aldy says...
CONTAINS SPOILERS9 years ago
Interstellar was alright.
To start with, the opening was very clunky. Obviously some exposition was necessary but it wasn't done naturally at all. Here, meet Cooper, just your average, every day engineer-scientist-quantum-physicist-drone-programmer-explorer-pioneer-farmer-pilot. Avoiding information dumps isn't really either Nolan's strong suit and while later on, especially on the space ship, expository dialogue is definitely necessary considering the subject matter, it still comes across as awkward. Cooper is occasionally an expert on things that should be beyond him (which, of course, he conveniently explains for you), while at other times he's completely clueless about things that he should really know about in his position (which, of course, somebody else conveniently explains for you). Cooper isn't the only one guilty of this though, everybody else on the spaceship likewise seem very ill-prepared for such a trip.
Speaking of characters who aren't Cooper, everybody else's characterisation is terrible. You don't know anything at all about two members of the crew, and somehow you're meant to care about one of their completely avoidable deaths (come on, he got to the ship first, he could have easily gotten in without getting in the way of TARS)? Somehow you're also meant to care about My Cocaine's death (which I'll get to in a moment) because he's a father of somebody? They're not even shown to have a close relationship or anything, it seemed more just an excuse to make a big reveal (which I'll also get to in a moment). His daughter, Anne Hathaway's character, also doesn't seem to have much of a personality until it turns out that hey, she's actually in love with this person you've never met. Even this "aspect" of her otherwise bland character seems to just have been added in as a lazy way to flesh her out and add unnecessary conflict. On the subject of unnecessary conflict, both the children, Murph and Tom, make really irrational decisions. When Murph tells Tom that he should move to save his family, he gets really upset because... who knows? And then even though he's given up hope on his dad, it's magically all okay later on when, after burning his crops, Murph tells him some nonsense about "hey, it was him all along, it was him, our father *sob*". Prior to that of course, Murph's been holding a grudge against Cooper for like three decades, even though she knew for a large chunk of that what he was up to, after she began work at NASA. This relationship gets all sorted out when she has her magical realisation that the ghost was Cooper all along even though that's just a huge leap of faith and there's nothing to indicate that might be the case, unless, of course, it was ~love~ (which, yes, I'll get to in a moment too).
Back to the death bed scene. It had terrible sound mixing as you struggled to understand what My Cocaine was saying at all, but even worse it lacked any emotional significance as mentioned above, instead serving to make the reveal that he never wanted to go with Plan A all along. Of course, like all final words, it also ends with a very convenient moment where, instead of letting Murph know that her father didn't know anything about this, he decides to recite a poem because you gotta have that pointless ambiguity and conflict. This big reveal about it ends up removing any tension that might have happened when you get told the same twist later by Matt Damon; there's no emotional impact as you were just told that ten minutes ago and you've had that whole time to let it sink in. Instead, you're just sitting there for a couple of minutes waiting for the characters on screen to come to terms with it.
Now to the script. The script was terrible. The expository dialogue was really bad, as mentioned above, and there were just so many cheesy lines in it. All the idealistic things that were being spouted out just made me roll my eyes, with all the "we're pioneers, humanity was born here, but we weren't meant to die here" crap. And of course love transcends time and space and everything. Anne Hathaway knows that one planet is better than the other because of ~love~. The whole reason Cooper can contact Murph and all that is because of ~love~. Love conquers all, man.
For some more minor things, using Morse code to be able to communicate data related to astrophysics and then magically using this to "solve" gravity is just dumb. Messing with time didn't always work out like somebody casually waiting for 23 years and then acting like it's nothing when they see humans for the first time again, or how Jason Bourne can sprint back to the station in five minutes when it clearly took at least an hour to walk from. A lot of the things with planets wouldn't really work: all the waves stuff, how shallow the water is and their drop, solid ice clouds, the fact that they can escape from a planet with 130% gravity just in their spaceship, but whatever, I've tried to avoid criticising the science because it's not really a big deal and even though it's sort of set up as being a realistic film, it's still just a movie. Besides, the science is mostly theoretical and speculation anyway so who knows, they might not be wrong about anything at all (they are). How come nobody cares what Cooper got up to in the 100 years he was gone? Also that's not what Murphy's law is.
Of course, it does a lot right, in particular the visual effects were really good and the score was absolutely outstanding, it definitely added a lot to the atmosphere, as did the use of silence. The docking, the way the takeoff was handled, entering the wormhole and some other scenes were really well-done too. TARS was great.
Now, despite having written all that, I'd still recommend watching it, especially in a cinema. I can definitely admire the film's scope and I'm really glad that somebody's able to attempt something like this while still having it be considered mainstream cinema. However, the people who are saying it's one of the best films of all time are absolutely kidding themselves; I'm yet to see Insomnia, but otherwise Interstellar is Nolan's second worst film, ahead of only TDKR. Of course, the fact that I've written so much about it obviously means I care and it certainly was thought-provoking and visually splendid, so even if I had a lot of issues with it, you should watch it if you haven't already and who knows, maybe you'll love it. At the very least, it's definitely Nolan's most ambitious film to date.
