Interstellar [SPOILERS]

Please add a spoiler tag to the title. Regardless how you feel about Matt Daemon, his role was supposed to be a surprise for the audience.

And oh, I just came here to say that the soundtrack is amazing. The song they use in the trailers and throughout the movie is Thomas Bergersen - Final Frontier. Hans Zimmer did not compose the entire soundtrack :)

Interstellar is amazing. Preordered!

@devinant: I added the spoilers tag, I hope the original poster doesn't mind.

More on topic, I really liked the movie. Didn't care for the ending (by which I mean everything after Cooper entering Gargantua), and it's definitely not how I would have ended the movie (something I think about more than I should, as a writer myself). That said, I really liked it a whole lot up to that point, and it didn't diminish what I thought of the rest at all. Though I can see how it could ruin it for some people (it almost did for my dad).

Damon is a creep, Topher Grace can get out of the movie

This is the dumbest movie I've seen in quite a while.

As soon as Brand made that speech about love on the ship, I knew this movie was going to jump the shark. And boy did it jump the shark. It's a real shame. I loved the set up. I loved how they had to face the consequence of interstellar travel (time dilation and long sleep). But in the end, the movie abandons all realism for what is ultimately a bad Doctor Who twist á la Moffat, including boring paradoxes and plot holes.

Also, the music was way to loud and frequent. Nolan needs to learn that some scenes work better with silence.

OK, I kind of loved the hell out that movie, but after I got out of the theater I noticed all these things that seem to be plot-holes I have to get off my chest.

1) So the planet that Matt Damon was on had "no surface"? Meaning it was a frozen gas giant? If so, how were they not able to tell it was a gas giant to begin with? I would think they'd be able to tell? Why did they even send Matt Damon to check out a gas giant planet?

2) Why did Cooper fly into the black hole at the end? The real reason is because the plot demanded that he dive into the black hole and have his "space baby" moment, but the actual excuse seemed to be that they needed to jettison more weight for Anne Hathaway to get to the third planet. Couldn't they have just jettisoned the extra craft without Cooper getting into it? He can't be that heavy.

Nitpicking aside, I really enjoyed that movie. I don't really think its quite as good as 2001, but at least Nolan was trying to chase that greatness, you know? 2001: A Space Odyssey is almost 50 years old now, how many films have even attempted to match it?

The movie had probably too much exposition and some of the dialogue seemed unnatural, but as someone who usually goes to the theater maybe once a year, this was a great theater movie. I still think Memento is Nolan's best movie though (I was 18 when it came out and I watched that movie at least eight times).

RE: The Prestige. People liked this movie? I got bored halfway through and turned it off. Then a year later my brother told me the dumb ending twist, which is pretty goddamn dumb.

@fredchuckdave:

I don't necessarily agree with MovieBob either but I do like some of the insights he throws into reviews where I think this one is particularly appropriate for Interstellar. Nolan is known for his conversation heavy, almost obsessive explaining of details, style where it works extraordinarily well in "detail rich" stories like The Prestige and Inception. It doesn't work in Interstellar because it feels like there are supposed to be "moments of wonder" that are there to leave the characters and the audience in awe but instead we have characters laboriously talk about it. Instead of leaving everyone to take in the spectacle, there is dialog going on the order of "Do you know how wonderful this is? Let me tell you about all of the facets of this..." which takes me immediately out of it.

I'm not trying to "pigeon hole" either Nolan or Spielberg but this feels like Interstellar is just the wrong style of movie for Nolan. If it stayed focused on just the mystery of "Where did that 'ghost' come from?" instead of the higher themes and universality, it would have worked better with Nolan's style. I too think back to The Prestige and Inception where these were complex stories but the details Nolan chose to dive into were very specific pieces and parts of their worlds instead of trying to explain the world.

And a scary side thought has crept into my head: I hope Nolan doesn't fall into the same trap with clinging to "twists" like Shyamalan. Mysteries are fine but when the story hinges so heavily it and yet is so telegraphed and partially nonsense, it can be very disappointing.

