Year: 2014
Director: Christopher Nolan
Writers: Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan
Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Mackenzie
Foy, Ellen Burstyn, Michael Caine
"Interstellar" isn't easy to review without giving away
spoilers and after just one viewing. And although I'd like to see some things
again, I don't really think that I could get through all the three hours again.
And I don't mind long movies, if they can capture my imagination for the entire
runtime. For me, "Interstellar" did feel like a 3-hour movie, if not
longer. The first hour I actually enjoyed - the setup was interesting and somewhat
endearing, except for the expositional footage of interviews. The beginning of
the film worked mostly because of the good performances of Matthew McConaughey as
Cooper and Mackenzie Foy, who plays his daughter - Murph. The young actress is
really exceptional.
The film’s logic becomes a bit questionable when a pilot, who
worked as a farmer for the last a couple of years (at least), is sent to the
first of its kind space journey without a single day of preparation. However, the
second part of the movie is still quite enjoyable, despite some plot holes and
absurdities. At one point, after the mission has started, one of the astronauts
explains to McConaughey, who is a trained pilot and brilliant engineer, what is
a wormhole. Not just that, he explains it in the way Carl Sagan would explain
it to 5th graders. It's just ridiculous - if Nolan doesn't believe
in the intelligence of his audience, he could at least explain things without
making his heroes look like idiots - couldn't they find a kid to explain to or
something?
On the plus side, "Interstellar" works on emotional
level, at least most of the time and that's mainly due to the solid
performances. The movie represents very well the effects of relativity on the
life of the characters (despite the fact that they constantly remind you -
"yep, that's because of relativity"). The scene dealing with that
somewhere in the middle of the film is probably one of the things that worked
best. Although, after seeing many people grow older, suddenly there's this one
character that haven't changed a bit - I swear I could hear silent laughs in
the cinema. However, emotion and sentimentality often go a bit too far in this
movie. After the first stop in the journey another intelligent scientist
suddenly starts an entire monologue justifying a decision based on the power of
love.
So far, so good. But the last hour of the movie was exhausting. I
lost interest in the forced melodrama and suspense. From the moment the
character Man appears things become more and more convenient and absurd.
Everything that happens with this guy rings false, his monologue is the most
unconvincing thing ever and it’s assisted by surprisingly bad acting. After
that the movie desperately tries to create tension again, which it regularly
does via docking sequences - not one, but a few and not surprisingly they are
all the same - 10 minutes of basically fitting ship holes. And we know that
they'll do it anyway! However, the incredibly loud and booming soundtrack might
keep you awake throughout all of this. Yes, even more disappointingly Hans
Zimmer used two chords for the entire film and combined them with a lot of
noise, really loud noise, but maybe the sound mixing is also to blame.
Towards the end the movie gets more and more convoluted, sentimental
and convenient, which is the bigger problem. And being more convoluted and
flashy isn’t equivalent to being more scientific or ambitious. There are so
many things in the last minutes of the film that are there just for convenience
and melodrama. Even the things that happen on Earth - the decision that the
brother makes at the end and the forced tension between them (as if they're
going to kill each other) - all this makes no sense, it's just a trick to
create false drama.
Still, probably the biggest problem is that in order to explain
and wrap up everything the film-makers decided to use a well-known sci-fi trope
that's inherently problematic, because it's a paradox.
Surely, the movie is shot on film and looks good, we know that's
the important thing for Nolan. It also has the most inconvenient robot - that
bulky thing could not move like that in real life (probably the reason why his
"action" scenes were edited so choppily), but that's a minor thing.
The robot was the obvious comic relief, but it worked well, without him the
movie would be too dreary.
I suppose "Interstellar" is an “ok film”, but the hype
and its huge ambition turned it into a disappointment. It isn't among Christopher
Nolan’s best movies, it's even much closer to the bottom for me. In comparison
to other recent space movies – I’m still waiting for something as thought-provoking
and engrossing as Duncan Jones’ “Moon” or visually immersive as “Gravity”. I actually
can't really think of "Interstellar" as a sci-fi or an art movie - maybe
a good family drama and above-the-average blockbuster. I just don't believe
that the biggest challenges and existential questions facing humanity are to be
explored by sentiment/the power of love and convenient plots where everybody's
safe.
The movie currently has 9,0 on IMDB - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0816692/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
8,5 from users and 73 from critics on MetaCritic - http://www.metacritic.com/movie/interstellar
74% on RottenTomatoes - http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/interstellar_2014/
Trailer:
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