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Interstellar SPOILERS ALLOWED Discussion thread


Jay

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As we have done in the past for Inception and The Dark Knight Rises, here's a thread to discuss Interstellar with others who have seen it. From what I can tell the film opens tonight at 8:00 in my local IMAX theaters, so I assume it's the same around the country if not the world.

Feel free to post short write-ups in the last film you watched thread or the existing Interstellar thread, the latter of which can be used for more talk about trailers, commercials, reviews, box office, etc - but here is where you can discuss the film in detail without having to worry about annoying spoiler tags.

Spoilers are allowed here, don't say you weren't warned!!!

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Ok well. I have a long winded post written but I don't know if it's worth it. This was one of those experiences that make me wonder what the point of talking about things is.

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Just finished. Yeah, lots of thoughts. On my way home, would definitely be interested in a discussion about it.

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As is typical when we see Nolan films, we managed to sort out all of the vagueness on the ride home. Which means I now have no issues with the film. Which means I'll make for boring conversation.

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So far I've read a lot of discussion about discussion. Are we going to get to the film, eh, guys? Anyone? Beuller? Beuller?

Ps I'm watching on Saturday (in f**k-off IMAX, thank-you-very-much!). I know this sounds awfully detrimental since I haven't seen it yet, but I can't help feeling that this film would have been much better if SS had directed it.

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If he had directed the 2008 script written for him, it would have been a good film, if sort of an immense retread. Not better than Nolan directing the script he rewrote though.

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This is what I hate most about Nolan movies. It's always so hard to put my thoughts on paper. The Nolan experience always leaves you in a daze, good or bad, it takes a while to collect your thoughts, and even then it's hard to express them. Which is why they often require rewatches. But I'll do my best.

Hands down, Nolan's most emotion film. This is probably the film's greatest asset. It revolves around two characters you care for, who help immerse you into an intimate setting in a film of such large scale. And this is largely thanks to Matthew McConaughey. What a beast. You'd hi I the emotional parts would be cheesy, but they actually hit you in the film. When McConaughey breaks down, something inside you hurts!

Anyways, the first act. Wonderful stuff. Mainly establishing characters, and not as plot devices (as they often are in Nolan films), but actual characters in a drama. The child who plays Murphy is lovely. And the lead up to the call to adventure is all well done, with ominous traces of classic CE3K style extra terrestrial hints.

The second act is the space adventure I wanted, sprawling, epic, even terrifying. There was the wonder and mystery I wanted, though it ended up being less lavish than I anticipated. Good dose of humour from the robots. Speaking of TARS, doesn't their bulky shape make them rather immobile (couldn't they have built a robot with a more convenient shape?). Minor quibble though. Aside from the gorgeous visuals, real credit goes to Hans Zimmer. Some lovely eerie clusters really help set the mood. But more on the score later.

It's the third act...this strange third act that boggles me. Up till now, it's been near-perfect, with all the characters, in space and back on Earth. But then there's this finale that wraps everything up, just too neatly. Up until the black hole, and even the fifth dimension stuff with the bookshelves is great. But it slowly becomes a bit too much like Inceptions, where suddenly there needs to be more answers than asked for, and you get a whole deal of explaining. A big part I wasn't fond of was the decision to make the whole thing stem from humanity itself. I felt the adventure was robbed of some of its mystery and wonder and is made much smaller. Gone is the ambiguity. Suddenly, it became less about the visceral experience, and more about plot, where we are now required to remember all sorts of small details from earlier because they add up to this big explanation!

So humans in the future set up a warphole so they could go and retrieve data from a distant black hole to help Murphy send humanity out into space? So what about the colonization of the distant galaxy? Why send poor Hathaway all alone, stranded in a distant planet? See? Sounds more like Inception-style talk.

And the whole Coop's station bit seemed like an afterthought added on from a lesser scifi film than what the first two acts had shown and promised us. Also more odd is the very finals end. Felt unfinished. In a film centred around the father/daughter relationship, why end the film on that note to rescue Hathaway? Strange conclusion.

Other plus points though include the science behind it all. Funny, because I Sam studying a bit of astronomy and astrophysics stuff, and I couldn't help but appreciate the credible science and level of thought put into this film. Great stuff.

