Welcome to The Morning After, where I share with you what movies I’ve seen over the past week. Below, you will find short reviews of those movies along with a star rating. Full length reviews may come at a later date.

So, here is what I watched this past week:

Interstellar

Great science for the sake of a sloppy story doesn’t make for great science fiction. Christopher Nolan’s latest film shows that his reliance on excess has gotten out of control. Left to his own devices, Nolan’s films have a tendency towards grand gestures and cheap theatrics in an effort to seem like a deep thinker.

The film plays at as a compelling look at a crumbling future where humanity has only a generation left to survive on planet earth, a world destroyed by forces left unmentioned, but which resemble climate change to those familiar with the subject. As mankind’s future depends on a subspace journey that takes Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Wes Bentley and David Gyasi on a trip through a wormhole to a solar system with three potentially inhabitable worlds, we discover that time, gravity and other forces may mean society’s survival.

The visual effects are spectacular, creating breathing worlds of wonder wherein the action takes place. In space, the mind-bending anomalies make for fascinating explorations of scientific concepts that have toyed with and delighted minds for generations. If you set aside the science, however, the story has some clearly hokey elements and tosses in a few non-scientific concepts that almost entirely defy logic. The plot isn’t confusing, it’s just terribly misguided.