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Interstellar


David
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I thought the first half of the movie was stronger than the back half- but I still really enjoyed it. One of my favorite films I've seen recently.

 

There were probably 15 different times I had a legitimate emotional reaction to something onscreen. Whether that was fear, anxiety, sadness, whatever. I was feeling it.

 

The run time didn't get to me at all. I was entertained throughout anD didn't do any clock watching.

 

 

The "construct" thing got to me a little bit because it was a total departure from the "hard" science of the first 3/4ths of the movie. I'd have been more apt to go with the alien race, or even God, explanation. The future humans living in a 5 dimensional world and manipulating space/time was a huge stretch for me. If the advanced humans can do all that, was this really their best way to solve Earth's sustainability problem?

 

The alien worlds were pretty cool. Loved to see them, and loved that the characters actually got out of the ship. God, the anxiety I was feeling during all that.

 

I'm on my phone, so more when I get home and others have seen it.

 

 

 

Also, if IMAX is an option for you, SEE IT IN IMAX.

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The "construct" thing got to me a little bit because it was a total departure from the "hard" science of the first 3/4ths of the movie. I'd have been more apt to go with the alien race, or even God, explanation. The future humans living in a 5 dimensional world and manipulating space/time was a huge stretch for me. If the advanced humans can do all that, was this really their best way to solve Earth's sustainability problem?

 

The alien worlds were pretty cool. Loved to see them, and loved that the characters actually got out of the ship. God, the anxiety I was feeling during all that.

 

I'm on my phone, so more when I get home and others have seen it.

 

 

I think I see what you're getting at with that, but here was my interpretation:

 

 

 

The fifth-dimension construct doesn't necessarily fully allow someone to manipulate spacetime. The only interaction they can have is extremely minimal at best. Cooper was only able to play around with the "strings" behind the bookshelf which very slightly manipulated gravity.

 

There's no way that someone would have been able to solve the problems of the future dustbowl. It's believably implied that the problem with the crops and food is a product of climate change, that's not something that any level of time travel would have been able to prevent.

 

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Really enjoyed watching this - good, intelligent film. I agree with your interpretation D-Ray. I just feel it's a paradox, so would have preferred another explanation.

But a small detail in an excellent film! The robot characters were very well done also - I was unimpressed on the first impression, but changed my mind pretty quickly!

Highly recommend this film.

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One specific part where it was particularly bad was when (plot related spoilers)

 

 

As Michael Caine is dying and he's "revealing" that there was never any way for the Endurance to get back and Plan A was a sham from the get-go. At least, that's what I'm pretty sure he was telling Murph based on later context clues.

 

 

I was leaning forward in my seat, not with anticipation, but because if I could.... just.... get a little... bit.... closer... I might be able to hear better.

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I legit just got home after seeing interstellar. I liked it, but I have some things I didn't like about it, but I'm going to wait until maybe tomorrow to talk about it because:

 

1). I want to figure out how I'm going to say what I need to say without giving away plot points

2). I don't yet know how to do the spoiler tag here to hide plot points that are unavoidably going to be spoilers

3). It might be prudent to give myself a day to let the movie soak in a bit

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Yeah, I really really really enjoyed it. One of my favorite in-theatre experiences ever probably. I was totally engrossed.

 

I just wish they wouldn't have transitioned from science-speculation to science-fiction in the final act. It didn't take away much from the movie for me, but it was something I wish they'd done differently.

 

One of the major complaints I've seen has been the plot string of "love transcends time and space!" but I honestly didn't get that from it. That criticism seemed to be based on a few lines of dialogue and I never felt that LOVE was the reason for anything happening.

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Saw interstellar yesterday and enjoyed it very much. I typically prefer movies with 2&1/2 hour run-times or less, and this was three hours. I felt it didn't need to be quite that long. Matthew McConaughey did a great job as the lead (Cooper) In this movie; I really like the comeback he's made recently.

 

The chemistry between Cooper and his daughter Murph was extremely well done and kept you engrossed well enough in what would be otherwise a slow start to a long movie. Since child actors aren't typically...good...because they are...well, children, I feel the need to give kudos when one does a good job; and McKenzie Foy did a great job as Murph. I felt that Cooper's son Tom was completely unnecessary however, and I wouldn't have felt bad if his character was removed from the movie entirely if only to shave minutes off the run-time. most of the supporting cast, played by various well-known actors all did very well.

 

The robot TARS was an interesting addition to the movie, and although I enjoyed the robot's character, I wonder why robots were included in the movie for reasons I will get into later.

 

The first 3/4 of the movie was very good and had some really impressive shots, for example the wormhole, and the black hole. The last 1/4 I felt was all over the place and a little...out there.