Walked away having extremely enjoyed it. Of course it's flawed, but I can hardly blame the film -- it reaches so high. Started off well enough, actually started to dip in quality around halfway from which I feared it wouldn't recover, and ended with a fucking bang -- I was surprised. As mentioned before by others, I got Contact and Sunshine vibes from this one -- in a good way. I'll definitely re-watch it when it's released. I thought the entire segment with Matt Damon could have been reworked and explained in different terms, and not because I dislike the guy in any capacity. It just felt unnecessarily dramatic and forced. Ultimately what I enjoyed about Interstellar compared to Nolan's other works was the show of heart. I thoroughly enjoy most of his catalog but find all of it cold. His previous films were never able to connect with me on an emotional level in any meaningful capacity. Interstellar did though, and I'm stoked about that. Can't wait to see what he does next.

@raven10:

Fair points, again i'm not saying you shouldn't have a problem with how it all wraps up, there were certainly much better clearer ways to wrap up the movie that Nolan should have considered. But personally i just have an easier time swallowing what happens knowing that some of the world's top physicists are unwilling to say its impossible, but hey, maybe that's just me and i'm just more forgiving of it.

also just to clarify there wasn't actually any backwards time travel in the movie, the messaging of the information to the past was through gravitational waves that coop created long after he left earth, gravity is the weakest of the fundamental forces and many physicists believe its because gravity transcends into multiple dimensions, so gravitational waves, regardless of their origin date, exists permanently across time. So the mechanism for the proposed messaging of data is maybe possible, but yeah that still doesn't help with any of the paradoxes.

Sorry if you already knew that, maybe i didn't read your comment closely enough.

@l33t_haxor: Anyone who likes The Prestige because of the twist is missing the entire point of the movie. The fact that the twist is silly and obvious is the very point of the film. Angier is obsessed with finding out how Borden's trick works. But as Michael Caine says at the very beginning of the film, "The second act is called "The Turn". The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you're looking for the secret... but you won't find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled."

And Borden's final words are, "You never understood why we did this. The audience knows the truth: the world is simple. It's miserable, solid all the way through. But if you could fool them, even for a second, then you can make them wonder, and then you... then you got to see something really special. You really don't know? It was... it was the look on their faces..."

The whole point of the film is that knowing the secret ruins the magic. The twist is purposefully disappointing because it isn't the secret of how you do the trick, but the trick itself that is compelling. That's the entire message of the movie and it is why I view The Prestige as maybe Nolan's best written film. Memento is brilliant. Absolutely brilliant, and The Dark Knight is fantastic, but both of those movies excel on the surface without requiring you to think further about the actual meaning behind the film. The Prestige is the only film Nolan has made where the brilliance of the film only occurs to you when you look at it from another angle.

@raven10: I mean I didn't get that far. I got up to the part with like a million light bulbs and said "this is goofy" and turned it off.

My understanding of point 2 was that the Rangers had to be jettisoned from inside their perspective cockpit and could not be done remotely. He blatantly lied to Brand cause she wouldn't have allowed him to do what he did. As well as having to engage the thurusters when the were trying to make the slignshot manuever.

I was really impressed with the movie and there are a lot of liberties taken with what we know of relativity and gravity but it was seriously close to my favorite movie of the year so far.

@l33t_haxor: Like most Nolan movies, you tend to miss the entire point of the film without reaching the end. Imagine only watching half of Memento or Inception. It would seem like a terrible movie. The beauty of Nolan's films are how the plot layers upon itself. You owe it to yourself to watch the second half because it is all worth it by the end.

Movie was definitely a mixed bag, but I will say that the scene of Cooper checking his messages is maybe one of the best scenes I've seen in any movie this year.

Couldn't have said it better myself!

You missed David Bowie playing Nikola Tesla. And you missed another important feature of The Prestige: Tesla was in a pitched rivalry with Edison. So many secrets leads to so much destruction.

I saw it today in IMAX. (The way it's meant to be seen.)

I thought it was a good movie. It's not Nolan's best movie, but there are enough elements that are great (the visual effects, sound design, the fucking fantastic Hans Zimmer score) that distract from the not so great. (Matt Damon who came off as redundant and ultimately unnecessary, although I liked the part where he dies mid monologue, and some story bits near the end.)

This sounds absolutely crazy to me. This is the most clever movie to have come out all year. The way they depict theories that can't be observed so far is outstanding. I think how they even dared to try and visualize them is already crazy, but they also pulled it off for being believable for most of it.

As far as the story goes, I thought it was really good. All this: 'I understood the story, therefor it isn't clever' is sort off dumb. It wasn't a convoluted story, but that doesn't mean it wasn't complex. I found the entire story to be engaging and it grabbed my attention throughout all of it. It has a simple set up, but the way it plays out makes it really cool.

