I personally did the same, starting with Abrams trek, but I think it's a bad way to go because it will set them up to expect essentially Star Wars style action from the series, not to mention that it will take a lot of the punch out of the ending of Khan.

If you wanted to show a more modern style movie to ease them into the series, you're better off with something like Master and Commander honestly.

Army of Darkness for sure. When you're 13 that's pretty much the greatest movie ever made

All the 80s Schwarzeneggar/Stallone stuff. Alien/Aliens/The Abyss/Terminator would play well at that point. The Matrix definitely.

Would also be a good age to get them into Clint Eastwood with the Man with No Name Trilogy and Where Eagles Dare (a personal favorite).

Might be a little young for The Thing, but you could definitely get them into some of John Carpenter's lighter flicks, with Big Trouble in Little China/They Live/Escape from New York/LA.

The first 6 Star Treks. Pretty much anything with Bill Murray in it.

If nothing else, I'm glad the failures of the show have made people realize how good Keanu's version was

Even more importantly, this is an incredible proof of concept for how we could divert incoming comets and asteroids.
You'd basically just need to repeat the same thing, but add a reverse thruster and fuel to push the comet off it's orbit.

I think there's a lot of cynicism and sarcasm in the movie-going community today, and for a lot of people anything remotely broad or sentimental just instantly gets rejected with an eye-roll which is unfortunate. Movies are either expected to be grim-dark cynical, or they have to do the Marvel thing and constantly wink at the audience and make fun of themselves.

For me, the sentimentality works in an optimistic sci-fi story like this, because it just harkens back to classic sci-fi literature and Twilight Zone stuff, which is full of those kind of broad emotional beats.

I'm just so glad Nolan's making a movie about real ideas and emotions here.

Inception, once you've rewatched it a few times, is such a cynical construction. It's elaborate plot mechanics around boring people doing something that doesn't matter and has no thematic relevance, all to justify action scenes that aren't even particularly exciting to watch.

Interstellar feels deeply passionate and human by comparison, and if it's occasionally awkward and blubbery about it, at least it's doing it for a good reason and out of a desire to inspire and motivate. I'll take that any day over cold, calculating nihilism.

It's literally one of the best things Zimmer has ever done, and a top contender for score of the year. You are a crazy person.

Some of your complaints I agree with, others I think have justifications.

The love thing bothered me when Anne Hathaway starts talking about it, but crucially, the movie makes a point of having the other characters basically saying she's full of shit. And then at the end, we discover that Gravity can be used as a communication mechanism across time, so you can view the "Love" thing as just the fluffy analogy for the actual scientific explanation, Gravity as a trans-time force. Love=Gravity, not literally, just as a metaphor. So that doesn't bother me.

Matt Damon doesn't want to get caught in the lie, that's why he doesn't just tell them and instead decides to steal their ship. He wants to fly home safely as a hero. I mean, imagine if he did tell them. For all he knows, they might decide to strand him there and leave to conserve oxygen/fuel and minimize their losses. Unlike Sunshine, I like his character in this, because instead of being some "space-crazy" bullshit, he's just a coward trying to make coldly rational justifications for his actions.

As for why the 5th dimensional beings don't send help in a more direct way and instead setup this elaborate chain of events, you can view it as a closed time-loop. They can't change the past without creating a paradox, they can only allow the things they know happened from their history to happen, a la Terminator 1. Because it happened that way in the past, it must happen that way when signalling the past. You can view it as kind of a copout, but there's a lot of precedent for it with time-travel stories.

As for why NASA doesn't find Cooper directly, you can imagine the government infrastructure being so fucked by that point, that they don't even know where he is, and aren't even aware he's still alive.

I do agree that the very end is a bit clunky with how they have him going out after Hathaway's character, but I don't know how else you handle it. If they just leave her stranded there, it's a really bleak ending, so I was happy they at least tied up that loose end. Like a lot of Nolan movies, you can imagine this being stronger if it was 3.5-4 hours long and had more time to develop pieces of the story, but that's just not going to happen.

Snowpiercer is really worth seeing for how off the wall goofy and crazy it is. Name me another big budget epic where the hero slips on a fish in the middle of the big action scene.

I think the ending is perfect, it's the good kind of open to interpretation, where I leave smiling.

I had fun with it, but I generally agree with your criticism. It's unfortunate, because the action is really well shot, and I would say that for about the first 2/3rds of it, the movie just kicks all kinds of ass and has a great energy to it that works.

It's also very well shot and lit, and looks great throughout. It makes how awful most of the Marvel movies look even more inexcusable, when you see how atmospheric even a throwaway Keanu action flick can look on its small budget. The night-club sequence in particular is action magic in my opinion, and the movie never reaches that high again.

The big problem, like you allude to, is there's no real villain. A movie like this really needs a formidable main bad guy, or bad guy henchman, that is going to be the major threat, and it never materializes in this. John Wick basically coasts through, with no escalation of stakes (I love climactic mano-a-mano fights in the rain, but that doesn't work if you don't have a bad-guy worth fighting). In a lot of ways, this reminds me of almost a 21st century spin on a movie like Commando, but Commando has Bennett as a great final villain, and it also at least has the girl tag-along character to change up the pace a bit throughout the first half.

Still, it gets so much of the details right, and has the right spirit to it, that I'm more bummed that they didn't put in the extra effort to make it great, than anything else. It's a fun one-time watch, but totally insubstantial and forgettable.