There was zero reason for the son, his wife and their son to be in the film. They could easily have cut 30 minutes out of the film by deleting entirely unnecessary characters.
The death scene with Michael Caine was a pivotal plot point and the sound editing was so bad that half his statements were inaudible in IMAX. He is a great actor and the directing marginalized his performance horribly.
Having a planet close enough to a black hole to slow time by 60,000x what it is on earth is not scifi. Scifi is an exploration of what may be possible.. Not things that are absolutely known to be impossible.
At the end of the film, he is extracted from a black hole how? To where? When?
What 'magical data' is a robot extracting from a black hole? To accomplish what exactly?
His daughter sees a glitching second hand for a brief moment and instantly she knows it's an interdimensional transmission in morse code from her father who she has not seen in decades... To explain the entire mystery of the universe in a series of dots and dashes? Really? If she is that brilliantly prescient, why didn't she just also know the magical black hole data the robot was recovering and shorten the movie by an hour
When in doubt, if the plot fails, just throw in words about Love and claim its part of the answer is not brilliant writing... Unless you are in junior high school and your teacher really wants to avoid hurting your feelings.
Humans construct 5th dimensional space but can't figure out how to communicate with people that only Mcconoughey can talk to? The girl can't figure out how to communicate with herself even though she mastered the entire universe and multiple new dimensions?
Good scifi like BladeRunner, District 9 and dozens of other monumental films are based in science. They explore extensions and interpretations of science. Bad scifi movies ignore science. This movie was nonsense with ridiculous leaps in the plot like her knowing her dad is communicating with her, a poorly paced story, a string of useless characters, terrible sound mixing and worse. It wastes performances by great actors like Lithgow and Caine to focus on weak performances and takes 2+ hours to tell a 45 minute story.
If you liked this, go watch District 9 if you haven't seen it. One is a great scifi film, the other is a trainwreck mascarading as a movie. See if you can figure out which is which.
