Movies:

The extremely popular director Christopher Nolan has decided in his latest motion picture, “Interstellar,” to go out into the final frontier, outer space.

In the not too distant future (next Sunday, A.D.), the Earth has basically en- tered another dust bowl era, as the environment makes it harder for people to harvest food and to live in general. With the danger of extinction staring them in the face, a group of explorers go out be- yond our solar system to find a new place for mankind to call home.

Now my history with Nolan has been a complicated one. While he has good stuff going, he sadly fumbles in a lot of ways with dialogue, emotion, and plotting. This film sadly doesn’t hold up for me.

One problem is that the emotions in the film come off as forced, to me at least.

A good chunk of the emotional scenes come from the main character, the ship’s pilot named Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) and his family.

For the most part it’s fine, if a little clichéd, but then later on when Cooper is in space, after a small exploration of a planet, a lot of time has passed, as indicated through video messages from his now older son, Tom (Casey Affleck), and one of the crew members (David Gyasi), telling them it has been 23 years.

As soon as the messages start playing, we see Cooper bawling his eyes out. I have no doubt that a mission like this and getting a message from your now older child would be upsetting, but it comes off as “This is a very emotional moment!”

For me Cooper should have seen the messages without being told how much time has passed, and then he should slowly lose control of his emotions. There are also moments that just get bogged down in Nolan’s overly expository dia- logue, such as the ending, but I don’t want to spoil too much.

One of the biggest problems for me is that Nolan tries to put a lot of his usual themes of lies in it when it doesn’t make sense. Unfortunately to elaborate on these would be big time spoilers.

But there are some good things in the film, mainly the performances. One performance I enjoyed came from the awesome and underrated John Lithgow, as Murph’s grandfather.

But the best is a three way tie between Mackenzie Foy, Jessica Chastain, and Ellen Burstyn, who all play Murph at different parts of her life.

As I stated earlier Nolan knows how to film a movie. The cinematography and imagery in the film are dazzling and worth a view just on their own.

While I didn’t enjoy it, I’m sure Nolan fans will.