If you want a spoiler-free review of Interstellar, you should go read my review from last week. After the jump, I'm going to be openly talking about plot twists that arrive late in the movie. If you've already seen Interstellar, you should join me.

Ready? Here be spoilers:

When I reviewed Interstellar, I thought I was going to be publishing one of the rougher reviews. Turns out, I was almost on the more generous side of things. It stands to reason that critics would be harsh, of course: Nolan's been cruising for a backlash for a decade now, and based on the way Interstellar is getting reviewed, the time for that backlash is now.

Here's the thing: I'm willing to give a movie a lot of leeway for displaying a healthy amount of ambition. But I hate a movie that telegraphs its ending. So I'm completely torn on Interstellar. The minute that "ghost" came up in the first few scenes, I knew it was going to be McConaughey's Coop manipulating time somehow, and I hoped I'd be wrong. I wasn't wrong. It happened almost exactly as I pictured. As I said in my review, predictability is not always a problem with a movie, but for a film that manages to convey complex physics in an interesting new way, that predictability comes across as condescending or lazy. I couldn't believe how cool it was to see a depiction of a wormhole that met Neil deGrasse Tyson's approval. I loved the fact that the theory of relativity was a plot point, even if a planet couldn't be that close to a black hole without being torn apart. The fifth-dimensional visualization was fascinating. Even though Nolan stubbornly stuck to closeups whenever he was on a spaceship—one could argue that he was trying to rope the audience in on the claustrophobia of space travel, but it's more likely he just enjoys closeups—this was still one of the most purely enjoyable visual experiences I've had in a movie theater this year.

And yet. There was way too much goddamned talking in this movie. The emotional heft of Interstellar hinges on two plot-points: Amelia's speech about love and the scenes with Matt Damon's Dr. Mann. As far as I'm concerned, neither scene worked. Amelia's speech was way too obvious and poorly delivered. And Mann as a character was ill considered. From the on-the-nose name to his sudden but inevitable betrayal, Mann was a bad choice. (And maybe because of his character's problems, Damon seemed to drift in his delivery. It seemed like he was doing a sour Captain Kirk riff that a funnier film could have taken a little joy in. I felt as though any humor in the performance went right over Nolan's head.)

And so, with those two scenes lying inert, we're left with the Spielbergian love between father and child to carry the film on its back. (Nolan gets credit, at least, for making Coop's most beloved child a daughter; in earlier drafts, Murph was a boy.) While McConaughey's portrayal of Coop's naked love for his child in the last few scenes is affecting, I felt that the predictability of the time-travel ploy stripped the scene of whatever emotional heft it could've had. In the end, it felt like maudlin sentimentality. The simple display of emotion isn't enough to earn an emotion in kind from the audience, like some sort of chilly business transaction. You have to earn an audience's emotion; Interstellar merely earns our respect.