Interstellar
Directed by:
Christopher NolanCinematography:
Hoyte van HoytemaComposer:
Hans ZimmerCast:
Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Matt Damon, Mackenzie Foy, Wes Bentley, David Gyasi, Michael Caine, Casey Affleck, John Lithgow (more)VOD (2)
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With our time on Earth coming to an end, a team of explorers undertakes the most important mission in human history; traveling beyond this galaxy to discover whether mankind has a future among the stars. (Paramount Pictures)
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This movie is as if Nikola Tesla opened up one of his Pandora boxes. I wouldn’t have understood a single thing, but I would have been absolutely fascinated by it. And now if you excuse me, I think I may have to spend the rest of my life studying all available theories about the universe, black holes and fifth dimensions.
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There is power in simplicity, even if the monstrous epic tempts many viewers to seek complex interpretations. The power of Nolan's narrative lies in confronting the fundamental life decisions of a handful of people about the future of homo sapiens at the expense of personal interests and desires. Let us take those scientific lessons, limited to the described tables, which we do not understand anyway, as a glittering decoy toward a dead end. The sweeping cinematography and roaring music are meant to give the impression of a major space adventure, and yet, thanks mainly to the terrific cast, it's really one big cliché about a father-daughter relationship where the question is whether the journey through the wormhole will help them see each other again. I really didn't expect myself to be so sensitive and that at the end of it, I would cheer for it wholeheartedly. It was actually nice to get something completely different in the movie theater than I originally expected and that the whole colossus worked. This is particularly true when I sat in front of the screen with a certain amount of skepticism thanks to the diametrically opposed responses. [But I don't deny that everything negative you read about the film is true. And yet so are the positives.]
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The secret of Nolan’s success lies in his ability to disguise his inability to maintain the logical and emotional continuity of the narrative in parallel storylines in a disarming and, at the same time, overly dramatic manner. This weakness drags down the entire second half of Interstellar, which will drill such a hole in your head that you are forced to switch to the passive mode of “a great blockbuster experience” – without being bothered by the fact that the editor doesn't know what he’s doing. The movie is full of self-serving dramatic scenes that are of little relevance to the story as a whole, by which I mean the epic docking with the damaged rotating station and the burning cornfield with an angry Casey Affleck (WTF?) on the opposite side of the galaxy. And by dysfunctional logical and emotional continuity, I mean cutting from space to Earth (where we don’t know what’s going on and to which everyone is running), which unnecessarily draws attention away from the key twists of the cosmic plot. It looks so terribly EPIC and uses such magnificent music that Nolan surely knows what he’s doing here...right? No, in my opinion, he does not. ___ But let’s talk about the first half of Interstellar, which seems to be a different film entirely – it is smooth, deliberate and sensitively edited, outlining beautiful thoughts about TIME (which, along with health, is the most valuable thing we have). Because of that, this half of the film is the most elaborate and magical sci-fi revelation in many years. I fell in love with Interstellar in the scene involving greetings after returning from the watery planet, which is something I don’t think I have ever written about any film before. And there it should have ended, and Nolan and his people should have made a completely rewritten sequel a decade later, after they’ve grown up and learned to perceive things in context, together with proper editing. Then, ideally by dividing it into two sensitively linked films, one of which would take place in space and the other on Earth, they could have made Interstellar into a milestone in the history of the science fiction genre, a dignified successor to Kubrick.
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Spoilers ahead. McConaughey’s cowboy longing to discover the unknown heads out into space not only to gain knowledge (mainly of himself), but also in pursuit of the same goal that the first American settlers (and protagonists of the first sci-fi movies) had – to uncover the unknown and to colonise distant lands. Interstellar dusts off Americans’ mythological presentation of themselves as those who bring their enterprising spirit and common sense to bear in establishing civilisational order wherever there are acceptable conditions for such an endeavour. Here the crossing of frontiers (and horizons) is far more spectacular than in westerns, because instead of nature, one has to contend with technology and space (this is foreshadowed in the exposition, when the characters corral an out-of-control drone instead of wild horses). Victory is not a matter of one side defeating the other, but of establishing a harmonious union between man and space. ___ If the transfer of the founding American mythology into interstellar space offers a broad range of interpretations with respect to the current state of America’s self-confidence as a nation, the narrative enhancement inspires both awe and embarrassment. The complicated narrative structure involves a rather simple story in which everything is carefully told and fully explained (unlike the less materialistic films of Tarkovsky and Malick, which remain broadly open to interpretation). The excessive complexity of the ways in which the characters are led to their goal and the ways that they are given information creates a false impression of sophistication. The complexity of the form is somewhat counterproductive in light of the parallel effort to achieve maximum clarity and comprehensibility. The film devotes too much space to explaining itself to us. The Nolan brothers’ primary interest in structure has the consequences of clumsily written characters and their utilitarian usage. They are merely pieces of a bigger puzzle. They do not exist outside of their place in the structure. ___ But as a dispassionate designer who masterfully uses motifs from myriad sci-fi movies and books (Armageddon, Contact, The Abyss, Close Encounters of the Third Kind), Nolan has few equals. When he begins to build one of the major scenes, subtly at first and gradually with more and more intensity, it is like listening to a symphony with perfectly tuned and orchestrated instruments. He doesn’t need to resort to his favourite parallel montage technique – on the watery planet, the ticking of the watch incorporated into the music is enough to connect the two storylines. This scene develops the central motif of time, most strikingly illustrated by the mother ship Endurance, whose circular structure with twelve capsules is reminiscent of an analogue clock. The concept of time itself determines the direction and dynamics of the narrative. Time is a source of most of the narrative conflicts. It serves as a substitute for “evil” in a more tangible form, which is what a more conventionally structured narrative would fall back on. The good characters struggle with it; the bad ones succumb to it (Dr. Mann goes mad). Only bringing time under control brings victory in the end. ___ However breathtaking the long build-up to the climax and its slow subsidence may be, we are presented with the question of whether it justifies the complicated narrative structure with the dilation of time, wormholes and black holes. Because the film cannot conceal the fact that Nolan designed everything in relation to this connecting sequence. Not because of grand ideas and carefully depicted characters, but only for the joy of engineering it. The great films of world cinema that we now consider classics offer more than just perfect structure. 85%
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I'm pretty confused about this one. He could easily have made a great movie, but they'd have to cut the minutes a bit and somehow get more suspense in there. The emotions aren't evenly distributed here at all. One minute you're bored and the next you can't wipe away the tears. On top of that, the feelings are fleeting and don't stick around long. If they had concentrated more on the film itself and not built it on dialogue that forces the viewer a bit too much into how to perceive the whole thing, it would definitely have added to the value of this piece. A weaker 4 stars.
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