Interstellar
Wow, Nolan outdid himself with the cosmic blunder that is “Interstellar.” Where do I begin?
My head is still spinning so let’s just start with plot. Its faulty first act is drenched in exposition. I mean drenched. There’s so much information spilled to the audience within the first 45 minutes, it makes Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” look subtle. Nolan’s trademark “puzzle plot” reveals itself sloppily and repeatedly (ad infinitum) within its third, fourth, and fifth acts. Jonathan Nolan writes characters fuddling through multiple dimensions but forgets to provide them with any whatsoever. Each of them serve more as mere catalysts to several mixed up ideas than individuals.
With its sprawling efforts and gargantuan stakes, it served as another self-aggrandized, yet supremely earnest piece by a director who simply lacks a sense of humour. The Nolan brothers seem obsessed by cleverness. It can only explain the hammy over-compensation of their emotional through line. Can someone please make a sci-fi where a child isn’t the impetus for an adults decisions? It didn’t work in “Gravity” and it certainly didn’t work in this.
Technically, the visuals of the black hole were stunning. Nolan’s imaginings of space are hyper realistic, but not particularly aesthetically pleasing (tetris robots anyone?). This is 65mm so obviously it looks fantastic and lush. But watching it in an IMAX theatre and I noticed so many soft shots. For a director who is identified by his technical prowess you’d think he’d be committed to sharp focus. Nolan is a virtuoso with special effects, but the camera doesn’t tell the story whatsoever. His framing is stagey (close-ups, close-ups, close-ups) and the script doesn’t allow for much visual storytelling when all the characters are yammering about their inner motives or constantly explaining details.
Acting all around was great but again hampered by its script. You have a legion of A-list performers reciting lines like “Eureka!” and “it’s not impossible…it’s necessary.” Seriously laughable stuff. Nolan tries so hard to make a serious film, it falls flat on its seriousness. (Spoiler Ahead) One particular scene stands out as a great actor trying to make a poorly written monologue work. When Matt Damon’s character Dr. Mann abandons Cooper in the middle of the ice-laden landscape, he keeps looking back and reciting his motives and inner conflict. It is one of the most unintentionally funny scenes I’ve ever seen. It was like Trey Parker and Matt Stone (whose franchise was sold to Paramount for this blunder) wrote a spoof on the film and Nolan decided to include their scene.
Where was the editor? For someone who made fantastic use of the art of cutting in “Memento," it’s disappointing to see the lack of that magic touch. Some scenes are just sticky and lack realistic pace (see Damon on the planet Hoth scene) and some just cut out mid-sentence. Yes, I’m serious. They cut off characters mid-sentence, as if to say "Yeah, no that part isn’t that important." Its disjointed and rushed pace hinders the performances to a complete fault. Meanwhile, the sound mix is pounding over your head (I was hoping to render me eventually unconscious) reminding us of its lack of stillness. Subtle it is not.
The score, which is wall-to-wall, is beautiful at first and then graduates to relentless. Its over the top theatrical string section begs you to feel for the characters because the script fails to do so. Here is a classic example of over-used and under-cooked use of non-diagetic score. Where someone like Fincher delicately uses music which offers punctuation in its precise placement or Kubrick’s wry use of waltzes in the dizzying emptiness of space, Nolan and Zimmer offer a soundtrack that is so wrought with emotion, it numbs the viewer halfway way through.
Speaking of Kubrick, it’s disheartening and offensive to consider this film in the same calibre as ”2001: A Space Odyssey.“ It’s a lazy and utter belittling of a masterpiece that revolutionized cinema and the science fiction genre. Let me correct the difference between these two films.
Stanley Kubrick sat down with an engineer and crafted a monumentally transcendental and philosophical story, wrapped in a very simple plot, hence relying very little on dialogue and exposition to weigh down its ideas. Christopher Nolan sat down with his brother and came up with a dozen concepts and tried to fit them in 3 hours. Then they proceeded to try to add humanity with tearful monologues about love and survival. Its sole philosophies lazily voiced through its handful of bad characters. “2001” is constantly in a state of reflection of who we are as a human race and where we’re going. It’s the reason Kubrick opened the film with a long period of blackness - as if to ask the viewer: can we think about this a second before we launch?
Nolan allows for zero moment for reflection. It’s a constant whirlwind that doesn’t stop to absorb the vastness of space or the plight of the earth. I suspect this is because there’s nothing there to reflect upon. It’s the true tell of a film scared to give a chance for its audience to ponder on its inherent emptiness.