I'm a little more positive on it than you guys... I think I was fortunate to run into an old friend at the cinema, and spend those formative first ten minutes after the credits rolled speaking to him about it.
I went into it jazzed about the touted scientific accuracy of the visuals (the gravitational lensing and other relativistic visuals are pretty much dead-on throughout - and they look absolutely spectacular and mind-bending to comprehend), and general respect for science woven through the script - that thread undoubtedly loosens here and there, and occasionally unravels for a time - but it was refreshing to watch a space film and not have to shut off the part of my brain that I use to play Kerbal Space Program or Space Engine (I couldn't say the same about Gravity)!
Well-timed engine burns and time-dilation-as-a-plot-point make me, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson, happy men.
What I didn't hold any particular expectations about were the plot and characters...
The world of the film has this "Keep Calm And Carry On" vibe, as filtered through a very 20th Century Americana aesthetic:
Society is hanging together by the skin of its teeth, but nobody wants to act like it.
This tension informs character relationships and behaviours that might seem occasionally irrational in other circumstances, but here, have a constant undercurrent of tragedy and impending loss to them. The sacrifices made in the name of the mission, in the name of hope, carry great weight, and really resonated with me. McConaughey gets an incredible line mid way through that justifies a core relationship in one simple but profound sentence. The consequences of relativity's cruel impassiveness on those relationships cut deep, and I love that scientific accuracy lends the film more heart, not less.
There are plot points that don't really make sense, or are clear contrivances, and there is clunky expository dialogue and half-baked pseudo-scientific pontificating and massive oversights by people who really ought to know better - but they are minor, and this is a film from the man who gave us the hodge-podge glory of Inception, so what do you expect?
Is it missing something? Yes... but that's true of every Nolan film except perhaps Memento and The Dark Knight. Like those films, it's still a hell of a ride, riveting from start to finish, and thrilling in its frequent veracity.
In those ten minutes after the credits rolled, I admit I was on the fence... could I let it away with the contrivances? Did the plot tie itself up as neatly as it really wanted you to think it did? I was really dithering, but that friend was there to help me evaluate it. It helps that he's a towering intellect - a qualified physicist, and he was with his supposedly far smarter older brother - and they both loved the film, and not principally on scientific terms, but on character, emotional, and cinematographic terms!
I've now seen it twice - the second time was with a lay-person with little more than a healthy respect for science - he loved it perhaps as much as I did, perhaps more, but, as I warned him, your mileage may vary.
