Here’s the place where you can speak freely about all the secrets of Interstellar and hash out whatever arguable theories and personal interpretations you might have. Spoilers? Yes, spoilers galore. But remember: “You can’t let one bad moment spoil a bunch of good ones.” – Dale Earnhardt
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This movie was fantastic!
Acting: 9.4
Film: 9.1
Sound: 9.5
Overall: 9.4
I was also surprised to learn that Netflix picked up a copy of the movie this early, usually they wait 5 months before purchasing the streaming rights, http://netflixmovies.com/interstellar
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‘They’ in the movie make a tesseract that can timeline events of the past and present of the human race. Now why can’t they themselves move the strings of gravity and convey the message? Why do they need another human to do that? This is because they cannot barge into the past and present of any human they can only view. Since ‘they’ are an element of the future they simply cannot manifest or contact the past and present of any human. So they make Cooper contact his daughter because the memories are between Murphy and Cooper. Cooper ending near Saturn is not their doing (‘their=they’) this was carried out by humans as we see in the movie. But the future race happens to find him floating in space and use him to send the message into the past and present of the human race.
Don’t know if I am making sense…. :/
My initial reaction after watching this brilliant movie was that it is the Best Picture of the Year. At least out of the movies that I have seen. I thought that it was much more ambitious than Gravity and much more thought provoking than Gone Girl. My brain was about to explode after watching. That’s how much I enjoyed it was drawn in the experience.
The movie isn’t perfect. But a wise man once said: “Someone’s failures TOWER over other one’s Successes!” Just remember that!!!
This movie will go down as one of the greatest SCI-Fi movies of all-time. I think the Academy needs to move forward and embrace such brave and thought-provoking films such as this. What is our purpose? What is our place in the universe? These are some deep deep questions and this movie goes far and beyond in at least trying to answer of them.
Interstellar is beyond our time. It’s a movie ahead of its time. Simply amazing – and much better than Inception in my humble opinion.
I’m disappointed and underwhelmed. Perhaps I let the hype affect me. Although I walked in spoiler free, I found the “twists” easily predictable, particularly the identity of the “ghost” and the intentions of Dr. Mann. I agree with many of the criticisms here: in particular about the disjointed editing and the perfunctory and inadequate emotional payoff. I liked Gravity much better.
This is the most conflicted I’ve ever been on a Nolan film. I loved a lot about it, and was quite reserved about other parts. It’s probably his strangest and most confounding film to date. The highs are extremely high, but the lows are also rather low. I honestly don’t even know what I would rate this. For what it’s worth, I haven’t stopped thinking about since the credits began rolling, so I guess that’s something.
And as for the script, structurally it’s all over the place but I didn’t find the dialogue to be on the level of James Cameron the way its most ardent critics have said. In fact, I found the dialogue in “Inception” to be more eye-rolling than most of what was included here.
So unless i missed something, how did earth (I presume it was earth because everything looked the same just with manipulated physics like Paris in Inception)
Wasn’t earth. It was Space Station Cooper (or something to that effect)
Does anyone else hate time travel paradoxes?
I agree with Unlikelyhood about the limited commercial potential of Interstellar. Yes, it’s Nolan and yes, it’s the event movie of the season, but still, it’s hardly kids’ stuff. It will be interesting to see where it lands BO-wise. With the 73% metacritic rating and all, it really needs a STRONG BO-presence, and the problem is that maybe it’s just not the kind of movie that can take off like that (no pun intended)?
On paper, ‘Gravity’ didn’t look like a big hit either, but it was a much more condensed story. There is a difference between sitting through 169 as opposed to 89 minutes…
Oh, and btw, I’m a bit dumbfounded by the overall very positive response to the movie in this thread. Did we see the same movie? I thought a film THIS flawed would have a hard time impressing AD readers…;) No, I know, Nolan is a divider, nothing wrong with that, quite the contrary.
White Corvid – Excellent theory! Certainly I don’t see scientists lining up to confirm how Coop could have gone from floating inside a black hole to back through a wormhole to Saturn’s orbit – in nothing more than a spacesuit.
I do think there’s a line between “intentional ambiguity” and “narrative copout,” and Nolan is awfully close, if he didn’t in fact step over it. It’s one thing to say “this last part may have been a dream” and something else to say “most viewers will see this as real, but hey, what the heck, it could be a dream”. I can think of examples of both. I would have liked something closer to Inception and that spinning top…
THE FILM OF THE YEAR?
Just got in from the two hour and forty-nine minute space epic INTERSTELLAR by Christopher Nolan. I was utterly overwhelmed in a way few films of recent years have done. The film (strains of Gattaca, 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Fountain are clear enough) is thought-provoking, dreamy, surreal, sensory, heart-stopping and philosophically ambitious. Above all it is heart-breaking, one of the most emotional films of this or any year. I dare say this is Nolan’s masterpiece. Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain and Casey Affleck are on board and the pulsating elegiac score in Phillip Glass mode by Hans Zimmer is the year’s most unforgettable in that category. I’ll have more to say on the MMD, but right now I am reflecting on this extraordinary experience.
Loved reading through this entire thread, especially the first half where respondents were rightly over the moon on it!!!
