INTERSTELLAR

Christopher Nolan's films are so good because he takes fantastical themes, or outlandish summer blockbuster material if you prefer,  and makes it believable. He introduces reality, or the perception of reality, to the unreal. Plausibility is the key.

So who better to make a ‘hard sci fi’ epic than Christopher Nolan? Interstellar feels almost like a  spiritual companion to 2001 A Space Odyssey, if less daring (but then what is?). With a film like this - clocking in at nearly 3 hours long, pondering man's place in the Universe, the survival of the species and the exploration of space - it cannot fail to be informed by the classics of the genre. That doesn't mean it's derivative, it's just cut from the same cloth. The three hours fly by. It is immersive, gripping film making.

If you can go into this with as little knowledge of the plot as possible, the experience will be all the better for it. I provide scant plot details here simply as a taster.

In the near future, Earth is on its last legs. A decimated population existing on a planet reduced to a dust bowl. Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is a widower, living on his farm with his two kids and father-in-law (John Lithgow). An ex-engineer and pilot by trade, farming has now becoming more valuable to an ailing humanity than anything else.

Cooper and his daughter, Murph, encounter the remnants of NASA, led by Professor Brand (Michael Caine), and Cooper learns that within a generation there will be nothing able to grow. The Earth is doomed, but a plan has been hatched to get out into the stars, and explore the possibilities of other planets for sustaining life. As the only pilot to have flown outside of a simulator, Cooper must make the choice whether to lead this mission or remain home with his children. To try to save humanity or stay behind and wilt with its crops.

McConaughey is excellent, amongst a 'stellar' cast that also includes Anne Hathaway, Casey Affleck, Jessica Chastain and Topher Grace. Interstellar absorbs you as you sink into this tale of exploration and bravery. It had me hooked from the word go. I loved the concept, the characters, the tech (especially the monolithic robots TARS and CASE) and above all the journey.

If there are a couple of minor faults, then I would have preferred there to have been no 'villain'. It would have been nice for this film to have been simply about humanity versus the Universe rather than having that personified by a character in part of the movie. Nonetheless it makes for some truly exciting spectacle that is otherwise hard to find fault with.

The second is a couple of nagging plot points, that are perhaps not so much plot holes, as they are lost to the whirlwind of exposition. But that really is minor quibbling.

The science and the technology could be bunk for all I know - uneducated layman that I am - and certainly I have read more than one review that has been overly concerned with nit picking the science. You could do that of course but it would be to overlook the fundamental thing about it - it's science fiction. The point of Interstellar, as with Nolan's other movies, is that it feels real. It's not a documentary, and it is not 2001 A Space Odyssey, but it is an intelligent and engaging science fiction movie, and there aren't enough of those about these days.

IMBD: Interstellar

TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles being rebooted by Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes - we all thought that was a great idea didn't we? What with all the wild success they had in remaking The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and so on.  Then some early concept design of the Turtles got released and we dared to hope it might not be all that bad.  'Hope' being the key word in that last sentence. There is a phrase that the young people are wont to use, that goes 'haters gonna hate'; and boy do the haters have a lot of ammo to go through with this stinkeroo of a picture (be warned, there lie moderate spoilers ahead).

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a mess of a film. All logic is discarded at a very early stage and it's so full of plot holes a part of your mind wonders if this isn't some elaborate avant garde experiment to challenge our preceptions of coherence. The plot, flimsy as it is, has April O'Neil (Megan Fox) and the Turtles battling the mega-maniacal Foot Clan as they attempt to take over New York. Ruled by the iron fist of The Shredder, alongside William Fichtner's evil industrialist, Eric Sacks, they aim to infect New York with a deadly poison dispelled from atop a communications aerial, for which they can then market the antidote and get rich.   If this all sounds a little familiar then that's because if you substitute a woman with four turtles for friends, for a kid with miraculous superpowers, then you've got almost the exact same plot to Mark Webb's dismal Spiderman reboot.  With a tiny smattering of Transformers 3 thrown in for good measure. This means that not only is this film stupid, but it's lazy too. If you're going to rip off a better film (and by acknowledging that The Amazing Spider-Man is indeed a much better film, this should give you an indication of the depths at which TMNT lurks), you could at least rip off one with a half way decent plot instead of wrenching something straight out of the Hollywood-generic-macguffin-generator.

The meagre plus points on offer here run only as far as seeing character actor  William Fichtner in a main villian role, although he has far less to work with than many of his previous lackey / bad guy stooge parts. Also Will Arnett (Gob from Arrested Development) comes through with reputation largely intact as Vernon, the comic relief sidekick.  Otherwise it's 120 joy-free minutes.  It's full of wretched one-in-a-million coincidences that drive the plot as a substitution for any sensible writing -  the Turtles turn out to be April's beloved childhood pets whom she saved from a fire but then for some reason decided to chuck into the sewer! And rest of it is just flat out dumb. The Shredder is part robot and about half way through they seem to forget that there's actually supposed to be a person inside, so the Turtles spend the entire movie fighting what looks like a samurai transformer. The plot holes are ludicrous - if the bad guys need the Turtles' blood to make an antidote, why do they want to take all of it and kill them? Why not keep them alive to make more antidote and thus more money? And the dialogue is dreadful - "We're Ninjas, we're mutants and we're teenagers" - all in the service of teeing up crap one liners.

In the end we're left with a risible mess that desperately wants a shot at the Marvel brass ring, but lacks the intelligence to recognise what makes those movies such fun. The best TMNT movie thus far remains the 2007 cartoon. Watch that instead.

IMDB: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles