10 harsh realities of retelling Interstellar, 10 years after the release of Christopher Nolan’s film

It’s been 10 years since Christopher Nolan released Interstellarand while there’s a lot to love about the film, there are some flaws that stand out on a rewatch today. Nolan has come a long way since his independent, no-budget debut film Following; Earlier this year, he swept the Oscar for his acclaimed World War II biopic Oppenheimer. After The Dark Knight trilogy provided him with the opportunity to land a huge blockbuster budget to bring his radical cinematic visions to life, Nolan took to the stars with his futuristic sci-fi epic Interstellar.

Throughout Nolan’s storied film career, he has had many films that have been universally adored, such as The Dark Knight and Startand he also had some that got a more negative reception, like the baffling Principle and the plot full of holes The Dark Knight Rises. Interstellar falls somewhere in between. There are a lot of things about the film that have been praised, like its groundbreaking visual effects and its un-Nolan-like emotionality, but there are also a lot of not-so-good things that stand out in a rewatch of Interstellar 10 years later.

10

Interstellar’s saccharine sentimentality is a radical change of pace from Nolan’s other films

Interstellar It’s a really sentimental, sentimental film that wears its heart on its sleeve. Sometimes it works, like when Cooper is saying an emotional goodbye to his children, and other times it doesn’t, like when Brand delivers a cloying monologue about quantifying love. But whether it works or not, this delicate sentimentality is drastically out of step with the rest of Nolan’s work.

Before InterstellarNolan’s films have been criticized for being cold and emotionless. The Dark Knight The trilogy placed a lot of emphasis on Bruce Wayne’s love life, but it always felt dull or downright hypocritical. Start is about a father who wants to return home to his children, but is much more interested in his action sequences than in Cobb’s quest to reunite with his children. Interstellar it was Nolan’s first foray into schmaltz.

9

Matt Damon’s Interstellar cameo interrupts the film

When the Endurance arrives at the second candidate planet, an icy world, they wake up Mann, the only survivor of the NASA expedition that landed there decades ago – and he’s played by Matt Damon. On first viewing, Damon’s cameo was a nice surprise. His cast was not announced in any of the negotiations and his scenes were not released in any of the trailers; the filmmakers managed to hide it, which is a rarity in modern blockbuster cinema.

But on a new note, Damon’s appearance in Interstellar It’s so shocking that it stops the film. The revelation that Mann falsified expedition details to encourage people to come rescue him is a huge twist. Casting Damon was a good idea in theory because audiences inherently trust him, but his star power distracts from the shock of this twist.

8

Interstellar has the usual Nolan sound design problems

Whenever Nolan releases a new film, it tends to be praised by critics. They praise his eye for breathtaking imagery, his commitment to pulling off jaw-dropping action set pieces, and his unique ability to bend time in his cinematic storytelling. But one negative criticism that comes up time and time again is that its sound design is annoying. Much of his dialogue is inaudible as it gets lost in the mix – and Interstellar is no different.

Hans Zimmer’s sound compositions are truly epic, but his music often gets in the way of characters’ speech and makes it impossible to hear what they are saying. When the scientists are presenting a crucial exposition that is key to understanding the plot, it is very frustrating when they are drowned out by the deafening soundtrack. InterstellarThe sound mixing of has exactly the same problems as Principle, Dunkirkand Oppenheimer.

7

The 23-Year Time Jump Is Interstellar’s Emotional Peak (And It’s Too Soon)

The most memorable moment of Interstellar is when Coop and his fellow astronauts return to the ship after checking out the watery planet for a few hours and deeming it uninhabitable. Due to time dilation, in the few hours they fell to the planet’s watery surface, 23 years passed on the ship (and, by extension, on Earth). Coop watches 23 years of video messages left by his children as they become adults in the blink of an eye.

Coop begins to cry when he realizes that he unintentionally broke his promise to his daughter and missed his children growing up. This is the most moving scene in the film – and perhaps the most moving scene in Nolan’s entire filmography – but it comes too soon. It’s the emotional peak of the film and it’s nowhere near the climax.

6

The Interstellar Bookshelf Twist Is Really Dumb

At the beginning Interstellarsome books fall off Murph’s bookshelf and she can’t explain why. In the film’s climactic sequence, Nolan provides a very convoluted explanation for why Murph’s books fell off the shelf. Coop enters a black hole and discovers that he can move through time, almost as if he is moving through frames of film. He goes back in time to the day the books fell, appears behind Murph’s bookshelf and pushes the books himself.

This might be a cool way to visualize gravitational time dilation, but it’s still too silly for the climax of this whole intergalactic journey. Coop travels the universe and enters a black hole only to communicate very poorly with his daughter in the past. It’s like a dumber version of La Jetée.

5

Tom adds nothing to the story

Coop has two children in Interstellar – Murphy and Tom – but he seems to have a strong preference for the former over the latter. The story focuses so much on Coop’s relationship with Murph that his relationship with Tom feels like an afterthought. Even the interdimensional beings who send Coop back in time seem to prefer Murph to Tom, because they send him to Murph’s bookshelf, not Tom’s. Despite being Coop’s son, Tom has little influence on the plot.

Tom’s scenes seem pretty pointless, especially once he’s grown up and taken over the family farm. Tom’s role in Interstellar is so inconsequential that it could have been cut from the film entirely and almost nothing would have changed. If Murph had been an only child, the script would have been simplified and Coop’s departure, leaving her completely alone, would have been even more painful.

4

Interstellar’s incredible visual effects require a lot of heavy lifting

Nolan innovated the visual effects process when he made Interstellar. Instead of creating the visual effect in post-production, he made all the effects beforehand so he could project them onto screens on set and give the actors something to react to. To bring theoretical concepts like the inside of a black hole to life on screen, Nolan’s team fed the equations into new CGI rendering software (via Wired).

Interstellar is a visual effects masterpiece with some of the most stunning CG effects ever put on the big screen. But the story isn’t nearly as groundbreaking or inspiring; it’s just a generic father-daughter tale tucked into a standard sci-fi epic about space travel. The visual effects have to do a lot of the heavy lifting to keep the film engaging as it moves through this mediocre plot.

3

Anne Hathaway’s monologue about love is quite noteworthy

Anne Hathaway is a great actress who has deservedly won an Oscar, a BAFTA, a Golden Globe, and an Emmy, but even the best actors can’t elevate bad material. In InterstellarHathaway is tasked with delivering one of the most cringe-worthy monologues in film history. Amelia Brand told Coop: “Love is the only thing we are capable of perceiving that transcends the dimensions of time and space.”

This speech is more likely to make the audience roll their eyes than pull their heartstrings. It sums up the film’s story and themes – Coop’s love for his daughter will allow him to break the space-time continuum – but it’s a painfully hasty way of putting subtext directly into the text. In a new observation of Interstellar today, this silly monologue will likely cause cringe.

2

Interstellar really starts to drag towards the end

Interstellar it has an impressive running time of 169 minutes – almost three hours – and it really does feel like a long time. The first act is pleasant and evenly paced. It takes time to present the futuristic Earth as a new Dust Bowl and establishes how desperate humanity is for a new home. It then succinctly establishes the premise of Coop being sent into space with a team of astronauts in hopes of finding a new sustainable home for the human race.

And once the film goes to space, it keeps audiences on their toes for a while with its gorgeous intergalactic visuals. But by the end of the second act, it really starts to drag. The film is not aimless – Nolan always knows where the story is going – but it takes a long time to achieve that goal.

1

It’s really obvious that Interstellar was originally developed for Steven Spielberg

Interstellar was originally developed for Steven Spielberg to direct before Nolan took on the project. Although Nolan significantly reworked the script to suit his own vision of a space adventure, there are still plenty of clues that this began as a Spielberg project. It’s really obvious that it should have been directed by Spielberg before being revamped into a Nolan film.

Of ET to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusadethe absent father is a recurring theme in Spielberg’s films, and Interstellar is about a father who puts the future of the human race over his own children. Like Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Interstellar takes a hopeful approach to humanity’s exploration of the universe and its chances for the future. It couldn’t be clearer that Interstellar it was supposed to be a Spielberg film.

Source: Wired