Maybe I didn’t enjoy Interstellar because of my cinematographic past. I’ve a list of films that I loved and I watched so many times, films that gave me so much in terms of ideas about earth, love, time, life, space, future. Films that overwhelmed me with questions. Films that ultimately made me experience most of the ideas explored in Nolan’s Interstellar like something I’ve already taken in but now out of focus.
To name a few:
Wall e
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind
Contact
2001 a Space Odyssey
Back To the Future
Star Trek
AI Artificial Intelligence
Avatar
Children of Men
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Inception
Star Wars
Well, now you made me want to see it again! But I do wish they would blip out all the pseudo-science and explanatory talk and just let us enjoy the experience. It’s freaking Interstellar Space for Chrissake! There are so many different ways this film could have been edited and given all sorts of radically different meanings. Amateur filmmakers and even professional ones are going to have a field day playing with it once it’s on DVD. Hopefully we can see alternate versions on Youtube.
Christophe and I are pals. We speak to each other in this tone.
Hathaway, Damon, and Burstyn had some tricky stuff to accomplish in INTERSTELLAR. I am in awe of them. McConaughey was a solid “Nolan lead”, much better than DiCaprio in INCEPTION.
Let me reconsider a bit and say I think most of the science mumbo-jumbo is completely forgivable and might even work to the movie’s overall goofiness/adorableness even more so over time. You know, in 20 years when people aren’t all “omg what is Neil deGrasse Tyson gonna say about this one!”. What I think the movie can do completely without though is TARS talking non-stop to Cooper during the black hole/fifth dimension structure/time mosaic whatever you want to call it sequence. I think everything would have made narrative sense while leaving something to mystery, something that even might be easy to interpret on our own. I absolutely love when he’s shouting “tell him to say!” “stay you idiot!” those are not my problem, my problem is “people can’t build this Coop” “not yet but whenever you know” “but ‘they’ didn’t send us to whatever”. Furthermore, I think he could have figured out how to help her without the “translate the quantum data into morse code” non-sense, and yeah sure, use morse-code if you must. The film achieves such stirring and effective aesthetic *and* world building *and* the humanistic themes are so well laid out by this point that I wish it had felt more comfortable with just showing/suggesting to us what is happening during that sequence. I mean it’s not completely TERRIBLE since TARS is so beautifully rendered and performed that he’s just a cool character you know, like HAL, Mother or GERTY, so it’s not like a “make him shut-up” kind of thing. Ending was strong, yo. Hathaway MVP.
So many dumb complaints about the film. Wow. But I’ll rebuke them all as the season progresses — so sit tight, Christophe, it’s gonna be a bumpy ride. :p
I think it’s likely Coop died, especially if you remember Damon’s comment about his children being the last thing Coop would see before he died.
On reddit, etc. there are endless discussions going on, science nerds having a field day. “Real” scientists have contradicted the claims of “scientific journalists” about wonky science in the film. DeGrasse Tyson loves it. NO scientist is going to go up against Kip Thorne. Wouldn’t it be nice if an offshoot of this film would be for students to start getting more interested in science, in physics? Would make a change from kids growing up wanting to be cartoon superheroes…
I just thought of what Jesse Pinkman would say about some of these comments and made myself lol. Anyway, I’m off to see it again. Tah tah.
So, admiration or vexation with this film? A lot of it might stem from how you decipher it’s third act. So many of the problems with the film’s resolution melt away when you open yourself up to the idea that Coop never made it!
“What?’ I hear you ask. Yep, he went to the ‘other side’ whatever that means to you. Nolan sets us up for the final act with Mann’s speech to Coop. A speech about what ‘comes’ to you when you’re in the final moments of your life…
When Coop falls into that singularity and finds himself in a hypercube or time construct, what are we to believe? There’s no way any benevolent hand would have conspired to help him get there given the unbelievable happenstance needed to have him arrive there in the first place so let’s rewind.
The Director loves symbolism and adores the ‘Barrel-roll’ – he likes to tilt things/turn them on end or at 180 when he’s making allusions (no, I didn’t mean illusions :). Examples are strewn throughout his works – batman/joker scene where the camera tilts to show the joker’s point of view (nearly convinces the Dark Knight to embrace anarchy here) and Inception is littered with such scenes. Like that feature this film lends itself beautifully to this device of his where he shifts perspective by rotating the camera or scene itself. When Nolan does this he’s showing us his cards and it’s hardly subtle.
The film is rife with symbolism and pointers that support the idea that Coop doesn’t make it. Here’s just a few: Early on the toy lunar lander Murph was playing with gets broken. This may seem insignificant but it’s symbolic of a mission failure (even though the real lunar mission was a success). Brand’s mission could be looked at as that success though.
Further, Murph’s teacher says the moon mission was a fallacy that has been corrected in the history books. This is analogue to the idea that Coop might be undertaking a mission fraught with falsehood. As it turns out, he was insofar as his mission is concerned but the audience are perhaps being given a ‘meta’ hint here as well.
Coop is Murph’s ghost! He has transcended the bonds of time. He has died in a very unusual place. In this place, this limbo, is he actually able to help his daughter (with the help of his robot friend). Or is he in the elastic throws of heightened awareness as his life passes – is he imagining what might have been?
