Christopher Nolan - Interstellar
Discussion
Early Reviews
WARNING: Contains Very Mild Spoilers!
Interstellar
More early reviews have been creeping out of the handful of pre-screenings that have been seen. Generally speaking, everyone's on board with the visuals, but the more emotional aspects of the film have been handled either brilliantly or disastrously, depending on whom you ask. From Slashfilm, we get:
Interstellar is ambitious, beautiful, Christopher Nolan's most emotional film to date. The story allows us to explore many big ideas we wouldn't normally see in a big budget studio film, but the ideas sometimes fly by at light speed, squeezed into popcorn cinema. The result is that the story is left with some holes of logic.
From Coming Soon is the revealing bit:
"Interstellar" is another one of Christopher Nolan's more personal mind-f*ck movies which he's done so well when not directing adventures of a certain cowled vigilante. While it may not be as immediate as "Inception" and it wears most of its most obvious influences on its sleeve, it's still very much the type of intelligent spin on a specific genre we've come to expect from the filmmaker.
... Even when the Nolan "Wow" factor transforms into a "WTF?" moment, it still gives you enough to work with that you realize that even some of the "Signs"-like moments from the first hour had a significant purpose. There is some stuff that sounds sillier when you try to explain it like there being some sort of "higher alien race" out there trying to help us.
As one might expect from Nolan, his film just looks fantastic whether it's the simple Earth setting or the fantastic other-worldly environments, as he switches gears by working with Swiss cinematographer Hoyt Van Hoytema, who has never shot a movie quite on this scale, but is still able to keep up with Nolan's grand vision. (I saw the movie screened in 70mm IMAX and there's really no beating that as the optimum way of watching it.)
And from Cinema Blend's 2.5/5 review:
"Predictable" isn't a word we'd expect to be uttered within 10 miles of a Christopher Nolan movie - and yet it's painfully necessarily in discussion of Interstellar, Nolan's aesthetically beautiful, large-scale sci-fi drama that is admirable in its ideas and style, but lacking in its storytelling and execution.
And here's The Wrap, utterly hating the ending:
In that respect, "Interstellar" may represent an apotheosis of sorts, as it illustrates the very best and the very worst of Nolan as a writer-director. On the plus side, there's a stunning portrayal of how far-reaching space travel might work, a glimpse at an apocalyptic near-future that's both brilliantly written (no year is mentioned, and we're left to glean together important bits of information that zip by in conversation) and designed (the clothes, the cars, and the tech are almost entirely late-20th century), and a vision of robots like nothing I've ever seen in a movie.
Weighing against that, without getting into spoilers, is a third act of staggering wrongheadedness, along with female characters whose intellect takes a backseat to their exploding emotionalism and rage. Nolan is, presumably, among a handful of filmmakers who gets to do whatever he wants with minimal studio intrusion, but the resolution of "Interstellar" feels so inorganic that you'd swear it was concocted by a Glendale focus group.
That ending feels like such a betrayal because so much of what comes before it manages to be truly stunning, particularly in the 70mm IMAX version, thanks to the art department, the visual effects team, and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema ("Her"). We open with interviews with elderly Midwesterners remembering crop failure and wind storms, and they would appear to be talking about the Dust Bowl of the 1930s until we see a table being set, where someone dusts off a plate, a glass — and a laptop computer.
Variety, on the other hand, is loving every emotional beat:
With each stop the Endurance makes, Nolan envisions yet another new world: one planet a watery expanse with waves that make Waimea Bay look like a giant bathtub; another an ice climber's playground of frozen tundra and sheer-faced descents. Moreover, outer space allows Nolan to bend and twist his favorite subject — time — into remarkable new permutations. Where most prior Nolan protagonists were forever grasping at an irretrievable past, the crew of the Endurance races against a ticking clock that happens to tick differently depending on your particular vantage. New worlds mean new gravitational forces, so that for every hour spent on a given planet's surface, years or even entire decades may be passing back on Earth. (Time as a flat circle, indeed.)
This leads to an extraordinary mid-film emotional climax in which Cooper and Brand return from one such expedition to discover that 23 earth years have passed in the blink of an eye, represented by two decades' worth of stockpiled video messages from loved ones, including the now-adult Tom (a bearded, brooding Casey Affleck) and Murphy (Jessica Chastain in dogged, persistent "Zero Dark Thirty" mode). It's a scene Nolan stages mostly in closeup on McConaughey, and the actor plays it beautifully, his face a quicksilver mask of joy, regret and unbearable grief.