And Hans Zimmer. This a big step up from Batman. Beautiful stuff, and not just the trailer music, but the eerie atmospheric material. Only problem is the score became rather repetitive in parts in the film, and sometimes hits the emotions a bit too hard. But lovely music indeed! Though from what I heard in film, I couldn't imagine what the 4 disc set must include....

All in all, an ambitious space odyssey, but an uneven one. And yet, I cannot say I'm disappointed by it. The experience was worth every second, and I would recommend it to all, especially for those first two acts. Flaws and all. I look forward to watching it again.

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I'm still not entirely sure what I want to say about this myself, but I want to respond to a few of your points.

First, the design of TARS and CASE. Somewhere, there is a bit of information on how they arrived at those designs. I can't remember where but it'll turn up. Anyway, it's a really ingenious geometrical principle, something about taking simple shapes and arranging them in a way that can be reconfigured in a vast number of ways, and actually makes them extremely mobile.

Now... the final act stuff. You don't like that it ends up not being alien meddling, but human meddling. I actually like this and I think it speaks to one of Nolan's key points with the film: that we can help ourselves. Instead of taking the easy way out (from a storytelling perspective and also from the perspective of the humans in the story) of relying on some unknown outside force to help us, he makes ourselves ultimately responsible for our own destiny, albeit in a very distant and almost godlike way. The thing guiding humanity, whether it's Cooper guiding Murph or the "future" beings guiding Cooper, is humanity.

The final "setting" of the ringworld type thing was in the original draft, and I was really happy they kept it in. It's a completely plausible means of transporting a civilization to a new home and doesn't depart at all from the prior scientific logic. It's just, like the five dimensional stuff, speculative science rather than known science.

I DO agree about the way the reunion with Cooper and Murph was handled. But when I think about it... it's not really that much of an issue. She's lived most of her life without him, and has her own family surrounding her, and doesn't feel like he should have to see her die. And they already had their reunion, in "ghost" form. In a way, he never really left her. So for him to fulfill his promise is enough. He sees her again.

That scene though, along with Cooper's initial departure and his deliberations leading up to it, and Romilly's 20-something years alone on the Endurance, could have benefited from even just a few more minutes per scene to add some more weight.


All right here's my spiel. It was originally twice as long, opening with a very preachy admonition against pessimism, negative expectations, cynicism, and nit-picking... but fuck that.

I uncompromisingly adored it. I've never treasured an experience in the cinema as much as this one, and it more than makes up for missing so many other great films when they were first let loose on the world. At the moment, I don't see any film rivaling it in my mind as favorite. It's technically beautiful, scientifically beautiful, and emotionally beautiful. It says something about our species and its existence that is worth hearing. And even if you utterly revile the rest of the film, see it if only to listen to what it has to say. Because it's real - and there's no amount of qualms that can dull the impact of hearing the truth.

The film is by turns awe-inducing, dryly humorous (yes, Nolan *is* funny), unbearably tense (there is a scene which is exponentially more edge-of-your-seat than the entirety of Gravity), and, most importantly, it is warm, human, depressing, heartbreaking, and finally uplifting. Nolan has slowly been allowing more of that sort of thing into his films, and here, finally, we have a complete willingness on his part to really let it all out. The result is as satisfying an emotional roller-coaster as you could hope for.

It seems pointless to talk about the film from a technical standpoint, because there's not much to say that isn't rapturous praise. It's a great story, well told, well acted, masterfully designed and visualized, and scored at a level of brilliance that surprised even me. Hans should have his second Oscar for this music, which sort of defies description. It seems that when given a story that lets him tap into his own experience with losing a parent, the results are truly extraordinary.

The degree to which the film is grounded in real science (and the new science that Kip Thorne's work on it has spawned) is impressive and lends a very valuable legitimacy to the proceedings, but far more impressive (and undoubtedly destined to be extremely divisive) is the stirring and moving boldness with which the film is willing to transcend all of that into something more. It feels wrong to talk about that point with any more specificity just yet.

And ultimately, that is the most vital thing about this film. Whether or not it will work for you depends on several things. It depends on your disposition. Are you cynical, prone to viewing any show of emotion as a Hallmark moment, or are you able and willing to accept certain simplicities for what they are, with an open heart? It depends on your age, I think. It depends on whether or not you have kids, but, whether you do or not, more on how much that affects your ability to identify with the characters. I can tell you that even if I had no other interest in this film and just happened to decide to see it, that by sitting there with family and friends, particularly the girls, seeing the emotional impact it had on them, sharing it with them, I would love the film every bit as much as I do anyway.