Certainly the meeting with his aged daughter is instructive. This meeting had been a three hour slow burn and we were expecting a pay-off but what did we get? Murph tells Coop she has her family with her and that it’s okay if he goes now. Really? After everything…? Instead, is she really telling the audience that she has accepted his death. Everyone else in the room ignores him, he is a ghost to them. The only real interplay is between Coop and Murph. It’s a ‘letting go of the past’ scene for her and he is privy to it either as a ghost or in his imagination as he is falling into the singularity. Food for thought my friends.
Because one thing seems clear – and that is – the idea that Coop actually did end up where he did and how he did could not possibly have been the architecture of some benevolent hand (and I don’t mean God). There’s just too much happenstance to conceive of it as a by-design plan. And if it really did all happen literally as it was depicted on film – if that’s what we’re supposed to swallow – well, it’s kinda hard to stomach. Especially the bit where Coop gets spat out next to a gas giant and gets scooped up by a passing ‘ranger’ ship (talk about your needle in a haystack). Oh, and he had enough oxygen left.
Anyone else gonna help me out with the symbolic clues?
Bryce,
I’ll just say your comment could’ve done with A LOT LESS commas. What completely saves your comment is that “the commas” are completely secondary and the emotion works 100% still. It is also secondary for its intellectual ambition, the comment could have made ALL THE POINTS without any punctuation, capital letters or hyphens, but I will clarify those points later on in the season..
INTERSTELLAR: the most frustrating time I’ve had at the movies thus far this year. I say frustrating because there were moments of sheer brilliance and others I found absolutely nonsensical. I’m still trying to figure out my overall take on this film. Christopher Nolan is one of my favorite directors. Memento is still my favorite film of his and one of my all time favorites but I also love The Dark Knight Trilogy and Inception. So I went into Interstellar thinking that it was destined to be my Best Picture of the year, regardless of what the Academy might say. And sadly that is not the case. I don’t think Interstellar is a bad film. I wouldn’t even call it average, which makes it really hard for me to even try to rate it. It certainly is unlike anything I’ve seen on screen this year. It tackles really complex concepts in my opinion and showcases stretches of imagination that are bold and far reaching. But my problems with the film over-weigh any ability I might have had to love it.
First off:
– The planet Earth will be inhabitable. Why? Is it a question of mankind sapping up all of our natural resources? Forgive me if I missed this. Are these dust clouds only affecting Coop’s neighborhood or can the same conditions be found in every corner of the world? For some reason, I wanted to feel more of an international scope levied at the situation. After all, they are aiming to save the PLANET and not just some small town.
-We know next to nothing about the crew that is assembled for the mission save for Coop and Brand. TARS had more personality than half the ship; which leads me to another problem…unnecessary characters and lack of character development.
-Why did Coop have a son? What was the point? This is a father-daughter story. I felt Casey Affleck had virtually no purpose in the film and have noticed how nearly every comment on this site has failed to mention him. WHY? Because his was seemingly an unnecessary character or a filler perhaps for when Murph was not speaking to her father, which to me is lazy storytelling.
-I still don’t understand why Murph started burning down her brother’s corn fields…maybe I missed something?
-Amelia is in love with Edmund…the true ghost of the story? WHY? For a quick character motivation? Is this convenient or simply contrived?
-Matt Damon’s Dr. Mann didn’t work for me. I thought that whole sequence could have been removed from the film all together.
-I found the score really distracting and I usually love Hans Zimmer’s work.
BUT Standouts for me on the positive end:
-I loved Mackenzie Foy and would have loved even more moments between her and Coop. His departure did feel unnaturally abrupt to me.
-I really loved the sequence on Miller’s planet with the “waves” and the aftermath where Coop is sitting at the station watching the messages he’s missed throughout the past 20+ years. It was actually the one moment in the film I truly connected with on an emotional level…almost got teary-eyed when Murph explained that she was now the same age as her father when he left.
-S.T.A.Y I loved this moment towards the end where Coop enters the black hole. I love the idea of being able to watch your past self with the knowledge of the future and how bittersweet it can be to realize you can’t go back and change the past with your present eyes. And yet to think that if Coop had stayed, they probably would have all died. Thus, in the end everything happens for a reason and sometimes you can learn the most from supposed “regrets.”
I’m going to try to see Interstellar again next week and maybe I’ll find that the things that initially bothered me won’t seem so offensive with a repeat viewing. All in all though, I do admire the ambition of the project and I respect the fact that even though Nolan may try to say too much in his films at times, at least he’s a director who always tries to say SOMETHING!
Unlikely hood – well, yeah. The MORAL implications of what Brand did are much more damning than the scientific ethics. He lied to and deceived both her and her Dad. He sent Coop into space under false pretenses.
BTW, laughed out loud at your Matt Damon “protip”.
Unlikely Hood – the only hoax Brand did was pretending he was dumber than he was. He had secretly already given up trying to solve the equation. But as the smartest guy in the room (the planet, really) there was nobody to call him on it.
And Mann’s hoax wasn’t going to last very long, he knew. He did break his robot so it couldn’t rat him out. They WERE going down to the surface to check things out, remember? They gave one of the most respected scientists in the world the benefit of the doubt for, like, an hour. That doesn’t strain credulity to me.
Whoah whoah, Sasha. “Terrible dialogue and bad acting”? It seems like your initially mixed response is growing more negative. And that’s the first I’ve heard from you or anybody about bad acting in interstellar. Who? Huh? Also, for what it’s worth, gravity’s screenplay was generally considered a weak link last year. I think interstellar’s needs work, but I’d rank it above gravity’s.