That moment signals a shift in "Interstellar" itself from the relatively euphoric, adventurous tone of the first half toward darker, more ambiguous terrain — the human shadow areas, if you will, that are as difficult to fully glimpse as the inside of a black hole. Nolan, who has always excelled at the slow reveal, catches even the attentive viewer off guard more than once here, but never in a way that feels cheap or compromises the complex motivations of the characters.
And The Telegraph is a fan:
Unlike Inception, whose puzzle-box games with time felt like a bedazzling gimmick, Interstellar mines the same ideas with a much more deep-digging intelligence, as the primary condition behind everything we know of the universe. "I'm afraid of time", admits Michael Caine's character, a NASA physicist for whom this ticking clock is humanity's oldest and worst enemy.
Nolan has built himself a huge house here, stepping from room to room to talk about human loneliness, love, the survival instinct, quantum physics, relativity – all the big questions, in one blockbuster package. If the philosophy ever has a whiff of cod, it's very good cod.
Working with a remarkable new cinematographer, Her's Hoyte Van Hoytema, Nolan conjures the most eerily beautiful vistas he's ever put on screen, whether it's the bright speck of a capsule floating past the rings of Saturn, or the frozen wastes of a cloud-cuckoo-land planet which may or may not save us.
Whereas The Guardian's review, while mostly positive, points out some flaws:
Interstellar looks remarkable. It's the best introduction of scientific theory into blockbuster cinema since Nolan's state-of-consciousness thriller, Inception. Nolan never patronises his audience, yet – in thrilling at the potential of human endeavour – he often forgets them. The relationships (even the crucial one between Cooper and Murph, who is abandoned and bitter, back on earth) don't have enough pull. The characters got lost in space.
WARNING: Contains Very Mild Spoilers!
Interstellar
More early reviews have been creeping out of the handful of pre-screenings that have been seen. Generally speaking, everyone's on board with the visuals, but the more emotional aspects of the film have been handled either brilliantly or disastrously, depending on whom you ask. From Slashfilm, we get:
Interstellar is ambitious, beautiful, Christopher Nolan's most emotional film to date. The story allows us to explore many big ideas we wouldn't normally see in a big budget studio film, but the ideas sometimes fly by at light speed, squeezed into popcorn cinema. The result is that the story is left with some holes of logic.
From Coming Soon is the revealing bit:
"Interstellar" is another one of Christopher Nolan's more personal mind-f*ck movies which he's done so well when not directing adventures of a certain cowled vigilante. While it may not be as immediate as "Inception" and it wears most of its most obvious influences on its sleeve, it's still very much the type of intelligent spin on a specific genre we've come to expect from the filmmaker.
... Even when the Nolan "Wow" factor transforms into a "WTF?" moment, it still gives you enough to work with that you realize that even some of the "Signs"-like moments from the first hour had a significant purpose. There is some stuff that sounds sillier when you try to explain it like there being some sort of "higher alien race" out there trying to help us.
As one might expect from Nolan, his film just looks fantastic whether it's the simple Earth setting or the fantastic other-worldly environments, as he switches gears by working with Swiss cinematographer Hoyt Van Hoytema, who has never shot a movie quite on this scale, but is still able to keep up with Nolan's grand vision. (I saw the movie screened in 70mm IMAX and there's really no beating that as the optimum way of watching it.)
And from Cinema Blend's 2.5/5 review:
"Predictable" isn't a word we'd expect to be uttered within 10 miles of a Christopher Nolan movie - and yet it's painfully necessarily in discussion of Interstellar, Nolan's aesthetically beautiful, large-scale sci-fi drama that is admirable in its ideas and style, but lacking in its storytelling and execution.
And here's The Wrap, utterly hating the ending:
In that respect, "Interstellar" may represent an apotheosis of sorts, as it illustrates the very best and the very worst of Nolan as a writer-director. On the plus side, there's a stunning portrayal of how far-reaching space travel might work, a glimpse at an apocalyptic near-future that's both brilliantly written (no year is mentioned, and we're left to glean together important bits of information that zip by in conversation) and designed (the clothes, the cars, and the tech are almost entirely late-20th century), and a vision of robots like nothing I've ever seen in a movie.
