Last night Interstellar became the 2nd movie of all time to make my highly prestigious "walk-out" list. This ranks it up there with a particularly traumatic experience which saw me once end up in a theatre showing The Devil Wears Prada.
While the Prada debacle was an honest mistake that I quickly recovered from, this Interstellar one I really didn't see coming. I voluntarily walked into the cinema, bought a ticket, a few beers, and some popcorn. All set for take off, or so I thought.
Time and Space
Looking back at the movie, I wonder did it ever really take off. The most interesting thing about Interstellar is how it deals with a somewhat dystopian future where crop failures have ravaged mankind's ability to speak clearly, serve hotdogs at a baseball game, or close the windows during a dust storm.
Once the opening scene of 7 hours was over, there was suddenly a secret NASA space research centre hidden behind one of the corn fields. Where else would it be?!
This obviously had old robots doing most of the work, such as opening the gate, and making jokes. The robot with sarcasm setting 100% was my favourite, until of course it was reduced to 75%. Presumably to keep the speed of time so slow, that mere minutes watching the movie felt like hours in real life!
Bad Casting
The biggest gap in the movie was the absence of Bruce Willis. Someone needed to shoot that wormhole, or Will Smith to fly some converted crop spraying bi-plane out of the solar system with a box of fireworks taped to the back of it as thruster boosters.
I'm skipping over the whole gravity binary signal thing because you really don't want to see it, nor read about it.
Some stuff happened then during the 7 year period where they pitched the badly spoken, hat wearing, ex-spaceship pilot, widower farmer Matthew McSleepy as the only potential saviour of this planet. He eventually got in his spaceship, before which there was a dramatic wrist-watch scene, and then some more time-space things happened.
Somewhere along the way they surfed a wave on one planet that took 23 years, and suddenly Matt Damon woke up on a different planet far far away. Even though the planet was extremely cold there were no killer polar bears, which was disappointing. At that point I'd have taken anything to speed up the film! When Matt Damon did wake up I thought
"No Matt, no, go back to sleep!"
I was very emotional at this point as you can tell!
But Matt didn't listen, and when he started crying into the other Matt's arms, I cried too. I knew that after 48 years in the cinema, and with no more popcorn or beer, my time in that world was coming to an end.
Beer Drought
Somewhat ironically, the lack of beer, presumably caused by a sudden wheat crop failure in this world, had me running very low on mind numbing enhancers and I was fading fast.
Then the dramatic death scene happened. Of course it was all a lie!
The underlying assumptions about time had been wrong and suddenly McSleepy's now 743 year old daughter was about to save the world with some trick maths equation. Presumably this saw her save the whole thing and meet her father who was now younger than her, but they eventually reconciled and love conquered all, or some rubbish like that.
Anyway, I say presumably because at this point I was prompted by a fellow time-space travelling physicist that the exit sign was hurtling towards us, from our future, at a much faster rate than anticipated, into our present. I wandered back out onto the street, older, but I don't know by how much!