“It was more ambitious, for sure. Makes Gravity’s visual effects look like child’s play. BUT there is no way to forgive that terrible dialogue and bad acting. Nothing can make up for it.”
I’ll agree that there wasn’t a performance here on a par with Bullock’s tour de force. McConaughey came pretty close, but overall, I think the performances were deliberately muted and the real star of the film was Nolan. I certainly wouldn’t say the acting was BAD, though.
As for the writing, I think this was infinitely better written than Gravity. Gravity’s writing turned me off almost from the beginning, and even if, on balance, it wasn’t a bad script, it was still not a very good one. (*spoiler*) I still think Ghost Clooney is utterly ridiculous. Utterly, utterly ridiculous. (*end spoiler*) The dialogue in Interstellar, I thought, felt much more natural and realistic than in Nolan’s past works. There was the odd line I didn’t care for (the whole Murphy’s Law bit still feels a little awkward), but there was nothing as terrible as “Could Harvey Dent be the Caped Crusader?” or “Forgive me for wanting a little specificity, Eames.”
I’d still rank it at #4 or #5 for original screenplays and at the low end of the top 10 overall, but I’d take it over Gravity’s script any day.
Quick question: does anyone know of any case of any scientist lying to any other scientist? This…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_controversy
…doesn’t count, sorry.
Assuming the history books in the Nolanverse stop scrubbing out the Apollo missions, they’re going to have to explain how Dr. Brand and Dr. Mann each perpetrated some major hoaxes…unprecedented hoaxes, amirite? I mean, wouldn’t *someone* have been able to check on Brand’s work? Mann, sure, maybe, though even there, I wonder if the arriving scientists would be so credulous. They’d want to see more than just his charts, they’d expect soil samples inside the station, maybe even a plant (not dancing like Groot, but still).
Seems interesting to me that a movie with well-publicized science bona fides (for example, in the Time cover story on the film, Kip Thorne and others are quoted and celebrated) would go back to the whole Evil Scientist trope, which to me is as silly as Dr. Smith breathing air on other worlds in Lost in Space.
But I liked the movie!
Schaeffer, I see what you mean, but as a non-father I side with the ending that we get. Murph is dying and Cooper has many more years to live (I’m assuming). I think Cooper belongs on the new planet with Amelia and that the idea of them being the First Woman and First Man on that new planet adds more insight into the film’s ideas about “the parent” than we’d get if Cooper stayed and held Murph’s hand as she died.
Also: thank you 🙂 I’m not from or in Los Angeles. I’m from NorCal and in NYC ;P
The ending with Burstyn killed me. A 90something daughter dying of old age and her 40ish father. When she tells him he should go because “no parent should have to watch their child die”.
Benutty, that is a valuable insight. But I guess the proto-Dad in me cannot FATHOM leaving a daughter for a coworker-astronaut after being separated from my daughter for her entire adult life. Especially after functioning as her ghost. And this movie is so explicitly about love, I just think his departure from Murph is a catastrophic narrative choice. I can roll with mini-astronaut bookshelf goblin, but all I wanted was for him to hold onto Murph’s hand and not let go til one of them croaked. Hey Benutty, you a Los Angelino? I like your comments; if you are, let’s grab a movie some time.
Schaeffer, that was my initial reaction to the film’s close, but after thinking more about it I realized that the problem between Murph and Cooper wasn’t that they missed each other and needed to be reunited, but rather that the reasons why they weren’t together weren’t honest. Murph came to think Cooper left her to die. Cooper came to believe that he couldn’t explain himself to Murph. This all becomes resolved not in their reunion, but in Murph realizing that Cooper was communicating to her through the books/gravity/watch and helping her find a way to save the people he left on Earth.
I see. As I understand it, the problem is that in order for a ship to leave Earth’s orbit the mass of the ship has to be small enough to require an amount of energy that can realistically be harnessed (in order to reach a speed fast enough). In order to get as many people off of Earth as they need to, using the large ship that they’ve built, a lot of energy would be required. The equation they spend the film trying to solve is something that hasn’t been solved (in terms of changing the equation of “escape velocity” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_velocity so that they can harness enough energy), so to expect the film to explain it would mean you expect an unsolved scientific equation to have been solved.
With that being said, I understand the frustration you feel because it’s true that the mechanics of the film’s plot depend on this problem and it goes underexplained. Where I dissent from you though is that I see an interesting thing happening with the script that allows this frustration to work in its favor. For me, the film takes quite simple, rather reductive approaches to ideas like “love” and uses them in what many are (rightfully) saying is overwrought and cheesy dialogue and makes them fairly grand. The debate that Amelia and Cooper have about which of the two planets to visit second is key here–Amelia makes the argument that love is a science, as much a dimension and mathematical truth as time and space are. Through her argument, Nolan takes the simple theme of love and expands it beyond how we’ve ever thought of it, as something more than just an emotional connection and as a building block of the universe. On the flip side, the frustration that you feel in an unexplained Plan A does the opposite–it’s taking a complex, unsolved formula and breaking it down to present it as something we might unquestionably accept as we often do the concept of love. There’s this interesting play between science and romance, knowable and unknowable, data and feeling that is going on here that I really, really like and happen to think makes the script feel large, intelligent and imaginative.
