“Hey, this isn’t where I parked my car!” Image via Hollywood Reporter

This review MIGHT contain some spoilers. I am not sure. I am very careful when it comes to revealing plot details in a film and I do my best to only reveal details that will create a better understanding of the film without ruining the possible intrigue of it. However, the rules of spoilers are a bit different when it comes to Nolan. So…POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT. Proceed if you’re not gonna be a jerk about it.

There are a lot of different sci-fi movies out there, but in truth, there are only two: those that want to be Star Wars, and those that want to be 2001: A Space Odyssey. Interstellar falls into the latter category. 2001 is probably the hardest to emulate, given that it starts with a bunch of dudes in ape suits playing with a skeleton and ends with a star baby floating in the sky. If anybody could at least come close to attempting this task, then it’s got to be Christopher Nolan. Or at least, that’s what you would think.

Unfortunately, Interstellar is a little bit like I thought it might be: a parody of a Nolan film more than a Nolan masterpiece because it has everything you would expect one of his films would have. Layers! Abandonment issues! Michael Caine! Husbands who won’t take off their wedding rings even though their wives are dead!

Matthew McConaughey stars as Cooper, another of Nolan’s heroes who is psychologically scarred by a mysterious past event. Cooper once flew a rocket into space. Now, he is grounded on Earth. In this vision of the future, the Earth is dying, as humans have depleted most of their resources. There is a constant drought and heavy, dirt-filled winds that make America look like The Dust Bowl. Also, space exploration is a thing of the past. Everybody is too focused on this little corner of the universe. It is almost as if they are using an allegorical dystopian future in order to tell us about the present. Crazy, right?

Nolan spends a lot of time setting up this world, and the dynamics of Cooper’s family. Cooper has a relationship with his son that is mostly stagnant, and an even more complex relationship with his daughter Murph, who dreams of going into space. Interstellar seems like Nolan’s attempt to go full Spielberg. Few blockbusters actually explore human elements such as family, so it is refreshing to see how much thought Interstellar puts into this.

One of the first issues with Interstellar is that its plot often feels like an accident. Additionally, it feels like various sci-fi stories sewn together to make an uneven whole. At one point, Cooper sneaks into a top secret government site. Literally, minutes later, he is being blasted into space. It doesn’t take very long for him to go from “some random dude who got caught sneaking on private property” to “the man who is chosen to save mankind.” It’s like they forgot the buildup to the film’s most important event.

Before we know it, Cooper is on a mission to find a new planet where mankind can live. He is joined by fellow astronaut Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway) and the two of them disagree on a lot of ideological issues because grrr deep space conflict. They are also joined by a robot named TARS. TARS offers some much needed comic relief, something that is rarely seen in most of Nolan’s films.

Let’s go back to the Space Odyssey thing. The reason that Interstellar never reaches that level is because Nolan the filmmaker interferes with that vision too much. As always, Nolan loves explaining everything down to the very last detail. Inception somehow turned exposition into an art form. In Interstellar, Nolan wants to explain quantum mechanics to us, and make it completely inaccessible at the same time. There are stunning images here. They are few and far between, but they are there. I just wish that at times, the characters would shut up for a few minutes, and let us take in the vast beauty and mystery of a wormhole. I looked back in my notes and saw that I scrawled “stop talking” across several pages.

There are times when Interstellar lands. And when it does, it makes the extra money you shelled out for IMAX worth it. The final stretch of the film is often stunning. It portrays the constraints of time in a way that I never thought possible. Interstellar is also filled with some moments that would work on any screen. The film’s most powerful scene comes after McConaughey has been stuck in space for much longer than imagined. He comes back to watch videos that his much older children have left him. McConaughey makes this scene feel real. He has gotten to a point where he no longer has to impress us; McConaughey is the real thing and we’re all going to have to deal with that.

Interstellar is overstuffed with ideas. That could be a positive thing, if all of these ideas felt like they had more of a home. It just made me yearn for more. I wanted to know more about the people on Earth; the people who actually believe the moon landing was staged. I also want to see more of these barren planets that we barely got a glimpse of.