 

Now, I'd like to address some issues I have with the movie. Needless to say:

*****SPOILERS BELOW*****

 

 

The movie established robots in the movie. Despite not having survival instinct, they are perfectly capable of determining whether or not a planet can sustain human life, so there's no need to risk the humans from the Lazarus project. I don't buy the movie's explanation why you can't send the robots; so maybe they shouldn't have been included in the movie in the first place, because if they could send robots you wouldnt have had the crazy lonely Matt Damon issue on the cold planet. And then you wouldn't have a movie.

 

The wormhole. From what I understand about them, they exist, but we've only seen them on the subatomic level, and they open and close in milliseconds, and where they appear in space are unpredictable. You not only can't fly a ship through these, let alone observe them. In the movie, the 5-dimensional beings not only opened up a huge-ass wormhole big enough to fly through, but held it open indefinitely. Pretty rad! If they could do that, why not send it closer to Earth? Why halfway across the solar system? Why not have us come out closer to the planet we actually have to go to? Why keep us guessing? Because we wouldn't have a movie.

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Here's my very boiled down comment on the end.

 

Up to a certain point the movie is based in real science and real human drama-- the characters take the time to explain that what they are doing is pushing past the proven and will move into the theoretical. Therefor, I don't think they are breaking the rules by basically going all future/magic in the end.

 

That said, I don't know that they really floated that concept enough for every audience member to buy. Sometimes it works, like in Contact, often times, like with Speilberg's A.I., it does not.

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Technically yes, but like I said, they tried to seed the idea that this was possible to set us up for accepting it-- it was probably just a bit too buried.

 

But not every writer agrees with me. Damon Lindelof is a millionaire for laughing in the face of such a notion.

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So I don't mind a writer using tech / magic to write themselves out of a box, as long as they sell it well and earn it. A writer who can't accomplish that is the same kid who ruined an elementary school chain story by adding "and then they woke up and it was all a dream." Interstellar walks a fine line between being able to accomplish that or not, and I'm going to have to go for a second viewing to figure out if it worked for me. Up until it gets to the last act or two, I can totally buy it. But then things (no put intended) get into a grey area.

Contact is a great example of a movie that walked that line really well, and it's honestly of my favorite movies ever in part because of that. In the first third or so of the movie, we're introduced well to the idea that the aliens that Jodie Foster is hearing from are far, far more advanced than us. It doesn't even put a lot of information on the audience all at once, it builds on top of itself. They can talk to us, they communicate in prime numbers, they can send TV signals back, they can send us blueprints, and then we can build their transport machine. It always earns the next step. By the time Jodie Foster gets in the machine and travels to the other side of the universe, we can totally buy it because it's been sold and told well. Which is crucial, because the audience has to be able to believe her story by the time it's picked apart by the government when she gets back home.

But here's the difference in the two movies for me..

In Contact, we get to meet the previously unseen character or element that had driven the story. At least enough to provide resolution for the audience. Things are left ambiguous enough in the fact that it's an alien as a hologram or whatever of Jodie Foster's dad that's explaining things, but that character still provides both an emotional and logical resolution to things.

In Interstellar, that same type of resolution is attempted by closing a logic gap by explaining that it was Cooper all along moving the plot ahead earlier in the movie. But it doesn't completely close it, because it only suggests the possibility that it was advanced humanity that provided the means for him to do that. It just seems like too easy and too cheap of a shortcut, and one that isn't earned and doesn't carry the same kind of resolutional weight that Contact did.

I'm only a Hollywood writer in my unrealized aspirations, but here's what I would have done:

Insert some scene in after Cooper ejects himself into the black hole. Cooper opens his eyes to find himself suspended either in complete darkness or complete whiteness, and thinks he's died. Leave him and the audience hanging there for a moment and let their imagination run wild, before finally hearing a human voice instead of TARS. It's his great (x200) granddaughter, who has been expecting him. She doesn't want to influence the past timeline other than to provide him a way of connecting history, so he can't see her or the extra dimensions that the future-humans live in. Instead, they transport him through a wormhole to a limited construct they've built, where he can finish the task and close the loop. As he sends the needed info as the "ghost," his great granddaughter tells him that his family knew that he would come home all along.

It just would have taken a slightly longer and slightly modified scene to bring a lot more closure, at least for me.


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Yeah-- again, like the end of AI.

 

Speilberg is all about family. The core of every single one of his movies from the last decade is about the family unity being the ultimate goal-- even when it doesn't service his story. (i.e., the endings of AI, Minority Report and War of the World especially)

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