Did anyone else feel very disappointed that we didn’t get a longer, richer reunion between now-90-something Murph and Coop? I just felt like the ENTIRE movie orbited this moment. And then it happens. And it’s beautiful. For 90 seconds. And then Murph is like, “I got me a family, Pa, why don’t you just go back to space rather than spend every waking second of my life rekindling this relationship. There’s an astronaut out there you need to find, despite the fact that we just saw a half dozen trained astronauts preparing to fly through the wormhole.” And Coop’s like, “Sure thing, Murph! I wept at the loss of you, and now that I have you again, I’m going to leave you ninety seconds later!” Did anyone else feel like this was the shittiest emotional payoff of the year? It’s like the movie’s final twist: Murph and Coop actually don’t really want to spend much time together.
@Antoinette: “why didn’t the eagles just drop the ring in Mt. Doom” stuff. Cause there’d be no movie that’s why.”
No, because the ring wants to be reunited with its master and it has such an evil power, how can you trust that power and the effects on the eagles? : )
Benutty – no I never implied the fact that I saw a twist coming meant the script was bad. Like I said, it didn’t spoil the experience for me. And I checked with my wife immediately after the movie – she also being familiar with Sphere – and she did not have it figured out. No matter. It’s mostly of interest to me because in talking about the movie and its various influences, I always leave out mentioning “Sphere” on non-spoilery threads, because I think that might tip its hand too much.
And regarding Plan A, it sounds like I missed something in Michael Caine’s exposition. I just remember the moment when Coop looks up, sees that the NASA building is actually a very large ship, and then Caine saying something like “we can’t get it to work.” But I never heard any more explanation than that. WHY couldn’t they get it to work? Work how? What’s the problem. And seeing how the second-half of the movie entirely revolves around Chastain’s quest to solve this magic equation – I just wish I knew what she was trying to do rather than having it feel like a giant McGuffin. But again, it sounds like I missed some stuff. It sounds like she was trying to solve a master, unifying equation of modern physics. It just felt like a weakness to me during the film, because the rest of the movie was so concerned with plausible explanations based in science, and here it just seemed like the Nolans threw up their hands and said “let’s just fudge the details here because we don’t really know how to scientifically express the problem here, though we like the human stakes.”
I found the different timelines in Inception MUCH more difficult to follow than in Interstellar. In fact, I think that’s something Nolan should be especially commended for – making a time travel movie that doesn’t really hurt the brain because it’s always being explained in human terms.
Fred seems to have a problem with the “lazy editing” of the water planet scene that made it confusing how much time was passing. I didn’t find it confusing at all, and the editing seemed perfectly clear to me (the jumps from real-time cuts to time passing). They were supposed to be down there for about 3 minutes. Because of Hathaway’s decision and the subsequent water-logging, they were stuck there for about 45. Wasn’t confusing.
Right. I guess I misinterpreted your use of “future selves” as being a future Cooper rather than a different generation of humanity altogether. We could argue about it, but it comes down to how we interpret the idea of the “other” in this case. Either way, I don’t think whether you predicted that this was the case or not, or at what point you predicted it, makes the script good or bad.
Furthermore, can you explain what exactly you didn’t understand about Plan A? The role that weight and gravity play in space travel is pretty fundamental science, no? Why would the film have to explain this any more than it did?
“There is not enough fuel on Earth to get that many people off the surface, so the most feasible and effective method of saving everyone is through a gravity drive that can propel the station into space. Prof. Brand solves the equation for understanding/harnessing gravity with our current understanding of physics, and figures out that there’s no way to exploit gravity as a mechanism without reconciling it with quantum theory (a problem that actually exists today). When Coop sends the quantum data to Murph, she is able to solve the equations that give a unifying theory of gravity and, subsequently, develop the gravity-based technology that can transport the people on Earth away from the blight and onto satellite stations.”
Thank you, Vesh. That makes sense. The idea that Chastain was looking to reconcile the disparities between general relativity and quanum mechanics is a great one, and I wish that had been clearer (to me, at least) in the movie. Because yes, that is THE problem that’s been plaguing physicists for the last century. People knock the science in this movie, but to me it’s all clear and perfectly plausible – UNTIL the moment where it becomes purely theoretical and almost fantasy (when they enter the blackhole). But then again, I indulge them there because it’s simply a work of pure imagination and speculation at that point.
It doesn’t matter about the time changes when they’re on the planet because it’s the same to them. Meaning they’re not going to run in slow motion because it’s not being intercut with Earth time, the way the levels of the dream were intercut in INCEPTION. In that movie it was important to know what was happening in different places. If you did that here you’d either have to have Earth scenes so speeded up they’d be a blur or you’d have to have basically a movie of still pictures showing what happened on the water planet and it’d take years to watch. Otherwise, it’s more ‘why didn’t the eagles just drop the ring in Mt. Doom” stuff. Cause there’d be no movie that’s why.
“Danny, I’m pretty sure the wormhole was still placed there by a benevolent “other” rather than anyone on Earth. Don’t Cooper and TARS still reference the “other” when they’re in the black hole”
Benutty – no, it was placed there by the evolved humans, the “fifth-dimensional beings” that we become at some point in the way distant future. Your confusion lies in the fact that there are actually TWO “higher powers” helping our heroes throughout the movie. The first is Coop, sending messages from the future but a near-future (in the black hole segment). The other is still “us”, that is, humans, but at some indeterminate time in the future, potentially millenia away.
oh and Surprise Matt Damon! (Astronaut Mike Dexter?) really took me out of the film. they should have used a lesser known actor. and his evil plan didn’t seem to make any sense.
