Love Is the *Loud Barfing Noise* Dimension: The Slick Yet Empty SF of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (Patreon)

There really is no better, easier, more warm and confident and secure time to write about the power of father and child relationships in a film that absolutely hinges on it being an actual physical force in the universe than right after your beloved father-in-law dies without being able to say goodbye!

And yet. The show must go on. Dry your eyes, kitten, there’s a dumbass movie to poke with a stick.

So let’s inter our stellars and talk about everything that is almost, but not quite right about Christopher Nolan’s big shiny minimalist Science Fiction Can Be Serious Art You Guys and I Am Definitely The First Person to Realize That epic (that manages to come out first and then be in every way one thousand percent inferior to the better version of all its themes AND non-linear storytelling, Arrival) Interstellar.

I should say up top that this wasn’t NEARLY as bad as everyone said it was. I was ready to throw metaphorical popcorn at the screen and hurt myself rolling my eyes, but it honestly wasn’t egregiously horrible, except in the sense that it tripped, farted, hit itself in the face with a space-rake, and landed face-down in a puddle of its own expectations. Interstellar is that kid in school everyone thought was gonna cure cancer but ended up working a cash register because the pressure was just too much.

The problem is, when you roll up to a Christopher Nolan movie, you have a certain checklist of Art Stuff you expect to be fulfilled: visually slick, cool effects, washed-out monochromatic color palette, twist ending, long as fuck, the Cliff’s Notes to a philosophy 102 syllabus, Michael Caine, a big boomy soundtrack, a pretty dark take on humanity with some vague positivity stuck on at the end like a very expensive game of pin the tail on the nihilist, somebody yelling about their kid, non-linear plotting unless it’s Batman, every single trilby-owning male you know telling you you have to see it three times before you even begin to really “get it”, a lot of close-ups, like A LOT of close-ups, of a slightly-but-not-offputtingly-haggard leading man’s big face, something about the Power of Love unless it’s Batman, an etherally beautiful offsides female character that inspires the action but has little character or life of her own outside of her connection to a man, genuine human emotions added in post-production, probably some snow?

But mainly it’s gonna be cool. A Nolan flick is always, always cool as shit. And a Nolan flick wants to be An Event. This isn’t just me being a dick, Nolan has absolutely painstakingly cultivated these expectations, they are part of his brand and the reason Hollywood was apparently entirely depending on Tenet to convince people to go back to movie theaters and I guess AMC is going out of business because nothing is quite cool enough to risk getting the plague to see.

So while Interstellar is in many ways a perfectly serviceable mid-2010s science fiction movie (in that it is slow and full of portentious music and lens flares and it all comes down to daddy issues but also there’s explosions in space so it’s not like, lame. See Ad Astra for more of this), it fails as a Christopher Nolan movie, and that’s why it has to sit by itself in the corner while Inception and Memento and Dunkirk and The Prestige and The Dark Knight get to go out and play with the big kids.

And, in retrospect, you can tell it’s gonna go wrong from the title alone. What the fuck is Interstellar? It means nothing. It tells you nothing about the movie except that it might be science fiction, it’s not even really relevant to the plot (not so much traveling between stars or talking about stars at all so much as planets and time) and has no mystery or resonance at all. It’s just a science word out of the dictionary. Much like Tenet, which seems to have been chosen because it was a palindrome and publicity needed to play up the mysteriousness of the plot to sell tickets so the title couldn’t be anything that gave one second of story away. My theory is our buddy Chris REALLY wanted to call this l o n g b o y e Gravity and was super pissed when the Bullock/Clooney vehicle came out a year earlier and just picked another space word at random out of spite. The characters in Interstellar CANNOT FUCKING STOP saying the word “gravity.” If you took a drink every time someone said gravity in this thing, you’d be dead before Surprise Matt Damon pops out of a ziploc bag to jowl everything up for everyone. It seriously approaches semantic satiation and loses all meaning. Gravity gravity gravity bee bye bo bavity.

