If Lucy was the recent big-budget sci-fi flop then I think it's fair to say Interstellar was the big hit. Whilst I'd agree that it is certainly a much better film, in pretty much every way, the core concept isn't much more intelligent and the outcome is just as transparent. The latter point is all the greater a shame for the fact that this is a Nolan film, a director who normally excels at plot twists.

That isn't to say I think Interstellar a bad film. Far from it, the storyline was interesting, the acting believable and the pacing very well executed. Despite working out the central mystery as soon as the daughter said she felt like she "knew the ghost" in her room, it didn't massively impact my enjoyment. Nor did I find the whole time travel via gravity manipulation, black holes as magical mirrors pseudo-nonsense that grating. Eye-rolling, initially, certainly, but the plot was entertaining enough that I ultimately didn't care.

I would, however, have preferred a little more world-building. Keeping the root cause of Earth's plight secret did lend a little intrigue, but actually I felt that this story was a more interesting one than the (warped) exploration of relativity the film turned into. Admittedly, my opinion is coloured by the fact that the state of the Earth and the technophobic society inhabiting it reminded me intensely of one of my favourite Asimov short stories, Youth. Still, I would much rather have spent my time examining a culture whose schooling system has decided that the Apollo missions were merely US propaganda and that space travel is impossible (all whilst NASA work on a generation ship that will travel via wormhole to a different galaxy).

Plus, the time travel elements don't work out. It's one thing for him to be the "ghost", but another entirely that the Others are future humans. That only works if there was some plausible way for the present humans to escape the Earth and continue living long enough to create wormhole technology, which there isn't. As it stands, the result is a causal loop without any starting point, which doesn't work (no matter how many times you say the word 'gravity'!) and leaves a major plot hole at the core of the film.