Interstellar with mild to moderate spoilers
If Star Wars is space opera
and Stargate is military sci-fi
and Star Trek is Manifest Destiny in space
and Alien in a horror movie in space
and Gravity is Newton's Laws of Motion in space (with poor attention to detail)
then what is Interstellar?
It has been compared (favorably and un) with 2001. I can see why. It is an ambitious place in the universe picture, and there aren't too many of those. But it reminded me more of Tarkovsky's Solaris than Kubrick's 2001.
It set in the near future in a not very dystopian cusp of the apocalypse world that you might expect from PHB's brother Phil, Prince of Insufficient Light. Biodiversity is collapsing and the world food production is devolving into a monoculture of corn. It is Dust Bowl Redux with zero subtlety. It is a familiar SF trope: we fucked up this world and need a new one.
The film takes its time on Earth and could do with some judicious editing. The father/daughter stuff is important and Nolan handles it better than Spielberg would have (could there be a lower bar for director/kid work?), but I was anxious to get to the good spacey stuff.
I was distracted by some poor attention to detail on Earth, like a scene in which McConaughey and Lithgow were watching the last okra crop burn and lamenting that there is just corn now, all while drinking beer. I had to refrain from asking aloud 'where did you get the hops mother fuckers?' People, Mericans anyway, still drive cars. I gave that a pass since I guess it could be corn-based ethanol. At least they drove contemporary trucks that were not tricked out with solar panels, seemingly meaningless pipes, comic Mr. Fusions, or other such nonsense. At one point a character takes a swig from a 1.5l plastic water bottle. It was obviously a piece of contemporary petroleum-based plastic. A vegetable-based plastic container or a metal canteen would have been more plausible here. Was Nolan making a comment about our infinite capacity for denial or just being lazy? It came across as the latter.
Once in space, I liked the ship sets and I liked the reasonable fidelity to physics (deus ex machina ticket out of the solar system notwithstanding). I liked the droids better than I thought I would at first look. Nolan overdid the exposition on relativity a bit. I understood it without explanation but get it that some wouldn't. But even the mouth breathers had to get it before the fourth iteration. The crew performances were mixed. I've never really understood Anne Hathaway haters before this film. She has given acceptable performances in her past work, but she failed to pull her weight here. I haven't joined the ranks of the haters, but I was not impressed. Some of the minor expedition characters made up for her some.
The end of the film is the harder to judge. I want to like the concept a lot but the execution didn't quite deliver. I can't say more without crossing the spoiler event horizon.
Overall, a good effort. It is the first sci-fi movie I had high hopes for since the lamentable Prometheus, which it far exceeds.
Three stars
Gravity-fu
Worm hole-fu
Fifth dimension-fu
Awesome piloting skills-fu
Joe Bob would say 'check it out'
and Stargate is military sci-fi
and Star Trek is Manifest Destiny in space
and Alien in a horror movie in space
and Gravity is Newton's Laws of Motion in space (with poor attention to detail)
then what is Interstellar?
It has been compared (favorably and un) with 2001. I can see why. It is an ambitious place in the universe picture, and there aren't too many of those. But it reminded me more of Tarkovsky's Solaris than Kubrick's 2001.
It set in the near future in a not very dystopian cusp of the apocalypse world that you might expect from PHB's brother Phil, Prince of Insufficient Light. Biodiversity is collapsing and the world food production is devolving into a monoculture of corn. It is Dust Bowl Redux with zero subtlety. It is a familiar SF trope: we fucked up this world and need a new one.
The film takes its time on Earth and could do with some judicious editing. The father/daughter stuff is important and Nolan handles it better than Spielberg would have (could there be a lower bar for director/kid work?), but I was anxious to get to the good spacey stuff.
I was distracted by some poor attention to detail on Earth, like a scene in which McConaughey and Lithgow were watching the last okra crop burn and lamenting that there is just corn now, all while drinking beer. I had to refrain from asking aloud 'where did you get the hops mother fuckers?' People, Mericans anyway, still drive cars. I gave that a pass since I guess it could be corn-based ethanol. At least they drove contemporary trucks that were not tricked out with solar panels, seemingly meaningless pipes, comic Mr. Fusions, or other such nonsense. At one point a character takes a swig from a 1.5l plastic water bottle. It was obviously a piece of contemporary petroleum-based plastic. A vegetable-based plastic container or a metal canteen would have been more plausible here. Was Nolan making a comment about our infinite capacity for denial or just being lazy? It came across as the latter.
Once in space, I liked the ship sets and I liked the reasonable fidelity to physics (deus ex machina ticket out of the solar system notwithstanding). I liked the droids better than I thought I would at first look. Nolan overdid the exposition on relativity a bit. I understood it without explanation but get it that some wouldn't. But even the mouth breathers had to get it before the fourth iteration. The crew performances were mixed. I've never really understood Anne Hathaway haters before this film. She has given acceptable performances in her past work, but she failed to pull her weight here. I haven't joined the ranks of the haters, but I was not impressed. Some of the minor expedition characters made up for her some.
The end of the film is the harder to judge. I want to like the concept a lot but the execution didn't quite deliver. I can't say more without crossing the spoiler event horizon.
Overall, a good effort. It is the first sci-fi movie I had high hopes for since the lamentable Prometheus, which it far exceeds.
Three stars
Gravity-fu
Worm hole-fu
Fifth dimension-fu
Awesome piloting skills-fu
Joe Bob would say 'check it out'
