good movie

Interstellar is a hugely ambitious film, and it's a success when its ambition is realized.  Certainly the special effects are top-notch, as is the acting.  The settings, dust-bowl America and super-futuristic space ship, are so solid and real they are like important additional characters in the story.

It's an hommage to 2001: A Space Odyssey, very obviously, and insofar as hommage is a genre it's one of the best of that genre ever done.  It's  the same twenty-first-century sf family as Inception and Gravity, and in many ways is better than either.

I liked it but wanted to love it.  There's a structural problem that might be impossible to fix.  It's about compression and complexity, and you can't really discuss it in detail without giving away too much of the story.  Speaking broadly, the movie combines three good stories, set in different times and places, and a true but trivial observation is that it should have been three movies.   Not separate movies, but a trilogy like Red, Blue, and White.  Any of which would be good stand-alones – but the three considered together move into another, rare,  genre.

I want to see it again.  Fortunately, the Writers Guild forwards to its members DVDs of most movies whose scripts are nominated for the Academy Awards, so we'll probably get a chance.

Worth studying, I think.

(Of course I do have to sigh and note that there's a perfectly good story, The Forever War, that would benefit from the same level of acting and special effects.  But nobody listens to me.)

Joe