Way back before I started to regularly write about individual films, I had a little series going about my favourite films that I’d recently watched. It only got updated every couple of years or so. Anyway, in the very first installment of that series, I talked about five films. Out of those five, two were directed by Christopher Nolan. He has since gone on to make far bigger and better known films, most notably the Dark Knight Trilogy. But looking back, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Nolan’s output peaked with The Prestige.

Recently while reading a retrospective on the videogame BioShock 2 published by Eurogamer, I gained some insight into why this might be. The writer called Ken Levine, auteur of both the first BioShock and BioShock Infinite, Nolanesque. Both creators convey emotion in their work, but it is a cold emotion that stems from the head and not the heart. Their stories are intricate and intellectual rather than humanistic. They’re like puzzles that invite you to solve them.

The converse is that if you invite close scrutiny, you had better be able to stand up to it. Memento is explicitly structured as a puzzle box that requires you to rearrange its pieces so that they make sense. The Prestige is even more complex with multiple onion-like layers of revelations that add meaning to previous scenes. There are flaws in both films of course, and a rather glaring plot hole in Memento when it comes to the question of how the protagonist could possibly remember that he has a medical condition, but on the whole both are superbly constructed films that hold up through multiple viewings.

Then we come to Interstellar. Not every one of Nolan’s films is a puzzle of course. Batman Begins was a successful character study of Batman just as The Dark Knight was a great one of the Joker. But I would argue that Interstellar is closer in spirit to the earlier films. It begins with a cold open about a world that is in decline and it’s up to us to piece together what is going on. There is even an explicit mystery in the form of the poltergeist in the house. We know there is definitely something odd going on when the farming combines converge on the house for no discernable reason. Arguably each of the planets they explore is a self-contained mini-puzzle of their own.

Sitting in the cinema, everything works like a charm. The billowing dust clouds that evoke memories of the Dust Bowl and the salt-of-the-earth types eking out a living farming corn make for striking imagery of a crumbling civilization. The spunkiness of Mackenzie Foy’s young Murphy and the annoying intransigence of her teachers convince us that this is a film that heroically champions the cause of science in a dark age. The awe-inspiring vistas of space and the alien planets remind us of the epic nature of their mission.

There’s also no denying that Nolan has gotten better at tugging at our heartstrings. He milks the tragedy of the distance that time dilation creates between people for all its worth and Matthew McConaughey sells it so well that it’s hard to believe that anyone in the cinema could keep from being teary-eyed along with his character. Perhaps Nolan’s most amazing skill is his near perfect sense of pacing. He knows when to ratchet up the tension and when to ease off. He never allows the emotional moments to go on so long that it becomes sentimental. Throughout the nearly three hours long running time of this film, Nolan doesn’t just succeed in keeping us fully engaged, he has us thinking and feeling exactly what he wants at all times.

But once the lights come back on, the niggling doubts that had been just below the surface come to the fore. Did Anne Hathaway seriously make an argument for the Power of Love? Why couldn’t the world’s best scientists tell from orbit that the water planet was a lost cause? Come on, they can do the math and tell that due to time dilation the first explorer had only been transmitting for a few hours without needing to land. Why didn’t Matt Damon just confess about he’d done when they woke him up? When did Casey Affleck become such a jerk? He seemed like an okay kid.

In fact, the more you think about it the more it all falls apart. Major spoilers follow so those who haven’t seen this film may want to butt out now. If they have the technology to sustain sizeable numbers of people in space, why can’t they build self-sufficient biospheres on Earth? Why do they believe that increasing the number of farmers will increase food production? Why not biologists and ecologists? Given the amazing capabilities of the future humans, why is this the best plan they could come up with? They can place a wormhole in Saturn orbit, they can make a tesseract user interface to allow Cooper to manipulate gravity in his past, they understand enough of the human psychology of the period target Murph by going through Cooper. Did it not occur to them to say, tap the keys on Cooper’s laptop to spell out a message saying, “Here’s the complete specifications for the magical future tech that will solve all your problems. You’re welcome.”

I understand that not all films deserve to be picked apart like this. Action films get a pass because what matters is the thrill. Fantasy films get a pass because, you know, they can just say that a wizard did it. Even a science-fiction film like Under the Skin gets a pass because the plot and the details there aren’t important. It’s about the visceral impact of the presentation and getting into the head of the alien predator. Interstellar doesn’t get a pass. Simply by offering copious technical details, it is saying that it wants to be judged as being scientifically sound. It doesn’t deserve to benefit from the appearance of scientific rigor without being held to a higher standard. It gets especially annoying when defenders of the film repeatedly cite science to explain its incongruities. Hey Nolan, Kip Thorne is #notyourshield.

The same laziness actually appears everywhere in the film once you get over the initial high of watching it. It’s rather surprising how formulaic the film is. One crew member has to die on each planet to convey loss and sacrifice. The death on the water planet is especially egregious for how stupid and pointless it is. And why did Nolan feel that he had to damsel Hathaway’s character for basically no reason? The way everyone talked up Dr. Mann’s heroism was such an obvious red flag that his betrayal could be seen a mile away. I know that Neil deGrasse Tyson loved the film overall, but one of his Twitter messages perfectly captured the absurdity of a fist fight on an alien planet. Perhaps the clearest sign of how pretentious the writing is can be seen from the use of the Dylan Thomas poem. Apparently Nolan thinks it’s so cool that he can get away with repeating it four times over the course of the movie.

Admittedly the film is so visually striking and paced so perfectly that you rarely get a chance to think through all this while watching it. There’s no denying that it is a fantastic cinematic experience that is well worth watching on the big screen. I’m especially harsh on it only because I like Nolan as a director and I love the wealth of ideas here. But I’m also continually disappointed by all the compromises that he seems to think is necessary to make an epic film for a wide audience.

Let me end this by contrasting two different scenes from the film. There is one amazing shot of the Endurance as it sails past Saturn. It’s just a tiny, tiny speck against the massive backdrop of the giant planet. The shot conveys its utter loneliness and vulnerability, capturing the perils and distress of space travel without the need for dialogue. And then later they had to ruin it all by having their landing craft bump against a nonsensical “frozen cloud” and break a chunk of it off in a silly, almost slapstick, way.

A good film impresses you while you’re sitting down watching it. A great film impresses you more the more you think about it, long after you’re done watching. Interstellar excels in the former case, but think about too much and it seems like it’s all smoke and mirrors.