GaijinPunch wrote:Fair enough. Seems to require the highest learning curve in the mainstream (perhaps to date). I had to explain relativity to a friend.
Did you see Coherence, Skykid?
Not heard of it.
You had to explain relativity? Isn't that elementary? I went to see it with a friend who was so bored she gave up trying to follow the plot, but the one thing she did understand was the relativity stuff.
Anyway, more Interstellar detail:
All of Nolan's typical weaknesses were present and correct, although in some cases less pronounced than in former works. This is for example, a better film than Dark Knight Rises. The casting was again, the work of a man who doesn't really know actors and tends to prop up his ensemble with solid bets like Gary Oldman and Michael Caine with average joes like Christian Bale and guys you never heard of, and not in a good way.
Here McConaughey is sturdy - the best of it - and although his acting style is a little too ego reliant, he at least knows how to act. Most of everyone else were poor to embarrassing, although they were often charged with chewing around some of the clunkiest dialogue imaginable, so it wasn't all their fault.
Prime suspects were the on-board black guy and the other guy with the intense look and eyebrows (Miller), who were both embarrassingly awful. Whatshername who was Catwoman in Batman 3 was passable, just, and Matt Damien was ergh, ok. His character was good and he handled it confidently, although I'm unsure his delivery was really a 'performance' so much as it was saying lots of overfat dialogue about seeing your children when you die. Still, could have been worse - could have been Christian Bale!
Second Nolan offence, but really the primary, is the script.
This dude, I'll give him credit: he comes to the movie making thing with a certain freshness. I enjoy his concepts and find his movies stylish and visually engaging. But he has some lofty ideas that if you peer just a little close, end up being thinner than thin, owing to scriptwriting that cares not for consistency or rational thought. It's a weird imbalance where his talent is sort of cut off at the knee by his high school level writing, which veers between having flashes of excellence, to jargon that is unusually tough to follow, and outright flaws.
In this there are myriad idiocies. From a dialogue standpoint some of the exposition is even more painful than Inception, because here it's scientific. Explaining wormhole theory to a trained astronaut (and badly, the paper folding was at least clear in Event Horizon) is frankly a joke. The rest of the movie is rife with similar dumbassery, like Caine (who was patently bored working on this one in a kind of Harrison Ford in Jedi homage) who tells a guy the world is ending and they need him to pilot the last hope ship simply because three hours ago he stumbled on their secret base. And the cyclical nature of time and the binary coordinates leading to his destiny - but then time sci-fi is unsavable in this aspect so you need to just go with it.
The movie also had tonal inconsistency. At its best is was hard sci-fi goodness with beautiful aesthetic vision, at worst it was bordering on Spielberg producer-esque 80s melodramas like Cocoon and Batterys Not Included - and certainly in terms of when the science aspects gave way to the absolute hocus pocus and waffle about love being an unexplainable force. In fact that sudden, irregular and ridiculous monologue from a spiteful female astronaut was one of the dumber high points, giving her captain some tantrum because she had come light years away to save earth but was pissy because she couldn't go and find her boyfriend. I frankly couldn't believe it wasn't edited out, since it shot notions of professional believability right out the airlock. How Captain MM even knew she had a love Interest was another stupid turn-a-blind-eye to sensible scripting gaffe.
The good? Well totally watchable. Long but not boring. Engaging in its regular moments and almost gripping in its in intended high points. Ultimately it's a more thoughtful and imaginative movie than most of anything that comes out of Hollywood, and it should be credited for helping to bring back hard sci-fi, something that delights me.
Comparisons with 2001 are once again, embarrassing, but there were some noteworthy ideas in there.
So in summary, an entertaining, brave, occasionally muddled and muddied production with a refreshing concept but a lacking finality on its more important questions. Writing a script that isn't cursory about common sense would help next time, Chris.