And ultimately, that is the most vital thing about film. Not just this one. That's the point of all art. To interest you, to move you, to touch you, to have some enriching effect on you. Interstellar succeeds, if you are the type of person that Christopher Nolan is talking to. And that's all there is to it. This is no longer about "quality". I can see no more need to defend the man and his films against criticisms. After this, it's obvious that he has truly arrived. This is no longer a promising director who is finding his footing, albeit in a very impressive way. This is a man who has mastered his craft and who knows how to use it for his ends, and who knows fully what those ends are. He's gone from three technically astute but somewhat sterile and drab films, to five with greater spiritual depth, more inviting atmosphere, and more virtuosity, to this one, which is truly mature in a way that just makes me smile for having watched that evolution.

I read in another review a sentiment that I really liked. That this isn't Nolan's best film. It's his first. But like his earlier work, I believe this one represents a real parallel to the man himself, and poses a question/challenge which applies equally to our civilization, his colleagues, and his own life and career: where do we go from here?

- Naturally, there will be an obnoxiously lengthy score analysis once it is available.

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Good spiel. I don't want to respond without going into proper depth with my thoughts. So you'll likely hear from me tomorrow, when I have more time to ramble ;)

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Interstellar

It is a very typical Nolan film in most respects. With all the ups and downs of a Nolan film.

First thing I noticed is that Nolan isnt particulary good when it comes to knowing where to point the camera, and what to shoot.

Since this is often a very visually rich film the few times that there were shots that didnt seem to make sense stood out quite a lot. I noticed a few times that it wasnt very clear to me where a particular character was..

Secondly, much like Inception, this film is riddled with exposition, scene upon scene of fairly bland characters explaining things to other characters for the benefit of the audience. Though thankfully it doesnt go as far as Inception.

Nolan, as a screenwriter seems to lack the confidence to let the visual form of cinema do most of the talking, and as a director he often lacks the skill to make up for his talky scripts. It's almost a paradox.

Despite these shortcomings Interstellar IS actually a very good film. A very important reason for that is Matthew McConaughey. Who thankfully does not play the emotionally distant lead which is also a staple of the directors films. His Cooper is a warm, richly textured personality and becomes the emotional center that kept me invested in the film after the science stuff stopped making sense.

Like all Nolan films the movie is technically perfect. The art direction is really impressive. Sure the "worn out" look is not new in sci-fi (Star Wars, Alien etc) but the way the spaceships, suits etc looked was really impressive and realistic.

Same goes for the special effects. The movie looks hyper realistic in pretty much every detail.

I liked the story, how Earth was slowly getting depleted and how the USA had turned into a farmer nation, lacking the drive and ambition for discovery. The mission and everything about it was well done.

But I have to say that I actually guessed some of the revelations near the end. Before Cooper found himself in the black hole I already wondered if that would not lead into the past, allowing him to have contact with his former self or his kid.

All the scenes after that are a bit of a puzzle right now. They are good, yet it somehow feels off. I'm not sure if this film needed the "happy ending" it got.

Zimmers score was similar to Inception in that it was often very very loud and omnipresent. Zimmer has the tendency to overcompensate for Nolan's lack of emotional flair.

So all in all it's a very good fillm. But I'm not sure it's a sci-fi classic. It doesnt quite have the imagination for it.

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Stiffman, did you see it in IMAX? Was the sound imbalanced like it seems to have been at many showings (including mine)? Seeing it again in regular 35mm tomorrow and I'm curious to see how much of an improvement it is.

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What I mean is, was the dialogue at times drowned out by the rest of the soundtrack? Particularly when Caine is on his deathbed. I loved how crushing the sound was but it was just mixed very sloppily at certain points. I really wonder if it's the film's fault or that certain theaters just have poor acoustics or setups.

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First, the design of TARS and CASE. Somewhere, there is a bit of information on how they arrived at those designs. I can't remember where but it'll turn up. Anyway, it's a really ingenious geometrical principle, something about taking simple shapes and arranging them in a way that can be reconfigured in a vast number of ways, and actually makes them extremely mobile.