I mostly enjoyed the experience on a visceral level, but the dialog was just so clunky and the blocking and editing was awful. It made me crave the same film from a more arty director that would just let things be instead of having to explain the themes to death. Chastain pulls yet another rabbit out of a hat as the only person allowed to do any acting in the film. Nolan has the amazing ability to make you feel the power of his vision in the moment but he consistently overexplains some things in dialog repeatedly (love transcends the cosmos! this is how wormholes work! bla bla bla) while underexplaining key things at other times (Michael Caine knew it was impossible to move a billion people with gravity so he gave up on it. why exactly did everyone freak out about that?). Especially frustrating was the lazy editing on the water planet. We are told it is 7 years per hour, and it feels like we are watching them in realtime on the planet – it’s confusing when one second it’s 45 minutes until the water is out of the engines then 2 minutes later they just take off, and more confusing when we find they spent 23 years there. Nolan doesn’t have the economy to be able to clearly the passage of time offscreen. Not to mention the whole concept of the movie is insane (but that’s inescapable for time travel movies so you can’t blame them too much) – if Future Humans were able to put together a crazy tesseract and hook it up to a black hole that Cooper was going to happen to fall into (where he would have been stretched to infinite weight and died on the way in IRL), then they could have just told everyone on earth how to build bad-ass spaceships in a more clear way. Like a well-written e-mail to Michael Caine. Why bother with the mystery?
Huge disappointment. The first 30 minutes almost put me to sleep, lol. Clearly there’s a problem with the editing, keep disconnecting me from the film, like all the time.
additionally – my filmgoing companion was a Boeing engineer: he thought it was silly. To VESH: perfectly precise explanation. Kudos.
This IMDb person explains it: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0816692/board/nest/236600255
I had most of it, but forgot about the eggs. I just thought Cooper and Amelia were the new Adam and Eve on that planet then their supersmart descendants figured it all out.
Last night IMAX 70mm film – Seattle Pacific Science center.
general reaction from the full house and me: meh.
Best acting job – secretly, Anne Hathaway. But the character is thin, so it doesn’t stand out.
It’s his best film, and his weirdest. Anne Hathaway was a standout for me. I personally loved the ice planet section with Dr. Mann; it was almost like a mini sic-fi movie arc within the big one. The special effects were killer in 70mm, oh man. It’s hard for me to comprehend the criticism on this one.
I share a lot of the sentiments already covered here. I too, am not a Nolan fanboy. I like Memento, love The Dark Knight, think Inception was great upon first viewing but loses a lot once you know the story have to listen to two hours of exposition, and generally thought The Dark Knight Rises was a complete misfire. I have some issues with most of his films, this one included. To me, Interstellar was a close as he’s come to making a masterpiece. There were definitely issues, no doubt. I thought the movie was really about to jump the proverbial shark when Damon’s character did his 180. That whole sequence just didn’t work for me. Otherwise, I felt that he nailed it. The exposition wasn’t too difficult to understand or too lengthy. The emotional beats felt just right to me. And the production was just breathtaking. I left the theater in stunned, silent, awe at what I had just experienced. I went in knowing the RT and Metacritic scores, but I didn’t read any reviews until today (saw it Wednesday). What’s remarkable to me, in terms of the reviews, is that a lot of them (the critics) are deriding Nolan’s ambition instead of appreciating the fact that they are witnessing a director trying to do something remarkable. There isn’t any other director working right now who, excuse the usage of this phrase, is aiming for the stars like Nolan. I admit that Interstellar is not for everyone, but I’m truly shocked about some of the rhetoric. Is Interstellar a perfect film? No. Nowhere near. But there’s no such thing. This is a tremendous film, and upon first viewing, I would say that it’s Nolan’s best.
In the history there are movie so greatness that critics can´t understand because they don´t have hearts they are only worried about premiums and not in the movies itself, it´s the example of movies like Vertigo, Psycho, 2001, Orenge Clockwork, the same history mixed reviews , love and hate, and after the traveling of the time the truth comes to us.
I’m going to write my own thoughts before I go through everyone else’s comments. But for now, I saw no bad moments. None.
ALL SPOILERS ALL THE TIME FOR ME IN THIS THREAD SO DON’T PEEK IN HERE IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN IT. GET THEE TO THE THEATER AND THEN COME BACK!
This film is so extraordinary. I am a Nolan fangirl. But I’ll never be an apologist for anyone. For me, I saw no flaws. I hear about them. I don’t read reviews before I see movies anymore but I’ve read a few since I’ve been home and I just think those people weren’t paying attention or maybe they couldn’t hear as they’ve said. But flawed? No way. A flaw is a mistake. You may disagree with some choices but there were no mistakes in the movie I saw.
