It was a good movie. But I didn't leave the theater muttering wow. I had a lot of mental post-processing to do to unpack how I felt about the movie. In the end, there was a lot I liked about it, but I'm not as immediately blown away by it as I remember having felt just after watching Contact or Super 8. I'll try give my take in a spoiler-free way.
There's no denying that the movie has a great cast. And the actors are seeded in periodically throughout the film so that just when you think you've seen the entire cast, boom!, there's another actor you recognize. And Interstellar did the bits in outer space so very well. From the silent vacuum to the airlocks to the fact that the main ship spins to turn centrifugal force into faux-gravity. I also really loved the film's robots. Despite being initially a bit taken back by their strangeness, they were very creative and interesting.
But the thing isn't all plusses. Many of the interpersonal conflicts I could have done without entirely. The only character who turned out to be any kind of villain? Yeah - I wish they'd cut his bit, or at least shortened it. There was a bit too much of people giving weight to their personal feelings in decisions that literally affected the fate of the human race, but I guess that's a central theme in a movie where a widowed father abandons his family to try to save the human race. And while they did some great things with hard science, gravity, relativity, and time, that credibility took a hit when someone said love is the one thing that transcends time and space
. Ugh.
Overall, I really did like it. One of the greatest things about the film is that it's hopeful. So many movies have dystopias, whether they're due to zombies, disease, war, or a Hunger Games government. While Interstellar certainly begins in a dust bowl dystopia, it shows the protagonists struggling mightily to lift humanity out of an anti-science era into something better. One part of the movie that struck me most is a scene probably 15 minutes in involving revisionist history. I got so angry at the teacher, and I loved Matthew McConaughey's response.
The last thing I've got to say is that the movie delivers tension during certain scenes as well as any movie ever has. I was on the edge of my seat a lot. And a film like this gives me hope that next year's The Martian will be a good book-to-movie adaptation.