Saw this last night at a huge WGA screening in NYC. The audience was restless and often sounded bored. It received a weak smattering of applause at the end of its incoherent dull three hours. As with most of Mr. Nolan's films, the sound and music mix were so outrageously loud 50% of the trite dialogue was an incomprehensible, muddy mess. (Which I suppose is something for which to be grateful.). All of the visual beauty and "deep" ideas in any number of universes can't cover the fact that the script isn't very good and the story makes no sense. The usher at AMC's Lincoln Plaza stood outside the theatre, loudly shouting, "It's great, isn't it? It's brilliant, isn't it?" When the man in front of me said it was terrible, the usher shouted: "Oh come on, guys!" My companion turned to me and asked: "What do you expect from the same director whose last film was about a pinwheel locked in a safe?"

Whatever his strengths may be, Nolan lacks the human touch. His movies are numbingly sexless, and by that I don’t mean they need sex scenes or nudity -- those things are rarely really about sex anyway. But in all of Nolan’s films, human connection is such a noble idea that it’s beyond the grasp of flesh-and-blood people. Nothing in Interstellar is ever ragged or raw or dirty (though there is, admittedly, a lot of dust). Characters gabble on about taking risks, about needing one another, but they never leap toward anything so dangerous as intimacy. “Rage against the dying of the light!” Nolan urges us, and he himself burns through a great deal of electricity and gas to keep his spectacle glowing for as long as possible. He has so much invested in showing us. He just doesn’t want to get close enough to touch us. Space suits him just fine.