The biggest wrong thing I’ve read about this film is that Nolan failed because he’s a technical director, not an emotional one. Exsqueeze me? What Nolan movies have they been watching? Anyway, just concerning INTERSTELLAR, it’s all emotion. I don’t get how you don’t see that. We have Academy award winning and worthy actors. Those who don’t have one yet, it’s just a matter of time. Which is the other thing this movie is about. Time. If you have a metaphysical/astrophysical bend to the mind you may have, like myself , questioned if time really matters. My #3 all-time favorite song is Time (Clock of the Heart). I’ve been thinking about this shit since I was 10. Time is just a marker. Like the height chart your parents drew on a wall. It’s to show how far we’ve come, but we’ve gone much further than we know. We can’t handle it. Yet. We’re trapped in the Club Silencio. That’s why we, humans, need time.
My favorite thing in the film is the robots. I need something to hook me with movies. When, I think it was Case, I’ll check tomorrow, rescued Amelia in the water I almost lost my mind. Like when the Ents fought in FOTR. I don’t know why but I love that stuff. “People” you don’t expect to join the fight. The fight in this case is about the dying of the light. I’m realizing now that I can’t write everything I think because it will be a book. But I’m going to jump around and trying to type fast enough to get what’s spilling out of my brain down in this post then I’ll have to keep coming back to fill in later on.
MATTHEW FIGHT!!!! I had to do everything I could to not scream that in the theater. You know I’m not a big Damon fan but I absolutely think his scenes were necessary and well-done. See, the film’s rage against the dying.. it’s about survival. The survival of humankind, but humankind are a bunch of individuals. His character was about that individual survival instinct. I almost died recently and I’m not sure why I woke up. I don’t like the world that much. But here I am. Why? Apart from survival instinct I’ve got no reason for it. I don’t have kids. I don’t have anything to live for but I keep living. It’s just what humans do. You would think it’s a movie meant for parents. But I loved it regardless. We owe future people, whether they’re ours or not, a future. Their future. That they can push humankind forward with. So future humans can become the Mecha from A.I. or what ever it is they’ll become. Dr. Mann was displaying the human quality that allowed for humankind to survive even if it appeared to be a selfish version of it.
Maybe it helps to have a personal history of loving sci-fi movies. Maybe I dislike the world so much because sci-fi movies promised me better humans than the ones I’m surrounded by. Because they’re not raging. But as time goes on, I’ve come to believe that most of us are those humans. They just misplaced their rage. They see that a spacecraft has exploded and fear gets them. So they eat the corn. The cream corn. Garmonbozia. They look down instead of up. Well this is all about looking up. I believe that we stopped looking up on 9/11. The fear took at least a decade from us. I hope this film inspires people to start looking up again. Maybe if we can look to the stars instead of heaven we’ll be saved.
McConaughey. His Cooper is a great agent for mankind. I think McConaughey played a great everyman because he’s one of the humanest actors we have. I totally believed his connection with his children, especially the connection with the 3 actors playing his daughter. Ann Hathaway might be our most annoying human but her Amelia made us love her in spite of ourselves and her own selfishness led to the saving of mankind. Cooper’s selfishness did too and so did My Cocaine’s.
Okay. My brain is pooped out. That probably sounded crazy. I’ll come back later to fill in. But it’s about Love, Survival, and Time and how we can spin those three elements into a sphere that can move us into the future.
What Benutty said…”Nolan fanboys blah blah blah.”
Interstellar, overwritten underdeveloped visual giant that collapses in front of my eyes under its 3 hours weight while I have the feeling that time in cinema has been greatly bent and stretched with more wit&marvel like when we’re getting in Contact with a moving father-daughter relationship when we are reaching back into the meaningful feeling of Gravity or even when we simply go Back to the Future.
Pete, why is it that any time someone praises a Nolan film that they’re categorized as a fanboy? I happen to LOVE Interstellar, but I’ve disliked almost every other Nolan film. As if David Fincher doesn’t have his own set of rabid fans that praise his films just because it’s a Fincher. If we’re going to all be categorized as fanboys of a certain director, someone please direct me to the Malick thread.
Danny, I’m pretty sure the wormhole was still placed there by a benevolent “other” rather than anyone on Earth. Don’t Cooper and TARS still reference the “other” when they’re in the black hole–I think Cooper says that they brought him here to communicate to someone on Earth because in their timelessness they couldn’t find the right moment in time to communicate to someone, but Cooper could.
This thread should be called the “Nolan fanboy/studio plant” thread.
Good observation on Sphere
I got home last night from 8 pm Imax showing, and I couldn’t stop thinking about this movie. I ended up sleeping around 2am. I still have not figure out how many stars should I give to Interstellar. Before I even get into the movie theater, I was already unsure what to say about it should I disagree with the critics, is it going to be nominated for an Oscar, is it going to be good, things like that. But i did not want that to distract me, so I just told myself ,” Worry about what to say after its over.”
I tried that.
It did not work.
