the heavy gravity on some of these planets time proceeds differently and for each hour they spend there people back on earth age several years. As one of the astronauts so wisely puts it: That's relativity! Aside from the idiocy of the entire premise and the obvious consequences of the journey - the film begins with some aged people recounting what it was like on earth back in the dust-and-plague filled era, and if you can't figure out who these people are you probably should be condemned to watch the whole movie - we have to see Matthew McConaughey do a ridiculous reprise of his quirky performance in True Detective, but this time he's a farmer and former astronaut yearning to fly again. Sure. And then there's the ever unlikable Anne Hathaway, as an astronaut-scientist no less, explaining why, in choosing which distant planets to explore, she is following her heart. Yes, the technical effects are good - esp the looming giant waves that almost wipe out the mission on the first planet visited. But the plot is so preposterous and the planet-rescue-discovery mission so threadbare that I found it impossible to engage w/ this film in any way. That's relativity.