And the whole movie is…kind of like that. It implies depth without achieving it, seems sciencey but really isn’t, means something just slightly different than it says it does, promises a sense of wonder and then wanders off without dropping it off, and all together feels like it passionately intended to be better and just forgot to actually do it.

There’s a lot of cool stuff in there, though! It’s Nolan, of course there is. the robot design is great, the little fakeout frame narrative with documentary interviews about the Dust Bowl that turn out to be about the environmental crisis in the film is very effective, the black hole effects are absolutely gorgeous, there are scenes that are almost unbearably tense even though you’re pretty sure McConaughey isn’t going to cack it with an hour left in the film, the script is clearly thinking about time dialation effects in a clever way, and the interaction between humans and AI is different enough to not get tropey (although not quite interesting enough to qualify as groundbreaking). I’m holistically sure if I had seen this in IMAX I would have been blown away by the sound design and immersiveness of the effects and the tension. It is somewhat lessened by being on my TV with the lights on while my sick cat aggressively tries to show me that his butthole is feeling better and me going to get snacks any time I want—which incidentally, I don’t necessarily feel is a reason to forgive any film’s flaws. If I can only think it’s brilliant trapped in a dark room with a giant af screen that gobbles up my field of vision so I can’t look away like some kind of voluntary Clockwork Orange BDSM scenario, then perhaps it is just not that brilliant. A script should be compelling no matter how you view it. It should arrest my attention on an airplane, in my bedroom, in a waiting room, however I watch it. I should like it on a plane, I should like it on a train. I should like here or there, I should like it anywhere!

Ahem.

And there is, of course, the twist.

Or so I’m told.

I had the strangest experience watching this movie and then reading what people had to say about it afterward. Because they kept talking about the twist. But “the twist” is so entirely beat-for-beat what I assumed was happening from the second the ghost and the watch showed up that to me, revealing it was just…the plot, not a twist. I guess I read and watch and write too much science fiction. But when you spend 45 minutes of screen time setting up a father and daughter relationship, then make a big deal out of how she’s seeing some kind of ghost trying to send her messages, and say a bunch of words like time and gravity and all their synonyms and then lather some “I’ll always come back, double Chekhov’s pinkie swear ” on top, I fully assume the ghost is the dad and the messages are from him in the future and somehow this will be the solution to THE EQUATION that saves humanity. When some mysterious beings put a wormhole near Saturn and set up all these artificial gravitational anomalies to lead us to habitable planets just as ours was dying and no one will even specualte as to who “they” are, and again, every character with lines keeps rabbiting on about time, it’s…it’s definitely humans from the future who put them there. That’s not really so much a twist as it’s just how storytelling and foreshadowing work. But it’s Christopher Nolan, and we’ve all been told he’s the SMORTEST FEELM-MACHING MAN EVAR so now screenwriting 101 is crazy non-linear twistiness you can’t understand without a second viewing.

Girl, this shit is so long, if it weren’t literally all about the daughter they wouldn’t have spent an actual eternity staring at her face and telling us how smart she is and how she’s gonna save the world when she grows up. They say that in the beginning! Time is at a premium in feature films, you don’t say that shit unless it’s going to go off in the third act! Also, like, a watch? Is literally the most common macguffin in filmed media. Fucking watches. Goddamn Dad’s dumb-butt watch.

The biggest flaw in Interstellar is that it is completely predictable if you have ever seen or read or heard of science fiction beyond a half-assed glance through the syllabus assigned by the giant lips in the beginning of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Nolan isn’t supposed to be predictable. I have never really found him so before. But every point of this plot is absurdly easy to call unless your brain is being blasted out by IMAX overload. Oh, is the character named Dr. Mann actually the greatest danger of all? What an unforseeable turn of events.

I could spend five thousand words pointing out everything that doesn’t make much sense if you look at it any closer than a safe social distance. I won’t (probably) but I could. My main beefs, however, fall into boxes labelled Psychology and Ecology. There is another box labelled Physics, but everyone and their screenwriting brother uses that box as a toilet so I’ve just come to expect it and can’t get too mad when there’s a huge turd called Love Is A Physical Force Just Like Gravity stinking it up.

