Soap

Rating: 8/10 (9 November 2014)

(((SPOILERS!!!)))
So you like it when actors cry on screen? Then man oh man, have I got the movie of the century for you!
As for me, I have nothing against a good tear every now and then. But when people cry in almost all scenes, it all starts to seem a bit pretentious. In fact, I felt like Interstellar was pressuring me to feel for the characters. When that happens, I get kinda disconnected with the movie.
But it wasn't just the over-the-top display of emotions that I disliked. From the very beginning I had this strange feeling that something was wrong. And then, midway through the movie, it hit me. I had a huge revelation, something I had never noticed before: Christopher Nolan, one of the most gifted movie directors of our time, is amazingly bad at directing drama! Then I started to think about movies like Inception and Dark Knight - movies which I really enjoyed - and suddenly I realized that they don't have good drama direction either! Of course those movies aren't that much about drama, nor should they be, so this flaw has been easy to miss. But bad drama is really a major screw-up in a movie that oh so desperately wants to open up your tear channels.
In fact, while the space sequences contain a lot of good stuff, the entire drama part seems to be taken from the Big Book of Hollywood clichés. Have you read that book, mr. Nolan? I think I saw it in Murph's bookshelf...
What do I mean? Well, they live in a cliché farm, communicating only through cliché phrases, as if they were characters in a 19th-century book. It just didn't seem real to me. Furthermore, many of the nonverbal visual images were over-the-top sentimental and clichéd as well. And I'm not talking only about McConaughey's face while he was forcing them tears out (YET AGAIN!!!).
Take the ending, for example. How much do we get to see of the new home planet? Well, the American flag is there, waving proudly in the wind, and... then it ends. Oh, a patriotic message instead of a universal one like the theme of the movie would have suggested? Call me crazy, but I really would've wanted to see something else at the climax point. Something like, I dunno, how about... THE FRIGGIN' NEW HOME PLANET?!?
Furthermore, there is something seriously wrong with the rhythm and pace of the movie. No, I don't mean it was too slow. I'm talking about the pacing of individual scenes. Things like this: when they enter the wormhole, we get to see this visually stunning trip from our galaxy to another one. Well, we kinda get to see it. To be exact, we see approximately 2 seconds of this awesome wormhole jump, then 10 seconds of Matthew McConaughey's face. Then 2 seconds of jump, then 10 seconds of face. IT SHOULD BE THE OTHER WAY AROUND, MR NOLAN! 10 seconds of jump, then 2 seconds of face. Or how 'bout this idea: don't show McConaughey's face at all! We've seen it already, we know how he looks like! I mean, why create this stunning visual moment, if ye ain't gonna show it to the audience properly?! And don't tell me its because Kubrick did a similar thing in his weird space-jump-scene in "2001", because that was supposed to be like a montage thing, to add some extra weirdness to the scene, so that one had a real purpose!
Furthermore, when you get to be the first human being who enters the 5th dimension, you don't start mumbling how love guides you through that weird twisted world you found. Perhaps AFTERWARDS Cooper could've mumbled something like "maybe it was love all along that guided me". That might've worked. But not while you are experiencing something new and magnificent, something you can't quite understand. The experience should be so overwhelming that you can hardly speak! There is simply no room for preaching about love in that situation! (Especially since you are only preaching to a friggin' computer!)
Furthermore, after mumbling a ton of clichés about love, how did Cooper suddenly come to the conclusion that the whole "3D-world-inside-the-5D-world" was created by humans of the future? Did love tell him that too? There was no reason for him to think that. He was like, "hey, this idea suddenly popped up to my head, so it HAS to be true!" And remember, it is the same guy who gave his daughter a huge speech about not drawing irrational conclusions until all available data was observed and analyzed! Talk about incoherent characters!
***
But enough about the bad drama. Now, the movie had good elements too:
-I liked the space visuals.
-I liked it how Nolan tried to make all the space stuff coherent with modern science. In fact, the whole "hey-let's-jump-through-a-black-hole-into-another-dimension" -scenario actually seemed more believable than all the drama!
-I liked how the theoretical parts were not dumbed down for the masses, it really allowed the movie to play creatively with the concepts of time and space. And Nolan is really good at that stuff!
In fact, Interstellar would've easily made an intelligent space adventure genre movie! But I suppose Nolan had more ambitious artistic goals. And I get it! We all strive to find the limits of our talent, and... well, I think Nolan just found his.
Oh, and to those comparing Nolan to Stanley Kubrick: Nolan is a good movie director, but he still lacks Kubrick's coherence greatly. And Interstellar is no "2001", even without the flaws. Heck, "2001" had major flaws as well, but it also had a grand vision that perfectly connected the plot, the themes, and the visuals into one big ball of artistic greatness.
Nolan still has a long way to go.