The story was a little ham fisted in parts and felt like the characters were monologueing too much (Anne Hathaway's love schlock in the space ship was vomit inducing and the Dylan Thomas quotes made me want to throw my phone at the screen), HOWEVER, the representation of space itself in the movie was simply amazing.

It does not surpass 2001, but it definitely inspires hope in me that we can reach the stars.

Neil deGrasse Tyson has some things to say about Interstellar. Freaking love it.

IGN Link.......take it or leave

I saw it last night and loved it. I agree the movie is pretty hamfisted at times (that bit towards the end where the daughter shouts eureka, bleugh) but there aren't many big concept sci-fi films like this, so I can let it slide.

@raven10 Personally I don't have any issue with the bootstrap paradox, I think it's pretty clear the movie takes the stance that a causal loop is possible, seen as how its all theoretical there's no real way to argue one way or the other about it.

One more minor quibble, but I wish there was more shots of the spacecraft from the outside, I want to see what the crazy gravity ship at the end looks like!

Yah I mean pretty much every time travel movie has weird time paradoxes. I liked this movie, but didn't care for the last 30 minutes at all.

I thought the way their earth was ending was really interesting too.

I go to the movies like twice a year, I think the last movie I saw in the theater was The Wind Rises but I wanted to go to Interstellar opening weekend because I'm a big Nolan fan and a McConaughey fan at that. I won't say I was disappointed in the movie, it was huge and sprawling but at the same was personal, but I was expecting too much.

The black hole is so impressive and I watched some interviews about how they struggled to tow the line between cinema and science which just impressed me more. I look forward to picking it up when it comes out on Blu Ray.

I think Mathew McConnay was miscast. He is just not likable as a dad, believable as an astronaut, and certainly he had zero chemistry at "even attempting to have chemistry" with Anne Hathaway. Sadl,y he is not the worst actor in the damn thing...what was Matt Damon doing...who the hell directed that shit performance?

There were ten people in the theater the night I saw its. (I live in a small town....what can I say.) It was mostly 25-35 year olds and a few eldery people. At the end, nobody clapped, nobody groaned, and I think we all just felt tired/bored. Maybe, we were all just contemplating if we had just wasted our money; we wondered if we all were just suckers....we didn't want people to know that for sure.

I'm a total sucker for space movies, so I really loved this one. I'm not normally too crazy about Nolan's films, but this one clicked with me. I liked that pretty much all the main characters are scientists, though Cooper felt more like a really clever pilot along for the ride than anything else. Story got pretty wild, but I liked where it went. The emergency docking scene after Mann blows the airlock was my favorite scene, so fucking tense and the music was perfect.

The cine was pretty breathtaking and I loved how it was cut, editing is usually my beef with Nolan's films, but I liked this one.

The movie definitely feels like a 2001 for the modern ages, and I think that's a good thing, we need a movie like that once in a while to get the imagination going about the future.

I had to go back and see it in IMAX the second time, and that was great too.

I really liked the movie warts and all the only thing I hated was Matt Damon being a crazy man, I figured out he wasn't right in the head and had freaked out and killed everyone within the second scene of him being on screen and he was...really fucking terrible acting wise.

If Interstellar was a game, Tars would win best new character, hands down

This felt like a lesser man's 2001, with all the big ideas thrown out and replaced with hammy sentimentality. Basically it still has Spielberg's fingerprints all over it, I don't recognise it as a Nolan film much at all.

This film commits the grave crime of over-explaining everything, from the physics of space travel to the themes delivered through character monologue. I felt stupider having watched this.

@dudeglove: I mean the term was invented because it was a cheap way to create a twist in many Greek tragedies. It was a bad way to make a twist 3000 years ago and it remains a bad way to this day. Also, The Wolf of Wall Street was an absolutely brilliant movie. You want to talk about show, don't tell, there is really no one making films today better than Scorsese in that regard. In a movie all about unchecked excess, Scorsese drives home the point by creating a film filled with unchecked excess. The gratuitous sex, drug use and violence, combined with the 3+ hour run time drives many people away but instead of having his characters explain the insanity they were creating, Scorsese recreates the feeling with 3 hours of depravity. The movie would have made sense with an hour less of footage, but just like the Wolf himself couldn't stop even when it would have been best, Scorsese doesn't either. By being overly long the film's structure mirrors the psychology of its character. It's an absolutely brilliant way of making you feel the rush and the exhaustion of the character and as the film starts to drag you can feel how the endless partying and lying must have dragged down the characters of the film. The Wolf of Wall Street may not be a great story, or an original one, but it is an exceptional film that could only have been created by someone as obsessed with the medium as Scorsese.

i really enjoyed this movie! pretty good! :)

An author using "dues ex machina" in their story isn't automatically bad but using it because they have no alternative to get to the ending makes it feel like a cheat or extraordinarily contrived.