Well, I got that. I just thought that by the way it was walking, there could have been a more convenient shape, or at least a more convenient walking mechanism. ;)

Now... the final act stuff. You don't like that it ends up not being alien meddling, but human meddling. I actually like this and I think it speaks to one of Nolan's key points with the film: that we can help ourselves. Instead of taking the easy way out (from a storytelling perspective and also from the perspective of the humans in the story) of relying on some unknown outside force to help us, he makes ourselves ultimately responsible for our own destiny, albeit in a very distant and almost godlike way. The thing guiding humanity, whether it's Cooper guiding Murph or the "future" beings guiding Cooper, is humanity.

The final "setting" of the ringworld type thing was in the original draft, and I was really happy they kept it in. It's a completely plausible means of transporting a civilization to a new home and doesn't depart at all from the prior scientific logic. It's just, like the five dimensional stuff, speculative science rather than known science.

I DO agree about the way the reunion with Cooper and Murph was handled. But when I think about it... it's not really that much of an issue. She's lived most of her life without him, and has her own family surrounding her, and doesn't feel like he should have to see her die. And they already had their reunion, in "ghost" form. In a way, he never really left her. So for him to fulfill his promise is enough. He sees her again.

That scene though, along with Cooper's initial departure and his deliberations leading up to it, and Romilly's 20-something years alone on the Endurance, could have benefited from even just a few more minutes per scene to add some more weight.

Yeah, I understand that. This film is supposed to be a celebration of mankind's potential and future prospects, but it didn't run with it as effectively as it could have. That whole finale, turns what was a mysterious and at-times, awe-inspiring journey, into something MUCH smaller. The finale almost undoes what could have been the well-crafted ambiguity of what preceded it. It's now all about plot plot plot. It felt like a rushed mechanism to explain everything, like scenes from a lesser "scifi" film like in Inception or Looper, etc. But where Inception works with that in a heist-film setting, here, it robs the film a bit of its scale.

Btw, was anyone else really surprised when Matt Damon showed up?

No. There were rumours about it for a while now. And I wasn't even keeping on top of all the news popping up here.

Interesting. Must be a theater-by-theater problem then, because even among IMAX showings some people had no issue with it either.

Actually, that happened with me too. It was hard to hear what Caine was saying near the end.

Funny enough, TDKR had that mixing issue too.

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Yeah, I understand that. This film is supposed to be a celebration of mankind's potential and future prospects, but it didn't run with it as effectively as it could have. That whole finale, turns what was a mysterious and at-times, awe-inspiring journey, into something MUCH smaller. The finale almost undoes what could have been the well-crafted ambiguity of what preceded it. It's now all about plot plot plot. It felt like a rushed mechanism to explain everything, like scenes from a lesser "scifi" film like in Inception or Looper, etc. But where Inception works with that in a heist-film setting, here, it robs the film a bit of its scale.

I agree with this. It seemed to tie up everything nice and easy.

Also the black hole scene needed a LOT of exposition, so they roped in Cooper's robot friend to help out. :)

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Fair enough. Perhaps that's not the big issue with it. I think it's mainly how the "big explanation" was crafted. Wasn't very subtle in the explaining, and then it became a "talky" film rather than the "visual" one we were led to believe.

Funny enough, my brother watched it the same night elsewhere, so we text-chatted about it after. He loved it too, and like the finale, more than I did. But he brought up an interesting point about how he felt, the content of the screenplay didn't necessarily sustain the kind of wondrous finale that the first 2 acts led to. And I can see that. I just wish it was less about plot and twists.

And about the ending scene with Murph. Logically, yes I agree. Murph has her own family to tend to. But wasn't it a bit strange that it just cuts to Hathaway after that. It's kind of like "Woops! We forgot about Hathaway, so we'll just remind the audience that McConaughey is going to save her before everyone leaves". It was like an afterthought tacked on to the end. Made it feel a bit unfinished.



Yeah, I understand that. This film is supposed to be a celebration of mankind's potential and future prospects, but it didn't run with it as effectively as it could have. That whole finale, turns what was a mysterious and at-times, awe-inspiring journey, into something MUCH smaller. The finale almost undoes what could have been the well-crafted ambiguity of what preceded it. It's now all about plot plot plot. It felt like a rushed mechanism to explain everything, like scenes from a lesser "scifi" film like in Inception or Looper, etc. But where Inception works with that in a heist-film setting, here, it robs the film a bit of its scale.

I agree with this. It seemed to tie up everything nice and easy.