But the other boxes? Hoo, boy let’s go.

Like…okay, so the soil is fucked and crops are blighted. Fine. Are hydroponics and GMOs not a thing anymore? Are there really giant peaceful farms everywhere that aren’t being overrun by starving people streaming out of the cities searching for anything they can eat? McConaughey Acres is clearly still producing vegetables, so why are they talking about a linear time frame in which the soil will stop doing that and chewing tabaccy on our huge porches instead of doing all the things we know help with that? Corn is the only viable crop? Well, that’s not really going to work because you can’t live on corn alone due to a lack of niacin and B3 and insufficient fat. Are there still livestock? We certainly don’t see sad cows. And because I AM a science fiction writer I start thinking okay but it’s impossible every single crop except corn has peaced out at once and not one strain of one type of fruit or vegetable has proven resistant, there are too many variables in the ecologies of this planet for that to happen so fast and honestly corn is a very vulnerable plant when it comes to Dust Bowl conditions, hence, you know, the 1930s, so it wouldn’t be the last man standing. And if it were, tons of countries would already be shit out of luck because corn doesn’t grow in every zone. They should have picked coconut, that has enough of everything to keep a body alive and can grow in pretty garbage conditions. Why wouldn’t palm trees be able to survive? They grow everywhere from the hot butt crack of California to the deep tropics. Agave is out? Rice, which gives no fucks? Tomatoes, which are so easy to grow they can and do survive a Maine winter without replanting? We aren’t growing ANYTHING in greenhouses where conditions can be completely controlled? Which technology we CLEARLY have in this universe because we’re 100% doing it at the end on a space station off the coast of Saturn and THE EQUATION wasn’t about growing some bomb-ass apples? Is this a magic blight? WHY ISN’T EVERYONE LIVING IN BIO-DOMES INSTEAD OF JANKY-ASS CLAPBOARD FIELD OF DREAMS HOUSES WITH NO DRYWALL SO THEY DON’T GET THE FUCKING SAD FUTURE DUST-LUNG LIKE PA FREAKING JOAD?

But sure, okay, fine, this is a high-concept science fiction epic and high-concept means never having to explain a goddamn thing. For a relaxing time, make it corn time. Whatever. So then we have the scene in the school where one of McConaughey’s kiddos missed like two questions on the SAT and he has to be a farmer forever now.

Noooooope.

There simply is not enough land for every dumb kid in the world to farm, let alone every smart-but-not-genius kid to also farm. That is not how, you know, geography works. Also farming is hard! If it’s so important, you don’t want the kids who can’t math doing it all.We never see anyone but that one family on their farm, so I guess in a massive food crisis we’re still doing Salt of the Earth Hardworking ‘Murican Family Farming Whose Individual Property and Inheritance Rights Are Respected No Matter What instead of, you know, what would actually happen, which is Eminent Domain Strikes Back and some kind of fascio-communist crackdown where Monsanto is our Lord and Master, running every inch of arable land to its absolute capacity and you can suck a corncob if you don’t like it, now get in the compost bin, just-slightly-inadequate child.

Given what happens literally 15 minutes later, there is CLEARLY a large demand for engineers and the like. They are building MASSIVE ships (and space stations!) under the mountains in NORAD and recruiting astronauts and supplying all of those and also everything that goes with ships and launches which is a shit-ton of logistics. And that’s just in one location! I know AMERICA FUCK YEAH but no way are other countries just jamming corn up their butts and waiting around to die. Jesus, let little Tommy be a space janitor or something, Mama Monsanto will just assign another pair of sacrificial lungs to their 1930s cosplay farm set.