Side comment: It is interesting to compare this movie to Wolf of Wall Street. If Wolf of Wall Street was like Interstellar, there would be constant comments like "Belfort is funding this party with money stolen from the company's account and put into that company's account..." The important thing isn't the stealing or the party but Belfort so telling us about the stealing and the party in excruciating detail isn't "helpful".

Wow you really missed an opportunity to be funny here. "And then I sniffed cocaine out of this hooker's asshole and the sensation cocaine gives you combined with the irresistible taste of hooker ass gave me an epiphany, and lo' all was right with the world. It was "they" that led me to this asshole, it was future humans looped back upon themselves."

The few things that did not work for me:

Rant aside, that's some fucking amazing sound and visual design and some genuinely affecting emotional moments. I compared the movie to a Mogwai track in the movie review thread - it runs the gamut from beautifully silent to brilliantly deafening, and does it well.

@sinusoidal: I was wondering about the ending myself and I think it kinda works out in the sense that Cooper goes into the black hole and gets spit out however many years later. At the same time Brand is travelling to Edmunds planet and is being affected by the time distortion. I imagine that while about a hundred years have gone by for humanity, only minutes have gone by for Cooper in the tesseract and maybe hours for Brand on the new planet. So it's possible that if he were to take his ship and fly over to her only a day or so would have gone by.

Also I don't think him going to her is intended as a romantic gesture. He's just going out there as a "no man left behind" sort of mission. Everything else - well yah it's goofy but when you're watching the movie it's cool. I mean it's ridiculous that he would just jump into a ship without any training and without permission and just fly off. I assume the controls might have changed over the last 100 years or so but it was a neat moment.

@humanity It does make more sense as a 'no man left behind' moment, and now that you mention it, it fits in with the farmhouse being rebuilt and the movie showing how he never really was at home there to begin with. He was an explorer and needed to be on the frontier. Still, if she's so easy to get to, you'd think they'd have sent a bunch of people there now instead of, y'know, leaving her entirely alone on an alien planet for years. Dicks!

Hah, yes, agreed, the robot was one of my favorite characters, though I did have some problems with its ability to scale even icy terrain, but maybe it was wearing robo spike shoes.

Anyways, all I wanted from this movie was a love letter to space travel/themes around space travel and I got exactly that from the realistic to the fantasy side of things, so I adored it, and that soundtrack, that soundtrack. Amazing.

@zolroyce: Always had to wonder what was going on 1 foot below the frame, a rubik's cube does not seem like the most mobile of devices.

I really truly wanted to love Interstellar. I liked it, I really did. It was amazing to look at, had terrific acting all around and the sound design was top notch. It's just that it got really heavy handed in spots like with Anne Hathaway's love monologue and the ending was pretty dumb to me.

Yes Wolf had those 4th wall moments and that isn't what I meant either. There are multiple moments in Interstellar where something extraordinary or momentous is happening but instead of letting it happen and letting it wash over the viewer, there is a handy dandy voice over telling you exactly what is going on which serves to kick them right out of it. That is the problem with Interstellar where it isn't that the movie is talking to the audience but that it seems to be focused on telling "you the viewer" why "something" is going on instead of focusing on the meaning of what that "something" is.

It feels like a basically a failing of "show don't tell". The idea that man can transcending time and space to reach out to someone he cares for is an awesome idea for film (or books for that matter). Telling us in excruciating detail how while it is happening is not a good idea because it can pull the viewer out of the moment and the illusion.

Saw it yesterday in the early morning in a completely empty cinema (I try do that if I get the chance).

I loved it. The conceits they used to portray things like external dimensions that we are unable to perceive etc were extremely clever, and when I thought about it afterwards, the only way of doing it.

I did get a little annoyed when I guessed what was really going on with the plot pretty early in the film, but that did not decrease my enjoyment.

perfect movie! i really enjoyed it!