I left the theater with three terms bouncing around my head: overwrought, unfocused and self-indulgent. A few good moments were not enough to redeem it from being mediocre at best, totally artless at worst. The special effects were disappointing, the runtime was bloated, and the central character conflict was sidelined by a political plot so tedious, words fail me in further elaboration.

The whole thing was written in a hyper, disorienting style some have captured by describing the movie as a feature-length trailer. Really it's the result of trying to squeeze every conversation from a 700 page biography into one film, no matter how boring, redundant, or unimportant to the central story. Nolan is pleased with himself for skipping back and forth through the story's timeline as if it serves some purpose, but alas, this monkeying around only further complicates an already needlessly complicated trainwreck of a screenplay. There's zero payoff.

Perhaps it's too much to call him a one-trick pony, but certainly his usual schtick fell flat on its face here.

The soundtrack was nothing special - the sound engineers seemed determined to liquify moviegoers' insides via the Imax sound system (possibly out of spite, but I cannot say for sure). It's also worth mentioning that gratuitous nudity was liberally peppered throughout the movie for no discernible reason - at one bewildering moment, Einstein pops out of the bushes to dispense wisdom like some Santa Claus fortune cookie hybrid - physicists stand in front of a chalkboard giving "explain it to me like I'm five" lectures on black holes and quantum mumbo jumbo to Berkeley students. Naturally these are never revisited, and have nothing to do with the plot.

If this is considered great cinema, it is a testament to the fact that cinema is dead. Save your $20 bucks and buy a can of paint so you can watch it dry.