• From: Van Dieman's Land
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Topic: Interstellar (with spoilers)

WARNING - contains spoilers.

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Just saw it in a rare 70MM presentation at one of the biggest screens in London.

All the hype is justified: it's ambitious, cerebral, epic, an 'event movie', a new "2001" for the 21st century, with a lot of grand themes.

Zimmer's score was amazing - like an avante garde church organ in a cathedral. Although not the first time an organ has been used like that: Morricone used one in the lengthy zero-G transfer sequence in Mission to Mars.

I could only discern about 40% of the dialogue - did anybody else have an awful audio mix where sound effects and music drowned out the dialogue track? Even during important plot points. Gotta grab the script.

MM's acting was amazing, as we've come to expect. Very emotional at about 5-6 key moments.

Matt Damon's (stunt) casting was unnecessary. Sorta takes you out of the movie for a while. They could have cast a character actor for that role. And what he then proceeds to do, doesn't really make sense.

Typical Nolan editing: not much explanation to anything. He just expects you to hang on. For example it took me a while to realise there's a talking robot in the capsule with them.

Why could they take off from the second wave but not the first? Surely their analysis of the planet would let them know they'd be massive tidal waves if it's so close to a black hole? So what's producing the light in the system?

Are real practical effects better than CG, green screen, digital effects? A few years ago, unquestionably yes. But since Gravity, it's not so clear that practical IS ALWAYS better than well produced VFX. And it's not so clear that film projection is superior to a UHD digital projection.

Amazing to see such a short credits list for such a big movie. Hardly any CG artists. At the end of the Hobbit the credits seem to go for ages.

The science of Interstellar? Caltech professor Kip Thorne was advisor on the wormhole (just like in Contact) and black hole physics, which is all very speculative. The hole seemed to be portrayed with an accretion disc which normally emits a lot of harmful radiation. I didn't understand how the robot was supposed to transmit from the other side of the Event Horizon.
But anyway, in the end the black hole was actually another higher-dimension projection from aliens (or future humanity?) which was connected to the worm hole which was connected to Saturn. The last act was 'vague-d up' like 2001, so everyone will see it again and talk about what it means. Like Inception, it's a good way to double your box office.  big_smile

Dust bowl earth - didn't see much of the rest of the planet. The landscape looked okay on all the wide shots.
AI humour re: honesty settings. Yeah, as if you'd want anything less than 100% in survival situations.
Love as some cosmic divine force: evolutionary psychology has no problem accommodating why we still care about people who are deceased.

What was with the early drone sequence? Didn't seem to go anywhere or pay off?

So what was the solution that Cooper transmitted to his daughter via Morse code? Was that the most efficient way of communication?  That, and ghost-like book throwing? Not very sophisticated for 5D higher beings. Either information can get through or it can't.

Is the Rama tube around Saturn (Cooper Station) the solution to the emigration problem? Which planet were they moving to?

Loved the sentiments about always looking back into the past these days instead of the future, like we did 50 years ago. The golden age of forward-looking sci-fi is over. It's all Game of Thrones, Downton Abbey, Mad Men, Middle Earth, post-apocalypse, and hipster vintage/retro. Even Gravity was a 'period' film in that it featured the Shuttle.

I'll gather my thoughts more after a second viewing in another cinema with a (hopefully) better dialogue mix.

So what did y'all think?

Last edited by avatar (2014-11-07 09:37:20)

not long to go now...

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  • From: Van Dieman's Land
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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

not long to go now...

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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

Loved.

Teague Chrystie

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  • From: Van Dieman's Land
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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

Phil Plait's (aka The Bad Astronomer) review of the science of Interstellar...

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_an … ivity.html

not long to go now...

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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

This is Nolan's masterpiece. The boldest piece of hard sci-fi ever put on film. Frankly, I feel like I've been waiting my whole life for someone to make this movie.

Holy shit you guys. Haters can suck it, I'm happy to enjoy this one all by myself.