On top of which, Cooper over here is what, 35? Much is actually made of his age later so I will tell you he is indeed the roughest-looking 35 there ever was. And his oldest kid is 15. And he used to be an awesome engineer-pilot guy before he was forced to be a farmer which he hates. So that would make him 20 when the world was fine enough to let him be a big boy astronaut. Which means that all this shit happened in a maximum of 15 years but the Saturn wormhole turned up 48 years ago, and that means NASA, for 33 years, didn’t tell anyone about it and no one on the whole internet found it even though it seems pretty easily visible with a good telescope, and in 15 years everyone got convinced the moon landing never happened and NASA no longer exists and nobody needs scientists anymore (super not useful for saving the environment) unless you are the absolute world-saving smartest child to ever live, but also somehow NORAD is fully staffed and there’s a bunch of young astronauts ready to go and thousands of people are working on spaceships just in this one place in the middle of nowhere COOL BEANS. BUT NOT BEANS BECAUSE ALL THE BEANS ARE DEAD.

P.S. For reference, 15 years ago was 2005. It’s just not that long.

ALL THAT AND WE’RE NOT EVEN OFFWORLD YET.

So then obviously McConaughey is the Greatest Pilot Who Ever Lived and despite not having piloted anything more than a tractor in at least 15 years and definitely not being up to date on the ships they’ve been secretly building that are far better than anything he even knew about when he was playing Rocketman on repeat, in that they can get to Saturn in two years and go through a wormhole and have cool shuttles that land on and take off from planets no launchpads no problem, despite the fact that he is now 35 nad not 20, and thus his reflexes will be degraded by age and lack of practice, and his lungs are jacked up on corn-dust and Joadness and his mind is dulled by repetitive farm work and in every way he wouldn’t even qualify to pilot a space shuttle up to orbit and back right here and now, despite the fact that he is not in any way Humanity’s Only Hope, he is hailed immediately as Humanity’s Only Hope and Has to Go because no one else could pull it off. Thanks a lot, say all the other astronauts in the astronaut burrow. And like…all the other ones who went into the black hole just fine without being Tom Cruise from Top Gun? But a minute ago they didn’t even know they had access to the Great McConaughey, even though I guess he lived next door and they could have sent someone out to get him if he was so integral to this whole effort? So somebody who was up to date in their training and bonded with their team and not a 35-year-old black lung patient got bumped for a guy who quite literally wouldn’t know where the space-bathroom is, and all around it seems like a great idea to send him off with a bunch of scientists he doesn’t even know FOR YEARS on a mission it turns out Michael Caine knows he’s not going to come back from but fakes it like he is because of this EQUATION that Michael Caine will totally figure out so humanity can leave the planet when the air gets too bad instead of building one single dome with air filters I don’t even know, everyone here is bad at science.

But he’s a white straight male with a nice jawline, so off he goes ha ha this is fine.

But don’t worry! This is the Finest Crew Ever Assembled, the Best of Humanity (tm). I know you didn’t have to ask, but they are all American, there’s only four of them, so no room for anyone to have an accident (spoiler: they will immediately have accidents) only one is black and only one is female (despite weight and fertility being super fucking important). It is strongly implied that if they can’t figure out how to offload humanity into this cosmic slip n’ slide, Anne Hathaway is going to give birth to ten embryos and raise them and educate them in vital technical and practical knowledge, I guess by herself, so they can found a colony. And she is fine with that. And there is no back-up woman in case she develops space PCOS or something or, you know, dies in childbirth because I don’t see any medical doctors on hand.

It makes absolutely no goddamned sense, given the late reveal that the baby colony was always the primary plan and no one ever thought they could shift people off Earth at all, that the entire crew isn’t female. They have all these embryos, they can grow their own men when they get there. If the USS Forced Breeding is the last great hope, one womb that might very well get radiationed out of service on the way ain’t gonna cut it. Nor does the crew include anyone who knows how to build a colony or subsistence farm (except maybe McConaughey, who I repeat was just added to the roster so they didn’t have one single farmer in the plan for years, and there’s no way the pilot knows anything about xeno-agriculture or starting from scratch just because he can grow corn when corn is all there is to grow on land that has always grown corn. Also for a culture so worried about food it’s odd that their food supplies never come up as an issue on the ship, even when the one guy decides not to go back into cryo and just live for twenty years on the ship waiting for them to come back and no one says oh my god did you fucking eat all our food because you didn’t want to “sleep your life away”?). It’s just a bunch of maladjusted sad science men who definitely seem like the early childhood education nurturing types and one white lady prepared to shoot kids out of her like a t-shirt cannon, at which point they plan to tell those kids they all HAVE to have as many kids as possible by the partners assigned to them by a computer because genetic diversity (which is not reflected in the crew) is so important and no one for a minute thinks everyone won’t be super cool with that, or that a generation of kids raised by Anne Hathaway and two robots aren’t gonna be REAL WEIRD.

