Interstellar Review

Grade: C+
One-Liner: Inception in outer space, but without Leonardo DiCaprio, so what's the point?

One day, several years ago, Matthew McConaughey sat Christopher Nolan down in a room, got him high, and started talking about planets. That's the only possible explanation for how the idea behind Interstellar came about.

Now that he's won an Oscar and starred in True Detective, McConaughey is suddenly God's gift to acting, as if we could ever forget he once starred in Fool's Gold with Kate Hudson. He plays Cooper, a former pilot and engineer who is forced to become a full-time farmer once the world begins to implode. Without giving too much away, he is recruited to captain a mission to help save Earth by finding a new planet to populate.

Filled with the confidence only critical acclaim and several golden trophies can bring, McConaughey lept head first into the emotional and physical role, at times over-acting, but also hitting the raw moments on just the right marks. Jessica Chastain ended up stealing the show, and should have been given more screen time. Sadly, it was Anne Hathaway, who played McConaughey's co-pilot, that got the majority of the focus. Her character Brand had a tendency to screw everything up — a fitting part for an actress who tends to be universally hated. As I watched her essentially average performance, I couldn't help but compare her to Sandra Bullock in last year's Gravity. Though she wasn't referencing the two films at the time, Hathaway said it best in a recent Tonight Show interview: "If you don't want to follow anybody, you especially don't want to follow Sandra Bullock." Truth.

Two epic space blockbusters back-to-back like that don't seem like the smartest choice, and if it's a battle, Alfonso Cuaron's stunning look into what lies outside our own world wins every time in my book. Gravity's details, never-before-seen effects, brevity, and visceral acting made it a masterpiece in comparison to Nolan's almost three-hour voyage. Where Cuaron honed in on the tiniest details, the Inception director zipped past the little things in favor of stuffing in as many plot points as possible.

Interstellar started off slow, taking painful chunks of time to explain what had happened to our planet. The middle hour proved to be the most promising, filled with twists, action, and the majority of the film's most sensical plotlines. Then things got simply bizarre in the final hour, with a climactic ending that needed much more explaining than was provided.

The one thing that was handled incredibly well was the relationship between Coop and his daughter Murph. It proved to be a key link throughout the film and the bond felt real and beautiful. But those moments always felt too short, while the exploration into Nolan's new worlds was drawn out and seemed like his attempt to show off all the director could do visually.