Last edited by bullet3 (2014-11-09 00:51:30)

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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

I'm 50-50 on alot of things about it.

It's incredible at times, and cringey at times.
All set pieces are superb, and Zimmers score enhance them so well. Some things rival Gravity in sheer awe and impact in the theater seat.

All the talk about love being the only thing able to transcend time and space, I just can't overlook the fact that it's complete mumbo-jumbo. Hate is just as valid a feeling as love, and logically would have just the same characteristics and suggested properties (being able to both hate and love someone across time and space). The bit about love was, I guess, supposed to ring emotionally true and not necessarily supposed to be taken literally, it was more about driving forces and what makes us do what we do, but it's so obviously such an over-simplified view and doesn't make sense even superficially.

Liked the hinted idea of the original timeline being that MM gets sucked into the black hole and dies, and Anne Hathaway populates the new planet alone, presumably creating a new set of humans that, long into the future, perhaps because of love, decide to honor their ancestors by reaching back through time and saving MM and allowing him to communicate a solution to the survival of humanity in that alternate timeline.

Though I don't know if I really feel it was necessary to spend all this time leading humanity to saturn, a wormhole, a black hole, only for MM to transmit some data back to his daughters bedroom. It just seems like such a waste of resources to end up right at the beginning. I guess technically the higher-dimensional future-humans couldn't interact themselves and needed MM to get to a wormhole to work as the mechanism for transmitting it, it just didn't ring logistically true for me. Maybe i'll have a different opinion of it.

What was Matt Damons motivation? I assume he wanted off the planet since it was dead. Why not just tell the guys who came for him, "yeah so this place is dead, let's move on to the other candidate planets". He wanted to leave and that would allow him to leave in the company of the new crew. Instead he leads them on with incorrect info, tries to kill MM, and then still leaves, which he could have anyways if he's just told them straight up when they found him.
Does anyone else understand his character actions better?

The end has MM and us realize Anne Hathaway is alone colonizing a planet on her own. Which was a bit clunkily delivered as his daughter finally saw her father again after so long, she was way too quick to just say "Hey, how's it going... So you should go". The entire film was about their connection and his promise to return, and I as an audience member got serious blueballs from that brushed-over interaction. There was barely time for a single tear to roll down their cheeks before it was over.

And then we're lead to assume MM borrows a very small, fragile looking space plane to go to Anne Hathaway. I guess the space station they were on was close to Saturn, but it felt like MM was just going to pop over to Wallmart to buy some groceries. Did he even pack lunch? Or was his pod capable of hibernation? Did he go to Anne Hathaway to bring her back to the space station, or to join her on the planet? Shouldn't MM atleast tell someone else he was going, just in case? Or was Brandts presence and isolation in the other galaxy common knowledge and other people around Saturn were already on the way there anyways with other expeditions to start life on that planet instead of earth. Surely it would be safer for MM to wait for a bigger ship or cruise to travel there, rather than taking a small plane himself? If he went there now himself, are the others humans coming along right behind him, or are they like 50 years away from mounting their exodus from our solar system to the new planet, and MM and Hathaway are going to die alone (which they may think is worth it, but it hardly seems in line with the more poetic, hopeful tone of the ending). Just one line about an expedition already being staged and everyone joining her shortly, and MM deciding to go slightly ahead of everyone else, perhaps subtly yet explicitly driven by love, would have given some well-needed exposition to make a more satisfying ending with a distinct emotional point, in this case hope of humans very soon reuniting again.