JK we all know the reason is Christopher Nolan will be good and goddamned before he casts an entire movie with women of different races and nationalities with a practical plan for doing anything beyond clenching their jaws and having girl-related trauma at the problem.

So off we go, with four fucking American douchebags who patently cannot do the job they’ve been given. Yay!

And here’s where we run into some lazy shit, my friends. I have not found much Nolan work to be lazy any more than I ‘ve found it predictable, so some Goldilocks fetch-quest room-temperature porridge where the first planet is too wet and the second planet is too cold but the third planet is juuuuuust right is some See Me After Class Not Living Up to Your Potential As a Student nonsense. How in the fuck do they not see that the whole first planet is water before they land? Do they not have sensors or telescopes or, you know, eyes? A water world is not livable without supplies they do not have, and both the scientist who sent back a message saying it’s all good in this here neighborhood and the people in orbit should be able to tell that there are massive waves just by thinking real hard about what would happen to a water planet next to a black hole.

So now, 3500 words into this, I come to what is my most controversial Nolan Take.

Christopher Nolan has a real problem with visual creativity.

I thought this with Inception and it was confirmed with Interstellar and I doubt Tenet will convince me otherwise. Nolan’s whole aesthetic is “Take out the color, no one smile, then make stuff have snow or water on it and be grey or so dark no one can see that there’s really nothing there.” It’s the film equivalent of an Apple Store. There’s no detritus anywhere or any feeling of real people living in an environment, it’s all clean and minimalist and monochrome.

THESE ARE ALIEN WORLDS. And all you got is Ocean Planet, Snow Planet, and Rock Planet? Holy shit, Super Mario does better than that. In this entire three hour film that mostly takes place in outer space, there is not one alien plant, one alien butterfly, one crazy rock formation, one speck of something interesting. It’s all stuff you can find on Earth, only bigger. Waves! But they are really big! Snowy mountains! But they are really big! The planets are literally the dreamworlds in Inception. The rainy city and the river they drive into are the waterworld, the snowy prison is the ice planet, and even when they finally ostensibly find a place we can live it’s basically just shitty New Mexico. It’s not about budget, this is an expensive movie full of CGI. Nolan just cannot imagine a truly dreamlike dream or a truly alien world. He doesn’t know what to put there other than grey, cool, slick emptiness. A white room, essentially. The final habitable planet is particularly egregious since, if we’re meant to be able to live there no problem, it should have…plants at the least. Worms in the soil. Moons in the sky. Something. Anything. Nolanworld is so concerned with being cool it ends up being nothing at all. 

It is just so empty and uninspiring. There’s no sense of otherness or wonder—and because Nolan is consistently bored by how actual humans think and feel, not one second of screen time is taken up by anyone thinking about how they are the first people to step on an alien world or expressing any emotion or even passing interest in that. Goddamn it, this is a big deal, you idiots.

The whole Matt Damon plot is silly—it’s obvious from the beginning he’s gonna turn out evil and he does with a quickness. Apparently there was no psych screening for these pioneers and no training where you had to be alone for a long time, and he had to kill everyone and not just be like plz take me with you even though by killing everyone he’s just alone again so mission accomplished, big buddy. Naming him Dr. Mann is just some kindergarten paint-by-numbers eye-rollage. The sequence with the ships docking is one of the best in the movie, but it’s all to serve a plotline that makes even less sense in 2020 when we’re all expected to go without human contact indefinitely.

