INTERSTELLAR

     Due to the Theory of Relativity,  IMAX decibel levels and its galactic length, the average viewer of Interstellar will age .75 years faster than the non-viewer.   When you're crossing the universe via wormhole, don't lollygag and don't lock the soundtrack at shuttle launch volume.   I liked the movie, but needed cryonic sleep to recover from stimulation overload.

     Too the good, director Christopher Nolan (Memento, Inception, The Dark Knight) went to great lengths to digest and imagine Einstein's Theory of Relativity at work.  Earth is dying for some unclearly defined reason and we need a new world.  A wormhole has appeared, mysteriously, and a few worlds at the other end look promising.   I had fun trying to follow plot through wormholes, event horizons, tesseracts, artificial intelligence and morse code.  Interstellar is a brunch buffet of scifi and melodrama and as such you usually know ahead of time if it's your virtual cup of tea.  Us fans aren't stunned when the film's scientific logic eventually becomes unglued.  "Let's slingshot ourselves around that black hole."   Fine, I didn't always believe Star Trek either.  

     On the flip side, Christopher Nolan's screenplay stumbles into one wormhole that's no longer excusable.  He can't write believable female characters.  I don't expect (or desire) to see frail women mastering relativity and exploring space. We're not in Edwardian England, this is the future and the effect is jarring. Come on dude, hire a woman co-writer, they're out there.

     The big failing of this film, however, isn't it's lousy female characters or it's humorously mystifying plot gyrations (see the blogosphere for more on that), it's the way Interstellar's soundtrack tries to hijack the movie.  Shot extensively in IMAX, Interstellar features loads of breathtaking visuals, but someone didn't trust these to work without thunderous reinforcement from organs, strings and synthesizers.  It's very often relentless.   And since I'm writing subjectively, the music isn't good, it lacks nuance and any sense of discovery.  Remember 2001: A Space Odyssey?  Whether you liked it or not, the music worked and it felt new.  Here the composer strains for that grandeur and achieves grandiosity.  You may enjoy the film despite the soundtrack.   I did, but yikes it was loud.