At its worst, Interstellar is exhausting. At its best, Interstellar gives us a glimpse inside the insane mind of Christopher Nolan, a man who is clearly not happy with any theory of nature until he has deconstructed it every way imaginable. I just hope next time he makes that journey a little more satisfying and fun for his audience.

Brain Farts From The Edge: The Holy S**t I’m Lost In Space Edition

• A lot of critics have given Interstellar points for ambition. That’s totally fair. However, you’ve got to rate a film for what’s onscreen, not for what it was supposed to be. If we rated it that way, then we would all have to give Kevin Smith a million stars because he worked hard on Tusk.
• A lot of people are complaining about the accuracy of the film’s science. Come on guys, were you really expecting a film about evil sandstorms and time traveling wormholes to be scientifically accurate? Plus, inaccuracies can often make for compelling stories.
• I’ve been reading a lot about sound issues in various theaters. I experienced them in mine. Sometimes, a jet blast would completely obscure some (possibly) important dialogue.
• For some reason, TARS just kept making me think of Abed from Community. Also, it might be a problem when a robot seems like the most human character in your film.
• In general, I have noticed how much the portrayal of artificial intelligence has changed in film lately. In Interstellar, the robot was comic relief. In Her, a computer was capable of falling in love and breaking hearts. In the upcoming Chappie (this is the impression I get from the trailer), a robot is capable of emotional and intellectual growth. Come on people! We’re going back to the future!
• I haven’t seen Gravity since I saw it in theaters, but Interstellar made me appreciate it much more. I really wish Interstellar captured not just the look, but the feeling, of deep space. There were times during Gravity where I actually felt like I was floating through space and running out of oxygen.
• This had less villains than The Dark Knight Rises, I’ll give it that.
• “That’s what I love about the space time continuum, man. You get older…I stay the same age.”
• “Time is a flat ci—ahh f**k it I give up.

This did end up working to my advantage, however, because I had no bias going into this remake. Whatever this movie did, it would not feel like it was ruining any part of my childhood. As a movie, “RoboCop” could have done much, much worse. However, it is just there. It doesn’t do much, and it doesn’t contribute much to the character or sci-fi itself. It just kind of expects you to be thrilled.

“RoboCop” is set in the year 2025, a future that is dystopian only because of how generic it is. OmniCorp is a huge corporation that specializes in building giant killing machines. The company is headquartered in Detroit. I can’t even imagine the amount of people who okayed this remake because using Detroit would somehow make it socially relevant. The company’s ambitious yet morally bankrupt CEO Raymond Sellars (Michael Keaton) wants to release crime-fighting robots that will be put on America’s streets. This idea is not exactly warmly welcomed, given that robots can, you know, turn and kill people indiscriminately. Instead, OmniCorp decides to put a man in a robot suit. The man inside the RoboCop suit is Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman), a Detroit police officer who nearly dies in the line of duty. The RoboCop suit is the one thing that saves his life. He is literally a bunch of organs trapped in a suit of armor. The movie really misses the chance to explore what this actually feels like. Instead, it just decides to show a bunch of nauseating shots of a man’s lungs moving. Hey, at least this helped me realize what the line is between showing too much and not enough. Learn from your mistakes, everyone.

Of all of the people that could have picked up on the RoboCop legacy, I am not sure why it had to be somebody this boring. No offense to Mr. Kinnaman, who I am sure is a fine actor, but he brings absolutely none of the charisma or pathos that is required in order to be a leading man in a movie like this. However, this seems more like a failure on the part of the writers to make a man turning completely into an emotionless machine interesting. The director just kept yelling, “come on, guys! We need more shots of his lungs!”

In fact, all of the characters here are fairly boring, with barely a unique personality to spare. They yell trite lines of dialogue at each like “I can explain” and “we’re running out of time!” and in between that they yell at each other about whether Alex Murphy is a man or a machine without giving us much reason to care. They all make a lot of big speeches and throw around a lot of big words, their favorite being “dopamine.” As Inigo Montoya would say, “you keep using that word; I do not think it means what you think it means.”