I’ve spent a lot of time on the first two acts because everything I heard about this movie was that the first two-thirds were fine, it was only the last act that got dumb and cheesy and I wanted to lay out clearly that THE FIRST TWO-THIRDS WERE NOT FINE. The thing people hate the most, that love is some kind of verifiable cosmic force akin to gravity, comes up for the first time in the second act, when Anne Hathaway starts bleating and singing I Dreamed a Dream about her boyfriend and how they should go to the planet he was assigned to because love is so powerful and she knows it’s real and she’s right and baaaaaarf of course they give this plotline to the only woman on the ship. And again if you’ve ever seen a movie, the minute they decide to go to Dr. Mann’s world instead, you know she was right and Dr. Mann sucks ass, because we have 90 minutes left in this thing.

The first two-thirds of this movie make no sense scientifically or psychologically, and while it is affecting to watch time go by with the kids’ videos, the main thing I took from them is that McConaughey is a TERRIBLE father who only loves one of his children. He can’t even get through one of his son’s videos without peering in the background for Murph (ugh, what an awful name, it sounds like barfing every time someone says it). As far as he’s concerned his son and his eventual grandsons are dumb and boring just like his teachers always said and only his daughter matters at all YOU ARE THE WORST DAD, COOPER, GET IN THE BIN.

The third act seems especially shit because human psychology has been treated throughout as an annoying technical detail that can be handwaved away. We spend vastly more time on Matt Damon’s little tantrum than on how anyone else feels about anything. Anne Hathaway’s only motivation is her space-boyfriend. We spent not a moment on how Romilly feels about living alone for twenty years while his crewmates dick around down on the wave pool planet, but a whole lot on how many jokes the robots can tell. And then we get shoved into this closed time-loop thing with the future humans leading McConaughey to leave clues for his daughter and…I don’t know…imagining? data from a black hole into morse code expressed by the motion of a hand on a watch, even though that data would be SO FUCKING HUGE just putting it into Morse code would take so bloody long let alone psychically impregnating a wristwatch with it and then jotting down TELEMETRY on the other end. Murph would know neither where the message began or ended and I don’t buy for a minute that she can pull…something…out of it to plug into THE EQUATION that somehow magically creates a mass driver that can solve space travel and also everything else you need to load humanity onto giant ships and high-tail it to Saturn.

Like, yeah, that doesn’t make sense and it’s stupid. But it’s not any more or less stupid than anything else that led up to it. And ultimately, all that Hallmark blathering about how love is a physical force is pretty irrelevant. It’s not love that solves the problem, it’s a robot sacrificing itself because it was programmed to obey orders, and data from inside a black hole, and a lot of chalkboards, and a giant monologue in case we’re still not getting it, and a tesseract that folds time so that the data can be encoded and transmitted to a child who won’t figure it out for thirty years. And that is a VERY risky and roundabout plan, Future Humans of the Future. Seems like it would be a lot easier just to give that data to Michael Caine in the first place in a magic love iPod or something. But what it is not is love expressing itself as a physical force and a fifth dimension so why is everyone even saying that and giving the audience something to latch onto and not take any of this seriously? WHY ARE YOU HITTING YOURSELF, MOVIE?

Now, we come to the dumbass ending. Because la la la the day is saved and humanity is fine and we can all live on these fancy ass ships that we couldn’t all just…live on and leave them on the planet as giant self-sustaining habitats, they only work in space because reasons.

You knew from the beginning when McConaughey was emoting about how he and his daughter could be the same age when they met again that he’d be young and she’d be old by the end. Fine. And she’s dying but coming to see him at last. Fine. I was told that now that I’m a parent, Interstellar will make me cry and pull on all my mother-strings so I knew we were in for the oh-so-never-used-before trope of everyone being saved by white middle class hetero love that produces children. Fine. But then we run face first into the fact that Christopher Nolan only understands human emotions in the sense that I understand having a penis. I’ve seen other people do it. I understand how it works. It seems neat. But when it comes right down to it, I have no practical experience and don’t really want to.

