The Butcher
You love ’em, he hates ’em! The Butcher carves up your favourite films, and this week, he applies his sharpened cleaver to one of the most pretentious films of all time…Christopher Nolan’s deep-thinking sci-fi fave Interstellar!
Aaaaah, Christopher Nolan…quite possibly the most-overrated director currently cranking out celluloid (yes, actually celluloid in his case) cringers. This is the director that wannabe intellectuals pontificate about wildly at inner city dinner parties in a desperate attempt to show how sophisticated and smart they are. “Have you seen the latest Nolan? Fabulous!” All those Oscars for Oppenheimer, all that money for The Dark Knight, all those wanky acolytes constantly singing his praises…Christopher Nolan really tangles this Butcher’s sausages!
With the trailer for Odysseus, Nolan’s latest pretentious epic, dropping recently, The Butcher’s hackles were instantly raised. This historical adventure based on the famous work by that notorious hack Homer and starring Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Jon Bernthal, Charlize Theron and pretty much everyone else in Hollywood (not since a pre-cancellation Woody Allen has a director been more of a star-magnet to desperate-to-look-cool-while-still-earning-a-motza actors than Christopher Nolan) got The Butcher thinking back to the past works of Christopher Nolan…and that got him sharpening his blade. But where to drop the blow? Where to sink the cleaver? Nearly all of Christopher Nolan’s films prompt the all-too-familiar sting of back-throat vomit, but one film kept raising its big, fat, space-helmeted head…
That’s right, kids, it’s time to call “Abort mission” on Christopher Nolan’s overlong, pretentious, and incomprehensible outer-space-and-wormholes 2014 extravaganza, Interstellar. Ever since he got the big thumbs up for his “serious” take on the eponymous comic book character with 2005’s Batman Begins, Nolan has been taking a slow, laborious journey up his own rectum (the ultimate in “inner space exploration”?), first with his absurd duelling magicians flick, The Prestige (2006), and then with the seems-smart-but-is-actually-really-dumb dream thriller, Inception (2010), then with his WW2 bore Dunkirk (2017), and then less so with Tenet (2020), which likely stands as the director’s best film. In amongst all that crap were more ridiculously bloated Batman movies, with Nolan’s brimming sense of self-importance expanding into intergalactic proportions until it literally exploded with the truly awful Oppenheimer in 2023.
Before that cinematic nuclear bomb, Interstellar’s bulging cinematic hubris went supernova, as the director took his po-faced, ultra-serious brand of filmmaking into the stratosphere, with his story about mankind’s last-ditch attempt to save itself by looking for new worlds to populate as the earth slowly dies because there’s too much dust…or something. There’s lots of wind, and fields getting burnt, but whatever agricultural crisis the world is experiencing is never quite spelled out properly, which is a bit of a problem considering that this drives the whole plot. At least it wasn’t zombies though, which is something.
Equally problematic are those chosen to save mankind via intergalactic travel – Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway don’t look like they could drive a car, let alone pilot a spacecraft. And then there’s the ending, in which McConaughey’s astronaut/scientist/farmer/whatever-the-hell-he-is goes into a black hole (or something), and ends up travelling through time (or something) before finally arriving in what looks like a big library, where he sends messages to his daughter in the past, which then affects his future. Um, okay.
It’s all vaguely ridiculous, and while films don’t have to spoon feed their audience to succeed, making some kind of sense is a plus. Sure, having a university degree would help in your appreciation of Interstellar, but that wouldn’t make this tedious slab of sci-fi twaddle any more enjoyable.
Want to read more from The Butcher? Check out his take-down of Marvel Studios, and his carve-up of that other cinematic shit-show Citizen Kane.