“RoboCop” wants to skewer the loud, proud media landscape of talking heads, and it almost does. The sharpest piece of satire is the CNN style show The Novak Element hosted by Pat Novak, played by none other than Samuel L. Jackson. Novak is a jingoistic commentator who cares more about his opinions than he does about American safety. The news show itself looks exactly like the direction that cable news is going in, with holograms and floating, computer-generated pie charts making up for actual substance. You just know that Samuel L. Jackson got paid millions for what was probably three hours worth of work. Well, at least he only half phones it in here. This is what we get when we don’t give Samuel L. Jackson awards when he actually tries. But I digress. The point is that The Novak Element belongs in a much different movie. It belongs in the kind of movie that can keep its political allegories straight. It belongs in the kind of movie that brings up drones and doesn’t forget about it two minutes later.

The remainder of “RoboCop” has absolutely no idea what kind of future it wants to convey. It suffers from “Oblivion” Effect: it uses minimalism both as a way to define the future and avoid having to come up with real ideas. It seems unfair to compare “RoboCop” to “Her,” as they both have completely different goals. However, one thing that every dystopian blockbuster could learn from “Her” is that the most convincing future is the one that actually has a sense of how the people who inhabit it feel. The world has changed a lot since 1987, yet “RoboCop” feels like it has barely reacted to that 27 year age gap. Remember, we live in a world where machines are as much our enemies as they are our best friends.

Perhaps the biggest crime “RoboCop” commits is that it isn’t any fun at all. The action scenes feel like they belong in an arcade game like Time Crisis, and the guy barely gets to use the suit at all. The idea behind “RoboCop” is a fairly cheesy one that would have benefited from somebody who was willing to have more fun with it. Oh wait, they already had a movie like that recently. It was called “Iron Man.” While “RoboCop” isn’t the worst remake that has ever been made, it never once feels like it has any reason to actually exist.

Brain Farts From The Edge

• The beginning of “RoboCop” was actually really promising, and replacing the MGM Lion’s roar with Samuel L. Jackson clearly his throat is the most bold artistic choice this movie makes. Basically, if the best part of your movie happens before the movie even starts, then yeah, your movie sucks.
• “RoboCop” felt like a setup for a sequel that nobody asked for.
• I really wish they had more of Alex trying to recover his memories while in the RoboCop suit. That is a really cool idea. Not as cool as “The Wizard of Oz,” but maybe a little cooler than the Detroit Lions.
• As my friend Ryan Little (a.k.a. Tremendous Jackson) said, “Michael Keaton is the guy who did the best Kevin Spacey impression in the casting session.”
• Another reason that “RoboCop” didn’t have to get remade is because Hollywood has been doing some variation of this idea for at least the past two decades. The idea of machine turning against man is so trite at this point that it barely means anything when it could mean everything in today’s technology-dependent society.
• On that note, this is the exact reason I liked “Her” so much. In terms of robot movies, “Her” is like “E.T.”: “E.T.” felt fresh because for the first time, someone made a movie where aliens didn’t want to eradicate mankind. Likewise, “Her” is the first movie where machines just want to be our friends and have sex with us and stuff like that.
• This RoboCop might as well be Turbo Man from “Jingle All the Way.”
• “RoboCop” almost reaches so-bad-its-good territory. Almost. There are some cheesy moments, but they are more annoying than fun. Two examples: RoboCop at one point does that Batman voice; the noises that RoboCop makes as he moves are the equivalent of somebody repeatedly saying “meep morp I’m a robot.”
• This movie tried way too hard to be a “Batman” movie, straight down to the way Detroit was shot. It was like they were trying to re-create a really shitty Gotham.
• This movie has some of the worst set design I’ve ever seen. The yarn balls placed above the TV in the Murphy home made me think of the infamous spoon portrait in “The Room.”
• I actually really like Jay Baruchel, but he is so miscast here. He should be playing Steven Karp, not high power marketing executives.  
• I am only half-joking when I say this: I really wish they cast Nicolas Cage as RoboCop. At least he would have brought some personality to the role.
• Jose Padilha owes a public apology to Peter Weller, Gary Oldman, and Joe Strummer.
• Okay, okay, I’ll go watch the original now.