When MM finds the NASA place they immediately recommend him as a pilot. MM asks why when they didn't even know about him an hour earlier. They explain they had pilots, but none as good. Obviously MM is an asset for them now.
But they also know who MM is when he arrives at NASA, they know his name and his record if I recall correctly. MM also drive max a day to get to them. Wouldn't NASA at some point contact him and ask him to pilot the craft? They need a pilot, they have one a days drive away. What gives? This is about the future of mankind, are they so secretive they cannot even contact a potentially very valuable asset and see what he thinks of the idea? It feels like "Well, now that you're here, you're perfect for this job. We just couldn't be bothered to drive a day ourselves and contact you, since we obviously know who you are and that you exist". Also they don't even seem to screen him for mental or physical health, they offer him the job on the spot pretty much. It feels like he leaves a week later at most. Matt Damon was supposedly a prime candidate and look how stable he turned out to be in space. NASA simultaneously has too little confidence in MMs necessity (they never specifically sought him out for the job), and too much confidence, offering him the job at a moments notice. Either seems the opposite of what would be expected from the people who are planning the continuation of the human race.

Stream of consciousness above, but I definitely need to see this a second time.

Last edited by TechNoir (2014-11-09 11:10:27)

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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

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.

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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

bullet3 wrote:

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.


I can agree with most points you raise.

With most of them, I do wish they had fleshed it out more in the film. Like msot of Nolans films I guess he does tend to brush past exposition, I love The Prestige and like Inception, but I've seen those multiple times and have bridged alot of gaps myself.

Thanks for the clarifications and I do have hope I'll like it more with subsequent viewings. Hoping for another cinema visit in the coming week, this movie did not suffer from a huge room and big-ass speakers, that is for damn sure.

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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

The movie seems to be getting mixed reviews. I have no idea if/when I'll see it. The local reviewer, who gave it three stars (mostly for the first half), had one fun comment: "The movie is too long by at least a half-hour. If it had spent less time raging at the dying of the light, the light might have been brighter."

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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

Invid wrote:

The movie seems to be getting mixed reviews. I have no idea if/when I'll see it. The local reviewer, who gave it three stars (mostly for the first half), had one fun comment: "The movie is too long by at least a half-hour. If it had spent less time raging at the dying of the light, the light might have been brighter."


If you've got a good cinema with good sound nearby, you have no excuse not to see it. It's a highly pleasurable experience, do not miss it.
Still not sure about the longevity of it, but one viewing it definitely deserves.

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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

Really enjoyed it

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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

TechNoir wrote:

If you've got a good cinema with good sound nearby, you have no excuse not to see it.

Sure I do. Nothing about the trailers looked like something that would interest me, and I stopped going to movies just to see the cg space ships a while ago. It's very likely I'll enjoy the movie on some level if I see it, but I have to be interested in seeing it first.

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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

Invid wrote:
TechNoir wrote:

If you've got a good cinema with good sound nearby, you have no excuse not to see it.

Sure I do. Nothing about the trailers looked like something that would interest me, and I stopped going to movies just to see the cg space ships a while ago. It's very likely I'll enjoy the movie on some level if I see it, but I have to be interested in seeing it first.

Ya, but what about model spaceships  smile

Just saw it again on a normal screen, and I have to re-iterate, you're missing like half the experience if you don't see this in 70mm. Watching this DCP felt like watching a movie, seeing it in IMAX felt like going to space.

Storywise, like Inception, the flaws jump out more on a re-watch, but the subject-matter is so much more compelling to me that it doesn't bug me.

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  • From: Van Dieman's Land
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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

The official response to my complaint re: inaudible dialogue...

Thank you for your e-mail regarding your recent visit to ODEON Leicester Square. We pride ourselves on the level of service and presentation that we provide t our guests, and we welcome any and all feedback, both positive and negative.

With regards to your visit - the sound mix on Interstellar has been a widely reported issue, around the world. From the first screening at TCL Chinese Theatre to regular screenings across the UK, guests have reported not being able to understand or make out large parts of the dialogue and the volume changing from being too loud, to too quiet and everything in between.

Here at ODEON Leicester Square, are equipment and presentation standards are kept to the highest level due to the number of premieres and special events that we host. As we held the European premiere for Interstellar, Warner Bros. were here for most of last week setting up and checking, with rehearsals most mornings to ensure the presentation was correct. These levels haven't changed since, with regular channel checks and white light checks to ensure that the projector output, both visually and audibly, is correct.

