I love sci-fi. I've been a long-time fan of all things Star Trek, I loved the Martian, I've read loads of sci-fi books like The Culture series, The Forever War, The Foundation series, and so on. I'm quite fond of hard sci-fi, so when I first heard that Christopher Nolan was working on a large scale science fiction movie that would try to stick to science I was very excited. In fact, Interstellar is one of the few movies I went to see in a theater. Sadly, my expectations were betrayed.
Perhaps it was because of the hype of it being a scientifically accurate movie, but I could not contain my disappointment. When I first saw it people in the theater were ooh-ing and ah-ing whenever something happened, and all I could think of, and came close to expressing vocally, was: "fucking bullshit". Interstellar shits on science. Interstellar pretends to be interested in science, courts it, dates it, then realizes it's not what it was after and brutally murders science and shits on its grave. That is how much I dislike this movie.
I think the problem for me is the initial premise. The movie goes out of its way in the beginning of the movie to show us humans: humans not at all different from us, because the events in the movie are supposed to have taken place shortly after present-day earth. The movie needs us to believe that these people are equivalent to modern-day humans. Then it proceeds to rub it in by giving Matthew McConaughey some clunky exposition dialogue to Murph about the scientific method, and how as a scientist you need to come up with a hypothesis, write down your findings and prove it. The movie clearly portrays the setting as 'In this universe science is true, yo. You better believe it.', and then goes on to violate exactly that premise. Sure, they got the little science-y details right, but that doesn't do shit if your overarching plotline is inherently anti-science (and full of plot holes).
It's been a while since the movie came out and I still hear people going on about how great it was. The movie still has a great rating on imdb too, so I was willing to concede that I might have been wrong about it. Today I watched it again. Nothing changed. Well, one thing. In the theater I didn't want to be that guy who loudly shouts 'BULLSHIT' during the movie. At home I had no such misgivings.
The whole point of science and the scientific method is observing, coming up with a theory that fits the evidence. The movie uses this as a plot device, for science's sake. If you're going that far to insist on science then you can't just do a heel-face turn at the end and be like 'five dimensions and a predestination paradox make all of this okay'. Because it fucking doesn't. That's making a mockery of science. The danger of using 'legit science' as your movie backdrop is that you can't make dumb plothole mistakes, like landing on a planet with massive waves without realising it had massive waves. There must be at least a minimum of dozens of scientists at NASA. Don't tell me none of those people would've thought that a giant black hole would affect the tides. Or, even simpler, a pilot landing on the planet with waves of that close an interval would absolutely have noticed something on his approach. So, yay for scientific accuracy, nay for basic common sense. I guess you can't have both in a movie because that would make things too boring for the viewers. But then I'd prefer leaving the science out rather than the common sense.
Now let me be clear: I have no problem with movies that make a mockery of science, or anything else, or with movies that don't take science that seriously. I still enjoy Star Wars, I love Game of Thrones and I'm fine with whatever unrealistic laws of physics and reality are thrust upon me in whatever anime of the month I am watching. But the movie can't violate its own rules. Interstellar establishes 'science just as in real life' as its own rules, and then in the end is like 'Oh, by the way, this movie's rules were actually science just as in real life plus five dimensions plus time travel plus the power of love. Fooled ya'. That is just not cool. It's as if I was making a movie that portrays Christianity as true and then in the end was like 'oh by the way, Christianity is only true because of science and God doesn't exist. Fooled ya!'. Certainly anyone should be allowed to make a movie like that, but that doesn't make it anything less of a dick move.
So there you go. I could not suspend my disbelief during this movie, and the reason for that is, ironically, because the movie tried to stick as close to reality as possible, and then failed miserably at that. I would've been much happier if they'd tried less hard at representing real-life science and focused more on the plot holes and fixing the common sense issues instead. I've experienced this a lot in Nolan movies. He likes to dazzle you and blind you with his pretty imagery and fantastic plotlines (don't even get me started on Inception, although I liked Inception a lot better than Interstellar) so that sometimes you don't even realise that you were fooled. Sometimes that works out, sometimes it doesn't. Interstellar was a classic Nolan bait-and-switch that I did not enjoy.