Young Dad sees Old Daughter and it’s supposed to be all FEELINGS and TEARS and I just was like WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SCENE WHY CAN CHRISTOPHER NOLAN ONLY HANDLE CHILDREN AND WOMEN AS ABSTRACT OFF SCREEN CONSTANTLY ABANDONED CONCEPTS?

You don’t ask about your son?

You don’t curse the cruelties of fate?

You’re surrounded by her family and descendants and you don’t even look at them but they apparently just…watch as this all goes down? Silently?

It’s been like eighty years for daughter and the whole universe plus time travel for dad just to see each other again and their love saved the species and they’re so happy to be together and no one is mad or bitter…but she just squeezes his hand and gives him a “lol 90 seconds is enough I’m gonna die with my real family now go get a snack”?

AND DAD DOES? WITHOUT A WORD?

No. Nope. No way. And I finally get to start a sentence this way. AS A PARENT, this is a load of bullshit. After all that, Dad says “not under my roof, young lady” and sits there and holds her goddamned hand and is there for his daughter like he never was when she was a kid, he doesn’t just mic drop and peace out after less than two minutes with the only person he has ever shown any feeling for in this whole movie. This isn’t how parents and children work! Having just been prevented from being with my father in law as he died, this scene is GARBAGE. She would want him there and he would want to be there and the fallout of not getting that chance is no small thing.

He would NEVER leave her side and she’d never ask him to! That is the wrong conclusion for everything that’s been set up so far! Absolutely nothing could keep me from being with my son in his last moments if I had BROKEN TIME AND SPACE TO BE WITH HIM, especially if every rando cousin who didn’t break time and space is welcome and just awkwardly standing there waiting for lunch or whatever. UGH. It felt like the end of A.I. only without any sense of connection or feeling or meaning or anything at all to say about how parents and children do that whole parent and child thing. Love was so important but then lol psych get out of my hospital room.

In fact, I would be hard pressed to tell you what the themes or meaning of Interstellar are beyond…I don’t know, dads suck, science is easy, if we break this planet we’ll just get a new one?

So even though he’s fine just getting a minute with the daughter that is his only reason for living, McConaughey senses he could hook up, so he immediately leaves to go join Anne Hathaway on what we are told is the Goldilocks planet all of humanity can go to and be completely fine and happy. Neat. Worst dad ever, no competition. (Also, they’ve got so many ships they’re gonna waste one so one guy can bang a little sooner than he would have if he waited to go with everyone else?)

Except that what we’re shown is Anne Hathaway burying her boyfriend, not at all in the mood for banging, and walking back toward a habitat all by herself on a planet that looks like total trash. There is not one speck of plant life. It looks like an even more depressing Mars. THIS is the paradise world we’ve been looking for? It’s barren as shit! It looks WAY WORSE than the land we were told in the beginning could not support enough food for people to live. It has our atmosphere, or Anne wouldn’t take off her helmet, and compatible gravity, or she wouldn’t be walking around like an easy, breezy, beautiful Cover Girl, but there’s nothing there? Not one blade of space grass? Not one alien bluebird? Just literally whatever patch of desert was closest to LA?

Again we have a total failure of basic ecology—the soil on our world works because it has had millions of years of decaying organic matter setting up its chemical cocktail. You need organic matter to grow plants—we add bone meal or even dried blood to soil if it doesn’t have enough. Just having unfrozen dirt doesn’t mean you can plant anything in it. If there’s no organic life on this planet, the dirt is trashsoil and won’t do us any more of a solid than the dirt we ruined back home. So all in all, if we have the technology to concert dead, alien dust into Lowe’s Garden Center Potting Soil, wouldn’t it have been way easier to just do that on Earth than to go through this whole wormhole time travel MYSTERIOUS EQUATION love is the fifth dimension Rube Goldberg plot only to end up right back at damn this dirt sucks at being dirt?

But don’t worry, Matthew McConaughey is on his way to knock your boots and make some weird emotionally damaged white midwestern embryos the old-fashioned way so it was all worth it in the end ha ha love is cool am I right fellow humans the end.

Minus a million stars, do not let this man parent anyone ever again.