8 November 2014

Interstellar



Interstellar is like the illegitimate love child between Gravity and Contact with The Hitchhiker Guide To The Galaxy and Space Odyssey 2001 both fighting to be its godparent. You know you are in trouble when the best thing about the movie is the wise-cracking robot a la Marvin from THHGTTG. 

Christopher Nolan has not made a good movie since The Dark Knight and even then his best movie still remained Memento. Perhaps responding to criticisms about Inception, this movie has been dumbed down exponentially definitely as a bid to wow all of Nolan's new found fans. But there is a difference between dumbing down to appeal to the masses and dumbing down to being outright stupid. For the former, see Michael Bay's Transformers; the latter - I can't even think of one now.

Jonathan and Christopher Nolan's script was filled with such bad writing. Clunky dialogue and heavy handed exposition. Poor line readings also did not help matter - will get into that soon. The robots had the best lines and their delivery were spot on. 

The concepts are great and interesting but the execution was horrendous. So many leaps of logic were necessary and even then one would even need to bend the whole space-time contiuumn to make sense out of it. Plots lines would just appear and disappear like wormholes. Just stay and accept the fact that things happen because the Nolans say so. 

Christopher's directing were also suboptimal. The pacing dragged and scenes stretched. Gravity has given all subsequent space-movies a new benchmark to hit and Interstellar unfortunately is too far down the new hierarchy. 

The movie lacked heart. The idea is there but neither the script nor the directing managed to bring it out. However, the fault would also have to lie on the actors. Without a good script some actors can still sell you the moon, but here we see Matthew McConaughey for what he can really do. There was no emotional connect between him and the audience not do we feel the emotional tie between him and his family. 

Anne Hatheway had the thankless honour of trying to sell the movie's clunkiest bit of dialogue. She did her best but the words failed her. 

Then we have Jessica Chastain. Suffice to say her younger self was more convincing than she was, but then again she did throw the most emotional punch of the movie. And she did that spectacularly. If I cared more about that relationship I might have teared. 

Hans Zimmer's score was also not the strongest. Ironically, at some points it was too strong and over-shadowed the movie itself. Hoyte van Hoytema lensed the film and there were some gorgeous shots but nothing too memorable. 

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