Weighing against that, without getting into spoilers, is a third act of staggering wrongheadedness, along with female characters whose intellect takes a backseat to their exploding emotionalism and rage. Nolan is, presumably, among a handful of filmmakers who gets to do whatever he wants with minimal studio intrusion, but the resolution of "Interstellar" feels so inorganic that you'd swear it was concocted by a Glendale focus group.
That ending feels like such a betrayal because so much of what comes before it manages to be truly stunning, particularly in the 70mm IMAX version, thanks to the art department, the visual effects team, and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema ("Her"). We open with interviews with elderly Midwesterners remembering crop failure and wind storms, and they would appear to be talking about the Dust Bowl of the 1930s until we see a table being set, where someone dusts off a plate, a glass — and a laptop computer.
Variety, on the other hand, is loving every emotional beat:
With each stop the Endurance makes, Nolan envisions yet another new world: one planet a watery expanse with waves that make Waimea Bay look like a giant bathtub; another an ice climber's playground of frozen tundra and sheer-faced descents. Moreover, outer space allows Nolan to bend and twist his favorite subject — time — into remarkable new permutations. Where most prior Nolan protagonists were forever grasping at an irretrievable past, the crew of the Endurance races against a ticking clock that happens to tick differently depending on your particular vantage. New worlds mean new gravitational forces, so that for every hour spent on a given planet's surface, years or even entire decades may be passing back on Earth. (Time as a flat circle, indeed.)
This leads to an extraordinary mid-film emotional climax in which Cooper and Brand return from one such expedition to discover that 23 earth years have passed in the blink of an eye, represented by two decades' worth of stockpiled video messages from loved ones, including the now-adult Tom (a bearded, brooding Casey Affleck) and Murphy (Jessica Chastain in dogged, persistent "Zero Dark Thirty" mode). It's a scene Nolan stages mostly in closeup on McConaughey, and the actor plays it beautifully, his face a quicksilver mask of joy, regret and unbearable grief.
That moment signals a shift in "Interstellar" itself from the relatively euphoric, adventurous tone of the first half toward darker, more ambiguous terrain — the human shadow areas, if you will, that are as difficult to fully glimpse as the inside of a black hole. Nolan, who has always excelled at the slow reveal, catches even the attentive viewer off guard more than once here, but never in a way that feels cheap or compromises the complex motivations of the characters.
And The Telegraph is a fan:
Unlike Inception, whose puzzle-box games with time felt like a bedazzling gimmick, Interstellar mines the same ideas with a much more deep-digging intelligence, as the primary condition behind everything we know of the universe. "I'm afraid of time", admits Michael Caine's character, a NASA physicist for whom this ticking clock is humanity's oldest and worst enemy.
Nolan has built himself a huge house here, stepping from room to room to talk about human loneliness, love, the survival instinct, quantum physics, relativity – all the big questions, in one blockbuster package. If the philosophy ever has a whiff of cod, it's very good cod.
Working with a remarkable new cinematographer, Her's Hoyte Van Hoytema, Nolan conjures the most eerily beautiful vistas he's ever put on screen, whether it's the bright speck of a capsule floating past the rings of Saturn, or the frozen wastes of a cloud-cuckoo-land planet which may or may not save us.
Whereas The Guardian's review, while mostly positive, points out some flaws:
Interstellar looks remarkable. It's the best introduction of scientific theory into blockbuster cinema since Nolan's state-of-consciousness thriller, Inception. Nolan never patronises his audience, yet – in thrilling at the potential of human endeavour – he often forgets them. The relationships (even the crucial one between Cooper and Murph, who is abandoned and bitter, back on earth) don't have enough pull. The characters got lost in space.
Reading reviews that stated this film deserves to be seen on a big screen, have booked to see it tomorrow at The Giant Screen Cinema at Millennium Point in Brum. Looking forward to seeing this "flawed masterpiece", as a lot of reviews seem to describe it.
As an aside, I was pleased to find out that we had a big screen in Brum, then sad to find out that this former Imax screen will close for "retail" business in January. It would seem that competition from the standard multiplex has done for them; I guess that with a single screen they cannot get enough people through the door to make it pay.
As an aside, I was pleased to find out that we had a big screen in Brum, then sad to find out that this former Imax screen will close for "retail" business in January. It would seem that competition from the standard multiplex has done for them; I guess that with a single screen they cannot get enough people through the door to make it pay.