Warner Bros. have set up a specific web page to gather feedback on the various formats, so I'd advise you to head there and leave feedback as well.

http://www.interstellarmovie.com/quality/

I hope I have helped assure you that we are doing everything we can to ensure that the film is presented to you exactly as the film makers intended and any issues with that content/feature, should be passed onto the distributor.

If you have any other questions/concerns, please do get in touch.

Regards

Chris Tayler
Operations Manager
ODEON Leicester Square

not long to go now...

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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

I liked this movie, but my only gripe is the music.  dear God that awful music!  45 minutes of the same 4 notes on a loop is not good for movie music!  Hans Zimmer has gotten lazy lately.

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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

*squint*

The music was awesome, and you are literally Hitler.

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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

switch wrote:

I liked this movie, but my only gripe is the music.  dear God that awful music!  45 minutes of the same 4 notes on a loop is not good for movie music!  Hans Zimmer has gotten lazy lately.

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.

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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

OK, I think we need to start showing this movie with all the credits removed. See how the film and music are judged then smile

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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

Or you know, you could actually WATCH the movie before passing judgement and making assumptions.

It's a great score, irrespective of composer.

And if you wanna go there, quite honestly, if this was some no-name director, I bet it would be received much better. It's the only way I can reconcile stuff like Looper and fucking John Wick getting better reviews.

Then again, I'm reminded that Contact has a 63% on RT, so maybe this genre just doesn't appeal to that many people. ::shrug::

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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

My assumption is it's a great move I have no interest in seeing. It's the extremes in reactions to it I find interesting.

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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

^^
Indeed, save for the "having no interest in seeing." More like, "don't have the money to spare right now" to see aspect.

Also, I suffer from this weird attitude that the more people say it is good, the more I don't want to see it. But, as I said, I'm weird.

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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

to each his own then.  I just found the music competing with the dialogue at times for my attention. This makes it confusing for me since I'm hearing impaired to begin with.  I don't think it's a good thing when the score is making it hard to understand what the characters are saying.  I noticed it the most during the last 30 minutes or so.

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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

That's not the score, that's what Nolan wanted the sound mix to be doing. In a case like that, both the composer and the overall sound engineer did their jobs correctly, and were just working for a guy with weird taste in mixes.

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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

These clowns add their 2c worth...

not long to go now...

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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

copy/pasted from my Letterboxd. tl;dr - I can't believe I liked this movie so much.

It was pretty good...relatively speaking.

I think it's amusing that Christopher Nolan took the concept of love and turned it into an abstract scientific force, but the emotional aspects of the film never felt clunky to me. Maybe it was the blaring, sentimental Hans Zimmer score (which is the best score he's produced maybe ever, btw) but I'll admit to getting a little misty at the end. Nolan clearly knows how love manifests to fourth-dimensional beings, so I'm okay with his fifth-dimensional exploration of it. I mean, geez, the scene where McConaughey is watching the videos from his kids? One of the only genuinely affecting scenes in any Nolan film.

He does seem more interested in the science than anything else (much like how James Cameron only made Titanic so he could have an excuse to go down and explore the wreckage) but those concepts are fascinating enough on their own to fill in the gaps of an admittedly thin script. We know very little about these characters, but most of them are little more than conduits so the audience can see the inside of a wormhole, and I see nothing wrong with that.

And what we do see from the characters is translated through the language of quantum physics in an original way. I can think of few other sci-fi films that tie the mechanics of their world so closely to the emotions of their characters. Usually they're separate, with all elements of human expression simply pasted in to a sci-fi backdrop. Science and emotion feed into each other in Interstellar, and I can see why that fell flat for a lot of people but damn if it didn't work for me.

While walking out of the theater, one of my friends said he was surprised that I liked it. He didn't think I would, having read my other reviews. I'm right there with him. I liked this one a lot more than I thought I would.

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