Talent not in doubt: originality is

Rating: 6/10 (24 November 2014)

I understand we can't always live in the past, and that just because something is prior doesn't make it better. But sometimes, and more often than not, we are better off with originals, especially if the main thing the spiritual successor succeeds in doing, whether it be ode, sequel, or reboot, is reminding us of where almost all of its ideas came from in the first place. My main problem with 'Interstellar' is that this film tried way too hard to quote and one-up '2001.' It tried way to hard to be "2001" for a new generation. I understand that Nolan probably has both genuine love for Kubrick's film and serious philosophical issues with it that he wanted to address. He also probably felt that, at this stage in his career, he's an important, talented, and respected enough director to take on the challenge of making just that: '2001' for a new generation. Nolan is really talented, no question. But he takes from '2001' (and other films like 'Contact') at nearly every moment in this film. You will forgive me if this review seems more like a comparison of two movies than a detailed deconstruction of the movie at hand, but maybe that's because the movie at hand never once stops comparing itself to its primary predecessor. It seems almost insecure in the amount of borrowed material... United States fights for place on Earth among rival superpowers: check. AI's with nearly human personalities brought along with human crew: check. Sociopathic crew-member who prioritizes self-preservation and "the mission" above the lives of others: check. "Born again" savior figure: check. Adam/Eve metaphors: check. Drawn-out scene of a ship docking with a spinning object: check. Space waltz: check. Orchestral music that overwhelms audience with sound to provoke feelings of intense awe: check- but whereas Kubrick strategically builds crescendos, diminuendos and cadences, both visually as well as with sound, Nolan seems to have two volume settings- loud and really f***ing loud. What's more, many of these "homages" didn't even feel like outright plagiarism. They felt like revisions that were half-baked and ultimately irrelevant. HAL 9000 managed to scare us, provoke us, make us question our humanity more than Dr. Mann (Damon), TARS, and CASE combined, all while speaking a fraction of the lines and fulfilling essentially the same narrative purpose as all three combined. The physics is cool, and the script goes to some length to try to explain the scientific principles underlying the film in layman's terms. I get that Nolan probably didn't want to leave things as open-ended or purposefully confusing as Arthur C. Clarke and Kubrick. But sometimes in sci-fi you sacrifice explanations of fourth and fifth dimensions (which no one short of a physics PhD would really come close to understanding anyway) for the sake of brevity and subtlety. This movie was, like 2001, stunning visually,and like 2001, it was anything but brief, but unlike 2001, which contrasted subtle and blatant, this movie was almost always noise (literally- the sound layering is actually unnerving in some parts). The script felt like an incomprehensible mess at times, the acting was underwhelming (which is unfortunate because the movie's full of really talented male and female actors), and it only really bested '2001' in that it was longer (longer even than Kubrick's original premiere cut), louder, and had more straight-up action scenes. I really wanted to like this movie as I was watching it, and I actually liked the last 40 minutes or so quite a lot, which made it both harder and more necessary to admit the following: ultimately, this movie could have been so much more. Perhaps it didn't need to be '2001: A Space Odyssey:the Next Generation,' or '2001: rebooted.'Perhaps it simply needed to be 'Interstellar.'