Interstellar

sploilers

So I just got done reading Moonraker, a novel where the female lead's last name is Brand and it turns out she's in love with someone else, and where the project's resident super-patriot turns out to be a bad guy in a twist it's basically impossible not to see coming, and I went to see Interstellar, a film where the female lead's last name is Brand and it turns out she's in love with someone else and the project's resident super-patriot turns out to be a bad guy in a twist it's basically impossible not to see coming.

(No, seriously, it's impossible not to see the "twist" with Matt Damon's character coming. First he turns up on an obviously inhospitable planet, then he tells them that his robot buddy just happened to completely malfunction, and then finally he puts on a spacesuit that is conveniently a different color from everyone else's so it's really easy to distinguish him in the inevitable fistfight.)

By the way, interrupting my negativity just for one moment here to heap praise on a most unlikely personage. I personally dislike Matt Damon because he's obnoxious and hypocritical and obnoxiously hypocritical, even by Hollywood liberal standards. And yet I wish to single out his performance for praise. His very first scene: "I'm sorry, I dragged you all the way out here for nothing" is written all over his face in a way you might miss until the second time you watch it. Totally brilliant. Now back to abuse.

I thought it was the best episode of Doctor Who I'd seen in years, but honestly, despite its amazing start, it's one of the weakest Christopher Nolan films I've ever seen. Sorry. The characters never receive any proper development, but this is endemic throughout Nolan's oeuvre (Hugh Jackman's character in The Prestige being almost the sole exception) rather than a problem with this one film.

The film's title is obviously Relativity and I have no idea why Nolan changed it to Interstellar. Maybe because he was concerned that people wouldn't know what Relativity means? Come on; what kind of title was Inception?

Elsewhere, I miss cinematographer Wally Pfister, whose absence is noticeable, and while Hans Zimmer's mathematical score worked well for Inception, here it's either boring and repetitive or a poor-man's substitute for the Blue Danube. And either way it's too damn loud, making that two Nolan films in a row now where you can't hear what characters are saying. And, pains me to say it, but two Nolan films in a row that would have been greatly improved by actually killing the hero when he makes his heroic sacrifice. 

The visual effects were, of course, amazing - Saturn looks gorgeous, which is clearly a "take that" to Stanley Kubrick, who had to relocate the climax of 2001 to Jupiter because he couldn't make Saturn's rings look right, and the visuals only get better from there. The robots are entertaining, if only because they have more character than most of the rest of of the characters put together. The child actors a) can act and b) resemble their adult counterparts, so yay.

I wonder what liberals think of the film's political subtext, given that the first half hour, with its government of central planners who edit human achievement out of the history books and whose sole goal is to "manage the decline," sets up the film to be "Atlas Shrugged In Space" (a film I'd much rather have seen than the product we got), and meanwhile Dr. Mann turns out to have told a Big Honkin' Lie.

I bet that as soon as this thing comes out on home video, you're going to see dozens of recuts popping up on YouTube that remove all the dialogue from the film after Cooper drops himself into the black hole. Because not one word of what followed was in any way necessary.

By the way, note the one thing I did not complain about: its length. The film runs for nearly 3 hours, so you can insert a joke about a film that plays with time wasting so much of it if that's the sort of thing that strikes your fancy, but I really didn't care.

(edit: I have a postscript here)

The Christopher Nolan Film List

1. The Prestige 
2. Inception 
3. The Dark Knight 
4. Batman Begins 
5. Memento 
6. Interstellar
7. The Dark Knight Rises