Went to see it this morning at 5.30am at BFI IMAX London 
Here are my brief thoughts on the quality (don't read if like me you didn't want to know anything about before watching it):
My rating: 7.5
Not Nolan's best film IMO but he sets the bar very high, so although this is a very good film overall, there were certain things that slightly tainted it.
Now I do have suspension of disbelief when I go to movies especially Sci-Fi, however there were things just annoyed me slighly and cheapened what was a decent experience. For example, the extreme forces of gravitational pull would have detsroyed the spaceship when it entered the wormhole. There were many instances where the film seemed to break all known physics.
Also the film seemed to borrow quite blatantly from other films IMO. You could see Alien, Buck Rodgers, Flight of the Navigator and even elements of Sunshine in it.
On the whole, if you can suspend disbelief and real-world physics, it is still a very good film.
Here are my brief thoughts on the quality (don't read if like me you didn't want to know anything about before watching it):
My rating: 7.5
Not Nolan's best film IMO but he sets the bar very high, so although this is a very good film overall, there were certain things that slightly tainted it.
Now I do have suspension of disbelief when I go to movies especially Sci-Fi, however there were things just annoyed me slighly and cheapened what was a decent experience. For example, the extreme forces of gravitational pull would have detsroyed the spaceship when it entered the wormhole. There were many instances where the film seemed to break all known physics.
Also the film seemed to borrow quite blatantly from other films IMO. You could see Alien, Buck Rodgers, Flight of the Navigator and even elements of Sunshine in it.
On the whole, if you can suspend disbelief and real-world physics, it is still a very good film.
type-r said:
Went to see it this morning at 5.30am at BFI IMAX London
Here are my brief thoughts on the quality (don't read if like me you didn't want to know anything about before watching it):
My rating: 7.5
Not Nolan's best film IMO but he sets the bar very high, so although this is a very good film overall, there were certain things that slightly tainted it.
Now I do have suspension of disbelief when I go to movies especially Sci-Fi, however there were things just annoyed me slighly and cheapened what was a decent experience. For example, the extreme forces of gravitational pull would have detsroyed the spaceship when it entered the wormhole. There were many instances where the film seemed to break all known physics.
Also the film seemed to borrow quite blatantly from other films IMO. You could see Alien, Buck Rodgers, Flight of the Navigator and even elements of Sunshine in it.
On the whole, if you can suspend disbelief and real-world physics, it is still a very good film.
Surely you can put your rating in public and then the reasons in the spoiler?Here are my brief thoughts on the quality (don't read if like me you didn't want to know anything about before watching it):
My rating: 7.5
Not Nolan's best film IMO but he sets the bar very high, so although this is a very good film overall, there were certain things that slightly tainted it.
Now I do have suspension of disbelief when I go to movies especially Sci-Fi, however there were things just annoyed me slighly and cheapened what was a decent experience. For example, the extreme forces of gravitational pull would have detsroyed the spaceship when it entered the wormhole. There were many instances where the film seemed to break all known physics.
Also the film seemed to borrow quite blatantly from other films IMO. You could see Alien, Buck Rodgers, Flight of the Navigator and even elements of Sunshine in it.
On the whole, if you can suspend disbelief and real-world physics, it is still a very good film.
Visually magnificent... I'd go again just to watch the ship passing Saturn. There are some clunky bits, however, and Michael Caine is not at his best in this at all. At my Cineworld showing the music overwhelmed the dialogue completely on occasion - notably when it was most important that you actually heard what they were saying. Had to concentrate pretty hard to pick up the hilarious dialogue between robot and crew during the launch for instance. Definitely an 8.5 out of 10 from me though it was all pretty predictable which is not what I expected from Nolan. Film 2014's review is so incredibly off I can't even begin to understand it.
I enjoyed the film as an overall experience, maybe a bit indulgent in places with the extended dialogue and Michael Cane just didn't work for me.
The story is so fantastical, I didn't feel the need to criticise the physics, unlike Gravity, so just rolled with it.
The mark of a good film for me is if I would get the DVD, not sure I would sit through 3 hours again, especially on a TV.
Still, it was an excellent cinema experience, so 7.5/10 for me.
The story is so fantastical, I didn't feel the need to criticise the physics, unlike Gravity, so just rolled with it.
The mark of a good film for me is if I would get the DVD, not sure I would sit through 3 hours again, especially on a TV.
Still, it was an excellent cinema experience, so 7.5/10 for me.
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