Also the black hole scene needed a LOT of exposition, so they roped in Cooper's robot friend to help out. :)

Yeah. At one point, I completely forgot that they had to retrieve "data from the black hole" and was a bit lost how Murph ended up saving the world...it's just too much plot condensed into it. And normally Nolan can cover that up in his past films. But with a film like Interstellar, it shows more, because these big space epics work best when they leave more things unanswered, than tying it all together.

The black hole design is fantastic though. And I really enjoyed how Nolan played around with relativity, in a rather credible fashion too.

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I did think the relationship between Cooper and his daughter, which is the central focus of the film after all warranted more then a 2 minute conversation near the end.

And the rescue Hathaway almost felt like the prelude to a sequel. :)

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Yeah, except we know we're not getting one.

And just a question is Murph sending humanity to the new galaxy where Hathaway is? Or are they just permanently floating around Saturn?

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Narration near the end seemed to state that wherever Hathaway is would be the new home of the human race.

Btw, when they were going through the wormhole to the other side of the galaxy, something seems to touch Hathaway's character. Was that ever explained? I dont think so.

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Yeah it was, in "the big explanation" montage. It was Matthew McConaughey. He made contact with in that "fifth dimension" matrix?

By the way, the film was sometimes a bit heavy handed with its portrayal of love and its significance. Especially during Hathaway's (a logical scientist) spiel when they were deciding which planet to go to.

I don't remember, but after talking to a friend, was the film suggesting that love was, or helped humanity create the "fifth dimension" in the future?

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Been thinking about the complaints regarding exposition. I honestly didn't feel at any point that sense of "oh, so-and-so is explaining something to me now." There were none of those obvious Inception moments of plot dumps. Everything that could qualify as exposition was justified as conversation between characters, with none of those particularly glaring instances of a character asking a question that they should undeniably know the answer to, just for the audience's benefit. Hell, if there were any less talking, you'd have people whining and saying things like "I go to the movies to be entertained, not to think!"

And about the visuals... while it would have been nice to have swaths of lush space vistas, I can appreciate the choice to keep things more claustrophobic. For the most part, we see what the characters see: glimpses out the windows of their ship. When we do get a "big" shot, it's appropriately restrained, like the staggeringly small Endurance set against an incomplete view of Saturn and its rings. Those few moments, the traversing of the wormhole, and the design of the singularity/tesseract leave me fully satisfied visually.

No, no. The only real thing I can gripe about here is a wish for three scenes to have unfolded more deliberately. It's likely that I'll find even that a moot point for myself on repeat viewings. Films pass by so quickly the first time.

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Just read this review and it kind of nails how I felt about it:

Magnificent as Interstellar is for much of its running time, though, some viewers will leave the cinema feeling that it might just have been a daft sci-fi yarn, after all. Much of that feeling will stem from the dramatic climax, which is swamped by a mushiness that was kept in check in Inception, let alone the Batman films. McConaughey is shatteringly good during this key sequence, but it’s so contrived and sentimental that it wouldn’t get past the script editors on Doctor Who.
Essentially, Nolan ignores the ‘show don’t tell’ rule of fiction: he doesn’t let a theme or a concept go by without spelling it out to the audience. It’s possible that he felt he had to dumb down some of the dialogue (which he co-wrote with his brother Jonathan) to compensate for the complicated stuff about the space-time continuum. It’s possible, too, that at heart he just wanted to make a sweet, old-fashioned fable about a father’s love for his children. It seems as if was aiming to travel somewhere far more ambitious than mainstream Hollywood filmmaking – but, unlike Coop and co, he couldn’t quite get through the wormhole.

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20141107-film-review-interstellar

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There's nothing remotely mushy or contrived about it, but of course that's wildly subjective. So why even comment on it as if it's some indisputable "flaw"?

And this notion that things are overly spelled out is one I don't agree with at all. I can see a film like Inception and notice some very gratuitous exposition. But here? No... it just seems like people were looking for it, and so they found it.

It's this allergy to "plot" that seems so rampant now that confounds me. Is it the successor to the plague that was aversion to unabashed sentimentality? I enjoy a heavily visual, impressionistic film with little dialogue as much as anyone, probably more. But I don't count it as a bad thing if a film takes another path.

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In my opinion the best sci-fi is the kind that allows it's audience some leeway to think for itself. To use the imagination, or the mind rather then have the writer or director "cleverly" connect all the dots together at the end.

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