Christopher Nolan is one of my favorite directors. I loved his movies; Memento, The Dark Knight and Inception in particular. Those 3 films are in my favorites of all time. If you were to ask me, what movie do you remember came in 2010? I would say Inception with The Social Network the close second. I’ve seen Inception more than 10 times now. Nolan has always set out to create awe and inspire its audiences, and Interstellar is no exception. The marvelous piece of work whose visuals will be hard to forget. His shots of space and the way he played with colors is rather masterful. This film is truly a sci-fi epic like no other, Mr. Nolan has set out to make his most personal and emotional film to date about love and time. Speaking of time, I did not even looked at my watch. I think in that sense, the editor did his job to keep me interested the whole time. The screenplay, written by Nolan and his brother, Johnathan, is unabashedly intelligent. Not since Paddy Chayefsky’s “Altered States” has such high-functioning dialogue been chewed onscreen by geeks. And while it’s constructed as neatly as a pyramid, the layers of the story might seem confusing to some unwilling to invest at least a little thought at the movies. But for those who venture into “Interstellar” for intelligent sci-fi, the threads of the tale weave themselves deliciously back together by its conclusion. The acting is top-notch, especially McConaughey, who gives his most emotional yet inspiring performance yet! If he didn’t win last year, the Academy would have given him this. All of the casts are great, but Chastain, who takes on the more prominent role of adult Murph, convincingly pulls our heartstrings as a child who feels abandoned and betrayed by a father who appears to have little chance of actually returning to her after a 20+ year absence. Their relationship is a complex and interesting one that only gets more complex as the film goes on. The musical score from Hans Zimmer is, without a doubt, his best and most influential work to date, helping drive the film’s bold and breath-taking vision. The visual effects are easily one of the best as well, making it a must watch for IMAX theaters. To see a black hole created through visual effects in such a way, both beautiful & horrifying! This film probably had the most realistic depiction of a black hole yet, and even offered new insight to accretion discs surrounding the anomalies (pretty cool!). All of the work done in this movie deserve an Oscar attention. Cinematography, Score, Sound editing and mixing, Film Editing, Visual Effects, Production, Picture, and more importantly Director. You wouldn’t acknowledge the beautiful paint without acknowledging the painter.
Interstellar is about true love, about loyalty, forgiveness, fraud, hard decisions, and much more. And it is designed in a way to leave room for the imagination of the viewers. It’s also possible to notice some structure allusion to another Nolan’s work – Inception. The story and visuals are combined just perfect! “Interstellar” is a film that wins the hearts of the audience not only with its sci-fi splendor, but also an emotional story that lies at its very heart. This film is not only about the discoveries, space exploration and the final frontier of mankind, but also about the relationship of father and daughter, who were in a difficult situation in life when one has to leave the other in the name of a goal that can not be underestimated. Just too epic!! Must Watch in IMAX!!
Danny, I just want to say I can see why you were raving about this movie despite critics giving it a less enthusiastic response. I need to see it a few times before I can really make up my mind on it, but I think it is Nolan’s most unique film and there is a lot to love about it.
Also, the glorious discontinuity editing. Do not see enough discontinuity editing techniques used in modern cinema. A very powerful tool used well in this film.
1) The “main twist” I got about 5 minutes into the movie when she was saying ghosts were sending her messages. Why? Because I’ve read Sphere. Somebody placed a wormhole within flight distance just in our hour of greatest need? Benevolent aliens? Nah…clearly our future selves. Figuring this one out didn’t spoil the movie for me. 2) My biggest gripe, and it’s possible that it was explained with a quick line in the NASA segment that I missed — I felt that “Plan A” was woefully under-explained. What was the “big problem” that Michael Caine and Jessica Chastain couldn’t solve? The so-called “gravity problem.” I got that they’ve built this enormous transport to try and get as many people off the planet as possible, but that they can’t get the thing to work. Why? Is it too heavy? Put some more rockets under it. What is the problem that Chastain spends 30 years trying to solve? What is that equation that she finally nails (with a little help from her interstellar Dad) in her Eureka moment? It seems to me that when so much of a movie revolves around solving a problem, you should have some idea of what the actual problem was.
Whew. What an experience. That’s what this was to me, this first viewing–an experience.
For sheer spectacle, for sheer scope and ambition, for the sheer capacity to make a film feel like an EVENT–this tops anything so far this year. I can’t imagine anything else comes close. I don’t know if I’d say it should win Best Picture (it’s my #3 or 4, and I’ll explain why), but it should win Best Director. I’d accept David Fincher winning, but Nolan really is the one to beat, as far as I’m concerned. Watch that film and tell me there’s a more accomplished VISION to be found on screens this year.
Now, if it’s an A in cinematic terms, it’s a B or B+ in dramatic terms. The story, at least on first viewing, is hellishly convoluted. I stopped trying to figure the science out for most of the last act, embracing it almost more like a fantasy. Letting it wash over me. Cooper somehow went to plaid and helped Murphy save the world by knocking over books and dicking with a watch? Fine by me. Other choices I was a little leerier about–the subplot with Damon, especially the big heel turn moment, didn’t quite ring true with me.
And I confess, I wasn’t THAT impressed with most of the acting. McConaughey was good, Mackenzie Foy was quite strong, everyone had their moments…but for the most part everyone felt adequate. Not much beyond that. And yet, it’s arguably Nolan’s most affecting film (the Murphy-Cooper scenes in the first act are so sweet). It’s weird. It’s such a weird film. (Trying to prove the moon landings were fake to keep the citizenry complacent? My jaw dropped.) It’s the most audacious blockbuster since Cloud Atlas.
I don’t really know how to sum it up. I need to sleep on it, but I wanted to say something while it was still fresh in my memory. It’s a staggering work of cinematic ambition. There are films that are more perfect, which meet their goals more fully, which boast better acting and tighter narratives…but in the 2014 crop there’s not much I can think of that’s as awe-inspiring as this.